Originally Posted By: Calybos
Oh dawg... not this again.

Pariah, you're simply wrong on this point. Ask any astronomer, chemist, or geologist. Radiometric dating has an upper effectiveness limit, yes--but the 50,000 year mark applies only to organic material, not inorganic ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating#Modern_dating_techniques

You're thinking of CARBON DATING, which is a (relatively) short-term isotope and is less accurate at its upper range of 50,000 years or so. URANIUM-LEAD dating, which works with much longer-lived isotopes, operates in the range of hundreds of millions of years.

Unless you think the U.S. Geological Survey is in on the conspiracy, you'll have to give this one up.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html


Carbona and Uranium-Lead suffer from the same calibur problem though. Scientists have no way of knowing if the daughter cells they measure within the half-life were there from the beginning or not. They both need perfect environments to work.

I'm not sure exactly what a Wiki article is supposed to prove. Here's something that explains how the particles in the Radiometric methods actually work:

http://www.trueauthority.com/cvse/radiometric.htm