What is the YEC answer to the lack of shorter lived isotopes?

That's because as you can see...those on the debate of the billions year old fairy tale are refusing to see things from a neutral and open perspective. One can not argue or debate with one who is in denial of facts and not intended to be open minded. If so, then I would love to oblige.

Then get moving. Oblige us.

Huh???

Present your 'neutral and open perspective.'

Rox, it spoils the fun when one challenges a troll to put up or shut up.

One can speculate on the reasons why the Creator may not have created shorter lived isotopes:1. Radioactive isotopes cause cancer. BBC NEWS | Health | Chernobyl's cancer world record 2. Making nuclear bombs would be easier if more countries could mine radioactive isotopes. Maybe the Creator doesn't approve of nuclear weapons.YECs would find it more difficult to answer the question "Why did God create isotopes with a long half-life" Was he not able to foresee that man would use them for war purposes rather than for peaceful energy? Will nuclear energy ever become absolutely necessary? Can't we just rely on energy from the sun?

Which happens for existing isotopes ... so having shorter lived isotopes would not add this effect. Which are made with one of the longest lived isotopes, while many isotopes with short lives are not used, so again this would not add this effect.While you are "speculating" (throwing out ad hoc concepts regardless of their validity), consider that the ones in question no longer list at detectable levels, completely in accordance with the age of the earth.The list does not include short lived isotopes that are a by-product of other nuclear reactions (like Polonium), so it is not a matter of NO short lived isotopes, just all the ones that are not made naturally and that would have decayed below detectable levels with the geological age of the earth.ie -- try again.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : .

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My apologies for resurrecting a dead post - but as a YEC'er, I'd never heard this question/objection before, and it fascinated me.I have two answers - I'll try to be brief, and will respond in greater detail in there is any interest.1) God created man, not an embryo. Builds on an earlier post.By logic, all things must have been created with apparent age. Obviously, Adam could not have survived had he been created as an embryo. Walking back up the food chain: Adam (a vegetarian) would have needed fruit and vegetables to eat, thus the plants created days earlier would also have had to have been created mature. The plants would have needed nutrients from the soil (soil!?), so the ground it grew in would have had "apparent age" as well. The sun would be providing light, at an intensity level compatible with life - so it would have an apparent age. The plants would have needed water, which implies lakes, rivers, seas, oceans, underground rivers, etc - all of which would have given an apparent age to the earth.To think of it differently, what would an embryonic earth have looked like? We can take our cue from the evolutionary model - a new earth would have been a mass of collected space debris, completely inhospitable to life, certainly not an "Eden". Would God have put life directly on such a mass? I think not.To paraphrase an old joke - We agree in principle that a newly created earth would have had "apparent age" - now we're just haggling over price (the exact age).So - how does this apply to the "radiometric age" of the earth? Much like the distant starlight question, it depends on your view of how God "aged" the earth and universe.Possible solutions:
a) God created the earth (and its radioactive elements) with age
b) God created an embryonic earth, and "aged" it in the days before adding lifeThere are a number of creationist models that deal with the distant starlight issue, that imply one or the other of these two. For example, the Humphrey's model would imply b), as the event horizon crossed the earth during the first day.So, I guess my response is "#1) God is a prankster and deliberately set up the universe to trick us", rephrased as "#1) God is a pragmatist, and deliberately aged the universe, solar system, and earth to provide the perfect habitat for supporting life."My second answer with this objection, is as follows:
2) This argument needs one more piece of information to be valid: All the long half-life elements should "date" to the same age (+/- a few Myr).The inherent premise of this objection is that long half-life elements, which presumably were deposited on earth's crust during the formation of the planet, still exist, while the shorter half-life elements have all "decayed away".So, if we accept this premise, the only logical conclusion is: All of the long half-life elements on this list (not naturally renewed), should have the exact same "age" - they should all date to the formation of the sun/earth.Do they? Do they all always show up in the exact same parent/daughter ratios? That information is not supplied - anyone have a reference? If they do all date to the same age, it doesn't invalidate YEC (see 1 above), but if they don't, then it completely removes this phenomena as an evidence for an old earth.In conclusion:
1) An earth with an apparent age is consistent with YEC theory, and a corollary to explanations for distant starlight.
2) Missing some important information regarding the "not naturally renewed" elements.

Let's look at one radioelement, Technetium. It has 3 relatively long lived isotopes:Tc97=4.2E+6 years 4.200,000
Tc98=6.6E+6 years 6.600,000
TC99=2.13E+5 years 213,000 (Handbook of Chemistry & Physics, 2006)Technetium is a colog to Manganese & Rhenium, but is not found in ores of the other 2 which is odd since cologs normally replace the other cologs in minerals. One does not find any technetium in in Manganese ores but Rhenium is found. The only source in which "Natural" Technetium is found is in Uranium & Thorium ores as products of Spontaneous Fission. Even if such were created 6000 years ago with apparent age there should be Tecnetium in the Manganes rocks since its half lives are much longer than 6000 years.Edited by bluescat48, : typosEdited by bluescat48, : sp

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

Edited by Son, : No reason given.Edited by Son, : No reason given.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Off-topic blather.

Oh look, it's the Omphalos argument. Where YECs admit that all the evidence agrees with an old Earth. Sure. But the Omphalos argument goes much further than that. To continue with your analogy, it's as though God created Adam with a complete set of memories of his childhood, photograph albums of when he was a kid, an apendectomy scar, scrapbooks, a birth certificate, a certificate showing the he and Eve had got married ten years previously, photos of him graduating from university ...Yes, possibly God would have made a world that kinda looked old. But why would he fake every detail so perfectly as to fool everyone who does geology?As Reverend Kingsley put it: "I cannot believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."

Then you need to show that the absence of these short lived isotopes is necessary for a viable habitat.The problem is not an apparent age. It is an apparent HISTORY. It is not like God creating an adult instead of an embryo. It is more similar to God creating Adam with scars from injuries that he never suffered. The absence of specific short lived isotopes is an apparent history for the solar system. I don't think it is possible to measure the Earth's total volume of specific isotopes.Also, you can not date atoms. You can't pull out a uranium atom and do a test to see how old it is.

Hi Dcarraher, welcome to EvC!Yes, God could have created the appearance of great age. God could have done anything. Given that anything is within God's power, you can appeal to God for the answer to anything. And if that's what you believe then that is fine and I don't think anyone here has any problem with that.But if the world isn't really old and we really shouldn't be teaching children that it is, then what should we be teaching in science class? We need a scientific answer, right? We can't teach that God made the world look old, because God is not a scientifically established natural phenomena. This thread is seeking scientific answers to how the earth could be young yet have no shorter lived isotopes.Regarding ancient rocks containing isotopes with sufficiently long half-life for some remnant of the isotopes to still be present and whether they all date to the same age, the answer is yes. The most ancient rocks on the moon and the Earth all date to older than 3.5 billion years, and most meteorites date to around 4.5 billion years old. The Earth and moon date younger because being molten resets the radiometric clock because element separation takes place again, and their larger size and their formation from a collision meant that they were molten more recently than meteorites.--Percy

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My second answer with this objection, is as follows:
2) This argument needs one more piece of information to be valid: All the long half-life elements should "date" to the same age (+/- a few Myr).

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The inherent premise of this objection is that long half-life elements, which presumably were deposited on earth's crust during the formation of the planet, still exist, while the shorter half-life elements have all "decayed away".

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So, if we accept this premise, the only logical conclusion is: All of the long half-life elements on this list (not naturally renewed), should have the exact same "age" - they should all date to the formation of the sun/earth.

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Do they? Do they all always show up in the exact same parent/daughter ratios? That information is not supplied - anyone have a reference? If they do all date to the same age, it doesn't invalidate YEC (see 1 above), but if they don't, then it completely removes this phenomena as an evidence for an old earth.

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I'm not sure exactly what you are asking for, but there is an old, simple, back-of-the-envelope estimation for the age of the earth based on abundances of uranium isotopes that may be of interest. This may be a partial answer to your question.238U has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, while 235U has a half-life of 0.71 billion years. Let's start by assuming that the initial processes that generated 235U and 238U did so in approximately equal abundances. If so, how long would it take for them to decay to their present abundances (99.3% 238U and 0.7% 235U)? Answer--between 4 and 5 billion years. This provides a rough estimate for the age of the earth, and is consistent with more exact measurements.Now, someone may complain about the assumption that 235U and 238U were originally created in equal abundance. So let's examine the sensitivity of our estimate to that assumption. Suppose we are off by a factor of 2, and the initial abundance of 235U was only half of the 238U. How does this affect our age estimate? This is simple; it affects the estimate only by the half-life of 235U (0.7 billion years). The age estimate comes down to just under 4 billion years, not too much different.

Thanks for the welcome, Percy! (and everyone who responded). I think people are reading slightly more into what I said, than what I meant, so let me take a few responses.First, Dr. Adequate accuses me of "admit[tin] that all the evidence agrees with an old Earth". No, I am admitting that the earth shows age, and that radioactive measurements using certain assumptions agrees with an old Earth. I am far from agreeing that a) all measures of age agree with an old earth, let alone b) all measures of age agree with each other. If you take the uniformitarian axiom used when calculating radioactive ages (i.e. rate of decay is and always has been constant), and apply it to other measures of the age of the earth (rate at which moon is receding, rate at which salt is entering the ocean, rate of change of C14 in the atmosphere, etc.) you get completely different ages for the earth. You can only square the circle by discarding the concept of uniform processes. In fact, I'd love the see a chart of various "age of earth calculations" that aren't based on radioactive isotopes, and see if any of them would lead an unbiased scientist to a 4.5Byr figure. So, no Dr. Adequate, the "rocks" don't provide an indication of age - just radioactive isotopes.Next, Taq accuses me of claiming an apparent HISTORY as opposed to age. Again - a ratio of radioactive parent/daughter product hardly provides a "history". The analogy of an "appendix scar" would be, for example, 4.5Byr layered sediment, or 4.5Byr of salt in the ocean, or dead moons around Saturn and Jupiter, not active moons or comets w/ decaying orbits, etc. - stuff that again requires you to discard your uniformitarianism to explain (and introduce all kinds of evidence-free hypotheses - like Oort clouds! and Dark Matter! and Multiverses! Woot!)To get back to the (limited) point I was making regarding "apparent age" - let me see if I can make myself clearer via brevity:Answer the following:1) If God created the world, He created it
a) with flowering plants, breathable atmosphere, temperate climate, drinkable water, and available shelter.
b) a radioactive boiling mass of molten lava.2) Assuming you answered a), it follows that the earth would appear to have "age". Is this because:
a) God is a prankster.
b) God wanted Adam to survive.3) If you answered 1b, or 2a, I'm not certain further conversation would be productive. If you answered 1b and "Suck it up, Adam! Don't be such a whiner baby!" you must be a Marine.So - my point regarding age:
Did God create a uniform, consistent picture in the universe and solar system where every measure indicates an age of 4.5Byr, complete with false history, to fool us? No.
Did God create an earth perfectly tuned for the support of life, which due to the need to support life, would have a variety of "apparent ages" based on the measurement used? Yes.Anyway, to answer the original post question: What is the YEC answer to the lack of shorter lived isotopes?
My personal answer: At, during, or shortly after creation, before life was introduced to the world, the rate of radioactive decay was significantly higher than it currently is. This was not done to "fool" anyone, but to provide the perfect environment for life and Man.