Yeah they have the internet from before LLMs were used for anything, so the data is not poisoned. Not unlike carbon dating becoming useless for estimating age of anything made after nuclear atmospheric tests, or low-background steel.
They're obviously not using carbon dating. The ages are too big.
IIRC The half life of carbon 14 is too short to distinguish samples that have been decaying for 50k years from background noise. You have to use other kinds of radiometric dating instead.
I don't think it's accurate to say we only have 150 years of data. We only have about 150 years of data collected in real time by humans, but we have plenty of other data. (Soil/rock strata,core samples, tree rings, etc.)
In some ways the geological and archeological evidence is more trustworthy than the evidence we've written down in the past century or two.
Carbon dating is only supposed to be accurate to about 40,000 years ago. They must be using some other method to date it, but I didn't see in the article where they say what method was used.
No, I don't regularly read slashdot and no one asked the question here yet so...
I don't find it surprising though that that is the first question that would pop into most peoples heads as dating is the most popularly know use of decay measurements.
Well, I meant very recent in the geological sense ;)
Good calibration curves accounting for things like that in your link are definitely required to get modern-era results, and with a 5,730 year half-life, it's difficult to even make meaningful measurements to throw onto the curve. So you're right.
I think a lot of people would be surprised, that tests done far away, eight decades ago, should have measurable effects now. If nothing else, it's a very important reminder that resumption of those tests would put even more radioactivity into the atmosphere.
There are other effects as well, like the fact that we've basically ruined carbon dating for new objects. They do dating with a basis of 1950 as "Before Present", half-jokingly calling it "Before Physics". After Physics, carbon dating is unreliable, and will be for many centuries to come.
The health effects are negligible, but it's an opportunity to talk about an process that does have real effects that people aren't aware of. And that has an effect on future decisions: let's not risk making them non-negligible.
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