Being a scientist myself, this argument is not very good. The believer can just say that god created lead as well, and didn't wait for it to be created by decay. If god can create a universe, why shouldn't they be able to create some lead?
That's a whole 'nother rabbit hole, that eventually leads to this:
Can blame it on the devil, or can say it's just a test by God. Anything from old rocks to fossils to light from distance stars created enroute. Using science to debate someone who doesn't understand science or thinks it's all a trick isn't going to work.
Exactly! In fact, we know that the universe was created in media res so that light photons allegedly streaming to us from thirteen billion light years away in mid transit with the exact amount of red shift it would have from that object retreating away from us due to cosmic inflation, and was, in fact, created by God ~~2000~~ in route in the (great) void of space so that it would smack not just into the dot that is Earth, but some dude's telescope and spectrum analyzer.
In fact, I wasn't born fifty seven (and some days) years ago. I was born this last Tuesday when the universe was created with everything in motion.
ETA Apparently in the last decade, Last Tuesdayism (the omphalos hypothesis that the universe was created last Tuesday) turned into Last Thursdayism
Prior to that, Last Thursdayism was a separate sect who suggested the universe was recreated every Thursday the way we reboot our OS every once in a while.
The Earth was created 10 seconds ago and we all have implanted memories, change my mind.
Heretic. True believers know it was 8 seconds ago.
Blasphemer. It'll be created tomorrow and this is all part of the memory implant.
Nonesense it will never be created this is just a simulation /s
LastThursdayism
I had a creationist professor who had a whole bunch of bullshit specifically intended to "debunk" aging using Polonium half-lives, etc...
You'll never "disprove" it for them, because they don't want it disproven. They'll just find the relevant page on Answers in Genesis/Ken Ham's website written by someone with a Ph.D. from Pensacola Christian College and consider it done. They're not in it to actually find the truth. It's not a good-faith discussion/debate.
In what backwoods podunk shithole did you have a creationist "professor?" What were they even ostensibly teaching?
I had a "Creationism vs evolution" class because I did one semester at a religious college before realizing I wasn't religious. It was about what'd you'd expect, and no, the credit didn't transfer to a real college
I've seen anecdotal stories of geologists who claimed they were creationists. The brain is an amazing thing.
Fortunately when they go find some page in AiG, you can just go point at the corresponding entry here: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
Been a while since I've seen that resource. Old webpages are refreshing sometimes.
You might be interested in the community I cross-posted it to then, if you're not already in it: !oldweb@lemmy.ml
Neat. I've ran across a few things that tie to the Small Web, but this is even more eclectic.
That's not the gotcha OOP seems to think it is. If the world was magicked into existence by a supreme being 4000 years ago, there's no reason it couldn't have been magicked into existence with heavy elements having decayed by an arbitrary amount or with Pb by itself. 'Tis the problem with invoking appeals to magic. And anyway a quick look on wiki says that primordial Pb was mostly created by neutron capture of lighter elements, not radioactove decay of heavier ones, so the mere existence of Pb proves nothing wrt the timeline of U decay anyway... but at that point if you're bringing nucleosynthesis into it, you may as well point to anything higher than lithium or even atoms as a concept as "proof" rather than picking anything as exotic as uranium decay.
That's crazy, is this the only source of lead? Like, can't lead come from somewhere else?
Yeah, this post is not fully correct. The lead nail in the coffin is not that lead exists, it's that we find it in certain mineral matrixes that don't form with lead.
Zircon is the most widely referenced mineral in uranium-lead dating, as the mineral rejects lead during its formation, but will incorporate uranium. So when we find zircon with lead in it, it means that the uranium has decayed and turned into lead while being stuck there, and the percentage of uranium to lead in a sample lets us determine its time of formation.
Neat
I'm fairly certain this is leaving out important details. I believe it decays into a unique form of lead with a different number of either protons or neutrons. The actual numbers I could not tell you as I'm remembering this from high school.
It's a different isotope, so different number of neutrons. If the proton number would be different, it would be another element altogether, since the proton number defines what element it is.
I think this is bad science. Its important to call out bad science to prove that good science exists.
I don't think all lead is the result of radioactive decay.
Do you have some more reading about this? The wikipedia article doesn't really touch on it.
The assumption is that the only way lead can exist is via a series of radioactive decay. It is a way. It is generally created in stars by a much more direct process, not through radioactive decay.
So the meme is incomplete, but the general point still stands from what I can tell, right? Stars take orders of magnitude longer than 4k years to create lead as well, and there is no way of lead being created that could happen in 4k years, unless you start getting into "God made the universe look old" territory?
I mean, it's created at a cosmic rate in the right sized star.
You'd need to back up and start talking about the big bang and star formation, and at that point lead isn't really part of the argument. Most elements exist as a result of stars smashing atoms as per my understanding.
Most elements exist as a result of stars smashing atoms as per my understanding.
In a single star the heaviest element you can make is Iron.
To get anything heavier than Iron, which Lead is, you need your first start to blow up making iron, and the stuff left behind to eventually form a bigger star, then that star needs to blow up (where you'll get some gold, lead and a few other slightly heavier elements. Then the remaining parts of the star need to form a neutron star. You then need that neutron star to find and eventually crash into another neutron star, and thats where you get the really heavy elements like uranium.
So does that imply that Lead has existed in the universe strictly longer than Uranium? Is the meme entirely backwards?
Not really, the original point was to prove the earth isn't 4000 years old. Even if this were the only way lead could be created I'm assuming some portion of the decay could take place in space and then be part of the earth's formation.
Stars take orders of magnitude longer than 4k years to create lead as well, and there is no way of lead being created that could happen in 4k years, unless you start getting into “God made the universe look old” territory?
Thats correct, but the meme is written as a scientific explanation and its is wrong/incomplete. To correct it, go with what you said, not with what the meme says.
Yeah, not really defending the meme. I just lazily cross-posted it from !science_memes@mander.xyz, but the discussion here has been great
Is there an emperic difference (like the isotope number or whatever) between lead created through radioactive decay and lead created directly in a star?
If you want a layman approach then this Youtube video about where gold comes from is pretty good. You can skip most of the first half about the culture of gold. The second half of the video is the creation part.
If you want a technical approach then you want to talk about Rapid Neutron Capture and GRB. You'll find that kind of talk here. Warning: When you start digging deep into scientific explanations you discover that there's more we don't know. As the article ends with the idea that our current working theory of r-process doesn't happen often enough to explain how much gold we have so there's likely at least one other way gold is created in the universe. Welcome to cutting edge science!
Thanks!
Stellar element synthesis is where most elements, iron and below, form. Hydrogen, the most common element, fuses to Helium, Lithium. There are more cycles to stars burning elements, Carbon-Nitrogren-Oxygen Cycle, and a bunch of other stuff, all the way up to Iron. After Iron, nuclear fusion can no longer sustain the star, and it collapses into a neutron star (or any other intermediary ranging from hypothetical quark stars to black holes).
On collapse, you get a supernova. Supernova and other high energy events (called Gamma Ray Bursts, usually attributed to Supernova anyway) explode in a shower of neutrinos and gamma rays. These neutrinos rarely interact with matter since they have no charge, but they still contain a lot of energy, traveling near the speed of light. Gamma rays are the highest energy photons. Anything either particle interacts with will change it.
The collision of the gamma rays burst and nuetrinos with interstellar matter creates the remainder of the elements, much in a similar way we do on earth to create the synthetic elements (like plutonium).
Any isotope can be created this way. Isotopes that are unstable then decay until they become something stable - Uranium -> Lead.
The universe is so old that enough of these elements were able to gather by gravity, forming the relatively tiny deposits we can find on our planet.
The futility of using scientific factoids to argue with an account named "Christians Against Science".
The only thing that you can use to convince someone who is dead set the Bible is the only truth is...the Bible. And even then they'll use gymnastics, but at least they can't just discard the source of evidence like they will anything else. If they bend over backwards to keep the Bible valid, then you know you'll waste time trying to debate them.
It's 4000 years old...
...and then some
That's not how half-lives work though
Lead existed more than 4000 years ago, but that doesn't prove it was part of Earth that whole time. Most of the planet existed in some form before it coalesced into the planet. 😌
I was in a Discord call and we were talking about theology and one guy used this argument against creationism. The Christian girl in the call said if Adam spawned in as a fully grown adult then God can create pre-aged uranium too.
Which ends up leading up to Last Thursdayism. Weird to believe in a deity that just enjoys fucking with you, but to each their own.
"Mind" I see no evidence to support the existence of one.
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