@kellyjay said
I don't know, do you?
Dodge noted. This thread is not about what I believe; it's all about you.
Next question for KellyJay:
These are the accepted durations for the time it takes for radioactive isotopes to decay into stabile elements such as lead (times given are in years):
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The naturally occurring radioelements are mainly found in thorium and uranium ores. Uranium-238, uranium-235, and thorium-232 have long half-life (238-U: 4.5×10^9 years, 235-U: 7.04×10^8 years, 232-Th: 1.4×10^10 years). Otherwise, they would not exist in nature today because some 10^9 years have already passed since the origin of the elements. Some of the radioactive decay products of these three long-living radioelements have much shorter half-lives, they are always newly produced by the radioactive decay of the long-living ‘parent radionuclides’. The stable end products of these naturally occurring radioactive decay series are 206-Pb (for 238-U), 207-Pb (for 235-U), and 208-Pb (for 232-Th). There was a fourth decay series in nature, which is ‘extinct’ now because of the rather short half-life of the parent radionuclide (237-Np: 2.14×10^6 years).
There are a number of other elements that also have naturally occurring radioactive isotopes besides the stable ones. They also have very long half-lives, similar to uranium and thorium; some of them are listed in Table 2 (below).
Table 2:
40-K 1.3×10^9
87-Rb 4.7×10^10
190-Pt 6.1×10^11
187-Re 5×10^10
176-Lu 3.6×10^10
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quoted from:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/uranium-238
Now, just to give people some idea how long these periods are, 1 x10^10 (one times ten to the tenth power) = 10,000,000,000 (years). Uranium-238 goes through a long series of isotopes, each with its own half-life in the above-mentioned ranges, before it stabilizes into lead:
billions of years to go through the whole series.
So here is my question to KellyJay: do you think those figures are correct, that billions of years have elapsed, or do you think those numbers are simply fictions? Do you think this is something physicists just made up? Or maybe you think radioactive isotopes do not decay, that uranium and thorium stay uranium and thorium forever and never change into anything else. What say you? This is not a trick question. I really want to know what you think physics has firmly established and what you think people just make up as they go along ('just a theory' ).