Carbon-14 Unexpectedly Found… Everywhere

JudeBrando

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JudeBrando
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"Carbon-14 Unexpectedly Found… Everywhere: Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years, and therefore, cannot last for millions of years. Thus evolutionists are shocked when they find find Carbon-14 EVERYWHERE it shouldn't be if the earth were old (Answers Jan - Mar 2011). Carbon-14 is found in petrified wood, coal, oil, limestone, graphite, amber, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in diamonds! Radiocarbon exists even in supposedly million-year-old two-mile deep natural gas wells (CRSQ Fall 2007): "Once again, fossil gas is not carbon-14 dead. Thus, the age of the gases is on the order of thousands, not millions of years.” See RSF 3-28-08 at KGOV. C14 in specimens supposedly millions or a billion years old is so ubiquitous that it is longer an anomoly, and while old-earthers had hoped that contamination must account for all the C14, Dr. John Baumgardner, of Los Alamos National Labs fame, has documented in Dec, 2010 Creation Matters that C14 exists even in the hardest naturally-occuring substance on earth, within diamonds, dashing the atheists' last hope and prayer that all such C14 might be from contaminants. The earth is young."

http://kgov.com/bel/20110204

http://kgov.com/bel/20110909
 
http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist

"Dr Jim Mason has a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Nuclear Physics from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He had a 37-year engineering and management career in defence electronics developing ASW (anti-submarine warfare) systems and land tactical C4 (computerized command, control, communications) systems."

"Radioactive 14C is continually being formed in the atmosphere, and makes up about a trillionth of all carbon atoms on Earth. Because it is biologically almost indistinguishable from non-radioactive carbon (12C), it is absorbed by plants during photosynthesis and then by animals eating the plants and other animals eating the animals that eat the plants and, of course, by humans when we eat our burgers and broccoli. When the plant or animal dies, it stops absorbing carbon and the 14C decays without being replaced, thus changing the ratio of 14C to 12C in the dead plant/animal over time. Using very sensitive instruments, the current ratio in a sample of the dead plant/animal can be measured and used (along with the known rate of decay of 14C and the assumption that the ratio of 14C to 12C in the atmosphere has always been the same as today) to calculate an age for the specimen. However, after about 90,000 years of decay, there is so little 14C left that even today’s very sensitive instruments cannot detect it."

"Carbon-14 in diamonds is another example of a young age measurement in substances that are ‘supposed to be’ very old. Diamond is the hardest substance on earth, because it’s an extremely rigidly-packed crystal of carbon. Therefore it’s impervious to the alleged possible contamination that has been used to try to dismiss the results for coal, although unreasonably. Yet 14C has been found in diamonds at essentially the same level as in the coal samples even though the diamonds are allegedly 1 to 3 billion years old."
 
In other news from the same science site:

"Is Water Baptism Required for Salvation?"
 
gph said:
In other news from the same science site:
"Is Water Baptism Required for Salvation?"
Click to expand...
Can you address the point concerning carbon-14 dating or is your point merely any way to avoid the point, which I fully expect as usual?
 
Carbon 14 is produced in the atmosphere and the ground through Uranium/Thorium which decays and their radiation produce Carbon 14.

Shouldn't ignore that fact =\

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011_6.html

Don't rely on the propaganda of Young Earth Creationists, just go do some research for yourself and you won't be stuck presenting old decayed (apropo word methinks) arguments from YEC's.

You do understand that Carbon can become C14 anytime in its life, and the conditions may be variable so it's not quite so linear as they think it is but luckily, geologists (wtb more Dinwar) are aware and take that into consideration...

I mean, you're smart enough Jude to understand that all the geological evidence that points to an incredibly old earth (4.5 billion years old) isn't jeopardized by such a pitiful claim; all creationists did is produce a fact and not explain it, rather they work with confirmation bias (young earth pls!) than actually explain why there is Carbon 14 in an old object. The explanation is simple, and doesn't give YEC any points =\ but it does make them look stupid and intellectually dishonest. Remember when you linked the "Evolution of a Butterfly" thread?
 
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JudeBrando said:
Can you address the point concerning carbon-14 dating or is your point merely any way to avoid the point, which I fully expect as usual?
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No, no I can't. I have zero interest in wasting time sifting through delusions for relevant science.

I'm just wondering how your thought process works that makes you think you're not being straight up lied to or following the ramblings of a delusional fool. Are you, in all seriousness, posting science from a site like that?

I'm also wondering, and you're not the first I've asked, how does your thought process work that makes you think you can debunk established science on an anonymous internet board? Even if every post following mine agrees with your Jesus site on carbon-14 the science still stands. It's meaningless and yet here you are. I don't get it.

(Edited for spelling)
 
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yy2bggggs said:
That statement is incorrect, and shows a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of decay.
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I would say the statement more or less is correct (the reason it doesn't work for millions of years is because its radiation is washed out by the background radiation of everything else at around 60,000+ years; it's still there though), but they left out the part that Carbon 14 also created throughout the timeline, even within diamonds (or coal, or oil...)
 
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JudeBrando said:
"Carbon-14 Unexpectedly Found… Everywhere: Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years, and therefore, cannot last for millions of years. ...
http://kgov.com/bel/20110204

http://kgov.com/bel/20110909
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Thank you JudeBrando for pointing out the ignorance of young earth creationists.

This is a guy who is ignorant of the basic fact that carbon 14 is produced by radioactive decay.

As already cited, try reading Claim CD011.6 for the simple physics debunking this claim.
 
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What about the specific claim that diamonds (which are around a billion years old, by my quick Googling) contain measurable 14C? The arguments for 14C contamination of coal or oil may not be applicable to a crystal of pure 14/13/12C.
 
JudeBrando,
I am kind of curious, does the responses here in any way shake your faith in creationist home pages and the idea in general?
(I mean the level of made-up arguments does not speak well for credibility.)
 
Yet 14C has been found in diamonds at essentially the same level as in the coal samples even though the diamonds are allegedly 1 to 3 billion years old
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Essentially the same level, which is to say bugger-all. Nada. Not a sausage.

We await your next effort, JudeBrando. How many of these killer facts have you served-up so far? Dozens?
 
Carbon-14 and Diamonds

JudeBrando said:
Dr. John Baumgardner, of Los Alamos National Labs fame, has documented in Dec, 2010 Creation Matters that C14 exists even in the hardest naturally-occuring substance on earth, within diamonds, dashing the atheists' last hope and prayer that all such C14 might be from contaminants. The earth is young."
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See "Use of natural diamonds to monitor 14C AMS instrument backgrounds"; R.E. Taylor & John Southon, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section B, 259(1): 282-287 (June 2007). Look at the title and notice the words "instrument backgrounds". At the time this was published, in 2007, it was common for a carbon dating laboratory to decline to report any age greater than about 60,000 years (about 10 14C 5730 year half lives) because of instrument calibration issues, notably 14C contamination in allegedly 14C-less carbon calibration targets. The ages reported by Taylor & Southon, which I assume to be the source of Baumgardner's claim, range from 69,300 +/- 500 years to 80,000 +/- 1,100 years (roughly 12 - 14 half lives), well beyond the calibration limits of the instruments. Some of those 14C atoms may well have been in the diamonds, created as a result of background radiation. However, most of them are in fact come from the laboratory background and even from the instrument itself.

I find it hard to excuse someone with Baumgardner's obviously technically competent background for deliberately misleading people with a claim that the 14C is all in the diamonds, when even the title of the paper makes it obvious that is not the case (and we do have to ask if Baumgardner even bothered to read the paper beyond the title before misrepresenting it). Furthermore, anyone who feels technically competent to criticize 14C dating should at least be familiar with the calibration procedures. Either Baumgardner was/is not familiar with calibration procedures, which makes him technically incompetent to make the claim in the first place, or he was/is familiar with calibration procedures, which makes it evident to the dispassionate observer that he deliberately misrepresented the results & intent of the Taylor & Southon study.
 
marplots said:
Pretty good answer here:
http://www.ridgenet.net/~do_while/sage/v15i8e.htm

Comes down to this -- Since no one really knows how much carbon 14 was around when the diamonds were formed, C14 can't be used to date diamonds.
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Well that's obvious; carbon dating a diamond is ridiculous, the method to date diamonds are by radiometric dating the surrounded strata (they don't use carbon dating for that -.-)

So the first thing that makes me mad is the gall to claim that carbon dating a diamond is actually viable and should be done (scientists don't carbon date diamonds usually) so when these YEC's carbon date a diamond, they're doing something stupid and of course they're going to find C14...because it IS everywhere. You get contamination from many sources (most likely from decay of OTHER materials which change C12 to C14) but it's not actually going to DATE the diamond because diamonds aren't thousands of years old (assuming they're diamonds that were mined and not manufactured...) they're millions of years old and we know that through the rock strata they were found in.

Do YEC's really think they can prove a young Earth by virtue of their ignorance of methods of radiometric dating? They're so ethically and scientifically bankrupt that it's embarrasing, they even try to portray that diamonds somehow are radioactively resistant so that contamination "Couldn't occur" when that's just a flat out lie -.- of course they can be contaminated.
 
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JudeBrando said:
"Carbon-14 Unexpectedly Found… Everywhere: Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years, and therefore, cannot last for millions of years.
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The half-life of Carbon 14 is 5,730 years.

So, assuming that 10,000 is more than "thousands," just the decay of three quarters of a sample of Carbon 14 is enough to make your statement untrue. A decay of 99.5% of a sample is enough to render your statement untrue altogether.

(However, for entirely different reasons, it is not used to date things beyond about 60,000 years.)
 
And those reasons are because carbon dating is used mostly for dating tissues (including bones, or even clothing since their materials are organic) that are made by metabolizing carbon; some of that carbon is C14 and has radioactive decay. At 60,000 years plus thet decay is hard to determine from other "noise" such as K40 decay, or even just good ol' sun rays.

That doesn't mean C14 won't be present, it just will be unreliable for dating. Another thing to note is that C14 isn't as linear in its concentration on Earth throughout Earth's history, it actually fluctuates. But paleontologists and geologists in general have properly calibrated for this so measurements are generally accurate.
 
JudeBrando said:
"Carbon-14 Unexpectedly Found… Everywhere: Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years, and therefore, cannot last for millions of years. Thus evolutionists are shocked when they find find Carbon-14 EVERYWHERE it shouldn't be if the earth were old (Answers Jan - Mar 2011). Carbon-14 is found in petrified wood, coal, oil, limestone, graphite, amber, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in diamonds! Radiocarbon exists even in supposedly million-year-old two-mile deep natural gas wells (CRSQ Fall 2007): "Once again, fossil gas is not carbon-14 dead. Thus, the age of the gases is on the order of thousands, not millions of years.” See RSF 3-28-08 at KGOV. C14 in specimens supposedly millions or a billion years old is so ubiquitous that it is longer an anomoly, and while old-earthers had hoped that contamination must account for all the C14, Dr. John Baumgardner, of Los Alamos National Labs fame, has documented in Dec, 2010 Creation Matters that C14 exists even in the hardest naturally-occuring substance on earth, within diamonds, dashing the atheists' last hope and prayer that all such C14 might be from contaminants. The earth is young."

http://kgov.com/bel/20110204

http://kgov.com/bel/20110909
Click to expand...

What a joke of a final statement. Even if this were real evidence (it isn't) that carbon dating were being done wrong, it would provide absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Earth was young. None.
The alternative is to claim that carbon dating is reliable and that carbon/coal/whatever is young. But this is inexplicable contradiction with most of physics and geology. So if most of physics is wrong, why suddenly claim that carbon dating is right?
 
JudeBrando said:
Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years, and therefore, cannot last for millions of years.
Click to expand...

yy2bggggs said:
That statement is incorrect, and shows a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of decay.
Click to expand...

Loss Leader said:
The half-life of Carbon 14 is 5,730 years.

So, assuming that 10,000 is more than "thousands," just the decay of three quarters of a sample of Carbon 14 is enough to make your statement untrue. A decay of 99.5% of a sample is enough to render your statement untrue altogether.
Click to expand...

Actually, the quoted OP statement is correct. If the half-life of C14 is 5730 years, then to have a single atom left after a million years, we would need to start with 21000000/5730 atoms, which would be about 8 x 1026 kg of C14 - more than 100 times the mass of Earth.

Obviously, the amount of C14 that ever existed on Earth is dramatically less than that, so it is very unlikely that there is (or ever was) even a single atom of C14 on Earth that would last even one million years, let alone millions.


On the other hand, although the bolded OP statement is correct, it doesn't support any of the subsequent claims, because new C14 atoms are created all the time, as other posters already explained.
 
JudeBrando said:
Can you address the point concerning carbon-14 dating or is your point merely any way to avoid the point, which I fully expect as usual?
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The point is that's a site dedicated to distorting science to support their silly religious mindset.

Furthermore this quote
Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years, and therefore, cannot last for millions of years.
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shows that the author either fails to grasp a basic part of physics or is deliberately lying to promulgate a particular view.

Perhaps you should try real science rather than the distorted version pushed by xian loons? Or would that be too threatening to your beliefs?
 
Thabiguy said:
Actually, the quoted OP statement is correct.
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No. The quoted OP statement is incorrect. Let's reread it together.
Carbon-14 decays in only thousands of years,​
This statement is incorrect. Anything concluded from this statement should also be incorrect. Carbon-14 does not "decay in only thousands of years". That is the wrong way to phrase what C14 does when it decays.

Suppose I gave you a single Carbon-14 atom. What can you tell me about when it decays? More to the point, how do you go about phrasing what you can tell me about when it decays?
and therefore, cannot last for millions of years.​
The conclusion is also wrong. The claim here is that C14 cannot last for millions of years. That claim is simply incorrect.
If the half-life of C14 is 5730 years, then to have a single atom left after a million years, we would need to start with 21000000/5730 atoms, which would be about 8 x 1026 kg of C14 - more than 100 times the mass of Earth.
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This is also incorrect, though it's less incorrect than the OP.

C14 has a half life because the probability that a given C14 atom will decay in a constant amount of time is constant. This implies that there exists a constant amount of time where that probability is 50%. 21000000/5730 doesn't quite calculate what you think it does; any statement that makes absolute claims rather than probabilistic claims on rates of radioactive decay is simply wrong.
 
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Thabiguy said:
Actually, the quoted OP statement is correct. If the half-life of C14 is 5730 years, then to have a single atom left after a million years, we would need to start with 21000000/5730 atoms, which would be about 8 x 1026 kg of C14 - more than 100 times the mass of Earth.
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I believe you'd use a different formula.

0.5^(1000000/5730) = 2.9 × 10^-53 atoms remaining.

And to make sure there's still a measurable amount, you'd only have to start with 10^30 or so. The mass of a carbon 14 atom is 14u. 10^30 C14 is 23247.54 kg.

Pretty sure I did all of that wrong, but I love playing with numbers. What did I screw up?
 
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yy2bggggs said:
21000000/5730 doesn't quite calculate what you think it does; any statement that makes absolute claims rather than probabilistic claims on rates of radioactive decay is simply wrong.
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What I wrote was short and simplified to get the main point across quickly, as I was in a hurry. The main point being: "it is very unlikely that there is (or ever was) even a single atom of C14 on Earth that would last even one million years, let alone millions."

I am fully aware that my post was simplified to the level of being inaccurate, and frankly, I'm okay with it. I could rephrase what I already wrote to start with "2-1000000/5730 is the probability for any single atom of C14 to last a million years before it decays" etc., but I see little point in doing that. Whoever can understand the main point should be able to get the argument technically correct in their head, and it will change nothing about the conclusion.
 
Even if Carbon-14 dating was useless, we know through overwhelming evidence from a wide variety of sources that the earth is not thousands of years old. Young earth beliefs are absurd.
 
Thabiguy said:
Well, how did you come up with 1030? If you start with that many, after a million years you'll end up with 2.9 x 10-23 atoms on average, which is... usually not measurable. ;)
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10^-23 is avogadro's limit, so to get back to that, I multiplied the 10^-53 by 10^30.

But yeah, that was wrong. :o
 
JudeBrando said:
Can you address the point concerning carbon-14 dating or is your point merely any way to avoid the point, which I fully expect as usual?
Click to expand...



Using modern methods the detection of is more sensitive, so there can be very very very small traces of C14, nothing like what you would find in a living tree.

Any C14 in diamonds is a incredably small amount.

half life of carbon is ~5700 years, so start with a mole of C-14

0 years - 6.23 x 10^23
5700 years- 3.12 x 10^23
14,000 years 1.13 x 10^23

510,000 years 1,380,000 atoms of C-14

half life is a division so every 5700 years the amount decreases by half, after .5 million years , we still have some left.
 
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gph said:
No, no I can't. I have zero interest in wasting time sifting through delusions for relevant science.

I'm just wondering how your thought process works that makes you think you're not being straight up lied to or following the ramblings of a delusional fool. Are you, in all seriousness, posting science from a site like that?

I'm also wondering, and you're not the first I've asked, how does your thought process work that makes you think you can debunk established science on an anonymous internet board? Even if every post following mine agrees with your Jesus site on carbon-14 the science still stands. It's meaningless and yet here you are. I don't get it.

(Edited for spelling)
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I like you.
 
JudeBrando likes to start threads with links to various creationist sites he comes upon during his web surfing, without any understanding of the (lack of) science behind them or doing the most basic research into whether the claims make any sense at all.

What he hopes to achieve is anybody's guess. What he's actually achieving is demonstrating how lousy creationists are at science.
 
Sideroxylon said:
Even if Carbon-14 dating was useless, we know through overwhelming evidence from a wide variety of sources that the earth is not thousands of years old. Young earth beliefs are absurd.
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Yes, there's lake varves, tree rings and ice cores to name a few.
 
If the Earth was young, plowing it would be akin to pedophilia; hence, its billions, not thousands of years old. The desire for it to be so young is sort of sick.
 
AdMan said:
JudeBrando likes to start threads with links to various creationist sites he comes upon during his web surfing, without any understanding of the (lack of) science behind them or doing the most basic research into whether the claims make any sense at all.

What he hopes to achieve is anybody's guess. What he's actually achieving is demonstrating how lousy creationists are at science.
Click to expand...

I think Jude actually does science a favor by raising consciousness to the infinite stupidity of YEC's and their intellectually dishonest propaganda to mislead the more credulous. In other words, Jude helped us to find and destroy the arguments of the religious by the very science they pretend is on their side.

Thanks Jude for helping us think, even at the expense of your online character.
 
AdMan said:
JudeBrando likes to start threads with links to various creationist sites he comes upon during his web surfing, without any understanding of the (lack of) science behind them or doing the most basic research into whether the claims make any sense at all.

What he hopes to achieve is anybody's guess. What he's actually achieving is demonstrating how lousy creationists are at science.
Click to expand...

On the other hand, the explanations rebutting the OPs are sometimes really interesting. The butterfly thread was great, and I learned from this one too.

Sadly Jude will eventually realise that, even though he doesn't yet know why, the latest creationist showstopper he Googles up will, like the others, turn out to be stupid and wrong. Eventually he'll tire of getting his fingers burnt for Jesus and stop posting these, which will sadly end a fruitful source of information and entertainment for the rest of us.
 
Yes, there's lake varves, tree rings and ice cores to name a few.
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The original evidence came from unconformities, which (given modern sedimentation rates and erosion rates--even the fastest) require millions of years to form. There's also thermoluminesence and optically-stimulated luminesence, which work on the same timescale as C14 dating (roughly) and operate by entirely different mechanisms. We can also use coral, mollusks, and other shells with known growth ring patterns in the same way as tree rings and ice cores.

I've often found the Creationist C14 obsession to be very weird. It's not even that common a dating method in geology and paleontology--it's mostly useless after the Holocene, which makes it most useful for archaeologists. I know Creationists go after low-hanging fruit, but this is taking it to some unwarranted extremes.

For those interested, Faure and Mensing have a great book, titled Isotopes: Principles and Applications on the subject of isotopic geochemistry. It's an expensive textbook packed with hundreds of very information-dense pages, and serves as a brief introduction to the topic. If you want to understand isotopic geochemistry (the topic of this thread), that's what you have to go through. It's an incredibly complex topic, very well studied and understood.
 
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