Half-Lives

Apologies, I know this is a day late but the weather was over me yesterday...

Even though it makes me feel stupid sometimes, it's nice when someone points out how a piece of knowledge you already have can be applied to a bigger picture.

I'm sure a lot of us remember learning about or at least hearing about half-lives of elements. Basically, it's the amount of time it takes for half of the mass of an element to naturally dissolve into radiation. Even "stable" elements have half-lives.

Okay, so what? What's the big deal? Well, aside from that being the basis of the popular Carbon-14 dating, if you extrapolate half-lives out over an enormous number of years, everything simply becomes radiation. In fact, according to physicist Brian Cox of "Wonders of the Universe," every bit of matter in the universe will have deteriorated into radiation waves in something like a trillion, trillion, trillion... I believe he said "trillion" seven times -- so 1 trillion has 12 zeros, which means we're looking somewhere around 10^84. That is a number 1 followed by 85 zeros. SO in that many years, all matter that currently exists in the universe will be *poof* gone.

Now I'm not trying to create any existential crises here but anyone who had hope that humans would resist the urge to annihilate themselves AND that the earth itself would resist any natural, environmental changes AND that our race would actually make it out into space sometime before the sun swallows our planet, now we know that in 10^84 years, nothing will exist.

NOW what does it all mean?!

Just Joe


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