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Author | Topic: Radioactive Potassium Demands Ancient Earth? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NosyNed Member Posts: 8996 From: Canada Joined: |
I clearly won that debate You'd have to point me at the core and resolution of that debate. I don't remember.
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
I clearly won that debate
You'd have to point me at the core and resolution of that debate. I don't remember. My recollection is the TheLiteralist admitted he had no explanation for the evidence and abandoned the debate. Wouldn't call that a "win". I can't find it right now.
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NosyNed Member Posts: 8996 From: Canada Joined: |
Message 207
TheLiteralist writes: As far as these issues are concerned, I can, at this time, do no better than I have done. I feel that there SHOULD be explanations for these "problems," but I am CERTAIN that I will be unable to provide such explanations (unless I become a good deal more knowledgeable). I think you have not yet become a "good deal more knowledgeable". I think we have made the point before that no one has any explanations. You may search the creationist literature and bring any explanation here. So far any attempts at that have been shredded. The conclusion is that, while there are creationists and they have a right to their place in society, and there are those who are both scientists and creationists and they have a place, there is no creation "science" and it has no place in the science classroom. This is what you have demonstrated, in your own small way, by attempting to explain these problems.
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sfs Member (Idle past 2534 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
The original argument appears to be as follows. Some creationists try to explain old radiometric dates by postulating much faster decay rates early in Earth's (short) history; they thus allow for the same amount of radioactive decay as standard science, but compress it into a much shorter time. If you apply this idea to K-40, you have to conclude that 91% of the original K-40 decayed in a fairly short time. (This is for 4.5 billion years, or 3.5 half lives of K-40, of conventional earth history.) How much energy would the decaying potassium have deposited in the world's oceans? There are 3.8e-4 grams of K per gram of seawater, of which 0.012% is K-40, or 4.6e-8 g K-40 per g of seawater, which is 6.9e14 atoms. That's the current value; originally there were 7.9e15 atoms. When each atom decayed it would have released (on average) 0.48 MeV. This corresponds to 3.8e15 MeV released per g(seawater), or 607 joules, or 145 calories. If all the decays occurred at the same time, this would be more than enough to heat the oceans to the boiling point.
By itself, this argument doesn't seem compelling to me, since it assumes that all of the energy was released simultaneously. If the increased decay rate was spread out over the first 2000 years of Earth's (putative) history, the energy flowing into the oceans is still large, but not enormously out of proportion to existing flows. It's about 20% of the net solar energy flux falling on the ocean surface. Now I imagine that increasing solar output by 20% would make things kind of hot, but it requires more work to make the case. This is assuming I haven't made any mistakes in the numbers, a possibility I assign a low probability to.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
I've considered this issue myself and you can't evenly spread out the heat release over 2,000 years and keep Flood geology. The Flood period could only account for 1/2000 of the radiometric age which comes out at less than 2.5 million years.
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Thanks for the numbers ... I still haven't worked them out for myself.
Most accelerated-decay scenaros have it happening during the Creation wek with more at the Fall and the Flood. From RATE GROUP TO RELEASE BOOK:
quote: From RADIOHALOS - SIGNIFICANT AND EXCITING RESEARCH RESULTS:
quote: So it seems to me that if "a vast amount" of accelerated decay took place in 2-3 days, say 75%, that would be sufficient to boil the oceans (450 joules per gram or 110 calories per gram).
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1405 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
TheLiteralist writes: Speaking of false memories, the way I remember it, I clearly won that debate...you and RAZD seem to have a hard time admitting it, though Have a nice week off, perhaps it will refresh your memory. I see the link to the post in question is already given. This is one of those areas where I feel that personal denial sets in. I have mentioned this before about when evidence comes in contradictory to stronly held beliefs. we are limited in our ability to understand by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}
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Dr Cresswell Inactive Member |
I see JonF has already alluded to it. But, you need to apply the same criteria to all other radioactive decay processes (except, possibly 14C) - which will mean your calculation for 40K in the oceans is just part of the heating contribution. You also get U and Th isotopes in water, which will also need to experience accelerated decay, and all of these are present in rocks which will also be heated. So, even if you spread that accelerated decay over 2000y rather than the creation week/Fall/Flood then the extra heat input to the earth is very significant.
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sfs Member (Idle past 2534 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
Clearly, if creationists want to stuff the extra decay into a short time, whether it's during creation week or during the Flood, they do indeed have a serious problem with heat.
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NosyNed Member Posts: 8996 From: Canada Joined: |
But the specific topic of this thread is potassium. It seems that there might be a way for potassium alone to be accelerated and fit into some creationist speculations. It appears the potassium decay doesn't necessarily (we really need very precise calcultions) demand an ancient earth but rather falsifies some of the scenarious made up by creationists about what did transpire before and during the flood.
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sfs Member (Idle past 2534 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
quote:Oh, I agree. I was just pointing out that the potassium contribution doesn't provide a knock-down argument by itself, at least not without further specification. More serious than the heat problem is the health effects of the radiation. If you want to cram 4.5 billion years of radioactive decay into a few thousand years, you have to increase decays rates more than a million-fold. Current background radiation from terrestrial sources is about 250 mrem/year. Increasing that to 250,000 rem/year would produce lethal doses of radiation (for humans) in less than a day.
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Dr Cresswell Inactive Member |
The topic may be related specifically to 40K, but if one proposes an acceleration of the 40K decay rate then a) there needs to be some mechanism for the acceleration, or reason to accept a radical change to the physics of radioactive decay and then b) accept that such changes would affect other radioactive isotopes as well or explain why they don't. If b) is left unanswered then a calculation based on 40K alone which shows that that would result in a heat flow that's "only" 20% of the solar input, and on that basis say it's not impossible (the seas wouldn't boil etc) the question of whether including the decay of other isotopes would increase the energy input to the point where seas do boil seems relevant. To me, at least.
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NosyNed Member Posts: 8996 From: Canada Joined: |
The specific claim was about K decay. TheLiteralist asked about this. It is not yet fully supported and may not support an ancient earth. To add anything else is moving the goalposts.
This thread can be tied off if no one can support the original claim and a more general problem with accelerated decay rates can be started. What might be interesting is to see if a scenario can be constructed that allows for K decay. Spreading it over the time pre-flood seems to work. It seems that having it happen during the flood does not. How firmly have either of those been established? It was pretty "back-of-the-envelope" that suggested that a 2,000 year period is ok. It may only be ok for not boiling the water. What does it do to corals? What about this problem of radiation poisoning? A possible outcome is that it doesn't demand an "ancient" earth but may demand one older than a few 1,000 years.
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Dr Cresswell Inactive Member |
That's another good point. Clearly if the accelerated decay was limited to the first couple of days of the creation week then there wouldn't be a problem as there's no life, let alone humans, to receive a lethal radiation dose. But, if there was accelerated decay at the Fall and/or Flood then lethal radiation doses would be a problem. For the Flood, the external radiation dose wouldn't be too bad because of the shielding effect of all that water, but 40K is the largest source of internal radiation dose (unless you're receiving radio-iodine for thyroid treatment or something), and a significant increase in the decay rate would raise that dose to levels that would be at least hazerdous. I'm not sure what sort of acceleration is needed for the sort of hypothesis suggested here, but the human body contains something like 4.5kBq of 40K giving a dose rate of about 500nSv per day. You'd need about a million fold increase in that dose rate to give daily doses above 0.5Sv, which is the level at which major radiation damage occurs - blood cell damage, nausea etc. A 4Sv dose gives about a 50% chance of death, and certain chronic disability. Of course, with such rapid decay, the starting activity would be significantly greater than 4.5kBq, hence reducing the maximum decay acceleration before chronic radiation sickness sets in.
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Dr Cresswell Inactive Member |
Hmmm ... I'd say that asking about other radioactive decays isn't so much moving the goalposts as better defining where they are anyway. To compress the history of the earth into less than 15000 years requires an acceleration by a factor of about 400000 (which, by shear coincidence I'm sure is the 1 day:1 thousand year ratio, as in "a day like a thousand years" which is somewhere in Scripture). If you're going to apply that to 40K to get K-Ar dates right, then logically you need to apply it to U and Th decays too.
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