TheKillerAngel wrote...
While you have some decent points, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of radiometric dating, but I won't blame you for it because you admitted that it's not something you are familiar with.
You state that radiometric dating only states how old the material used is. This is a misunderstanding of radiometric dating techniques. If what you said was correct, you mean that C14 dating on pretty much anything today would show that the item is billions of years old. While the atoms may be very old, Radiometric dating does not tell us how old the atoms in a material are. It tells us how long they have been in the sampled form.
This quote, taken from a Yahoo answers response sums it up well (surprise, Y!Answers is usually a ****hole).What does it mean, then, to say that this rock is a billion years old and that rock is two billion years old? We get this information from radioactive dating. (Carbon-14 dating applies to relatively recent organic material. Other elements, such as uranium, are used for dating rocks.)
As you say, all rocks on earth are the same age in one sense, but they have solidified at vastly different times. (If you want to see new rock forming before your eyes, visit Kilauea volcano in Hawaii and watch flowing lava cool and solidify.)
Radioactive dating of a rock tells us not when the atoms came to earth, but when the rock solidified. Here's a good quotation on the subject that explains why:
"Radioactive isotopes will decay in a regular exponential way such that one-half of a given amount of parent material will decay to form daughter material in a time period called a half-life. A half-life is NOT one-half the age of the rock! When the material is liquid or gaseous, the parent and daughter isotopes can escape, but when the material solidifies, they cannot so the ratio of parent to daughter isotopes is frozen in. The parent isotope can only decay, increasing the amount of daughter isotopes. Radioactive dating gives the solidification age."
You cannot use C14 dating to measure the age of an object past roughly 50k years because by that point so much C14 has decayed that it cannot be accurately measured. However, there are multiple dating methods, and techniques such as K-Argon or Uranium dating can measure the age of an object up to many billions of years, because isotopes like K40 have a half-life of 1.3 billion years.
As for another point - recordings. Cameras are apparently standard issue on suits, evidenced by the video feed from Eden Prime at the beginning of Mass Effect 1, which came from a soldier.
This^^. Even if my mis-statement of radio carbon dating is incorrect, this should work, and even if these wouldn't work, we know for a fact that the ME universe has some way of being able to tell extreme ages. Kenson was able to show in Arrival with dust partivles that the Alpha relay was made millions of years ago, far earlier than the Protheans, and there are a number of planets with ancient civilizations that are dated to 127,000 years ago on Eingana, 300,000 years ago on Helyme, and 20 million to 40 million years ago on Etamis. I know the last age in particular is a wide range, but again, these examples show that some type of dating can be used on very ancient artifacts, and can be used to show Sov was built in a time pre-dating the Geth.
Modifié par George-Kinsill, 22 juillet 2011 - 04:22 .
Retour en haut
