5mo ago

Radioactivity

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63 comments

It will be radioactive forever. The question is where you put the threshold, which is fairly arbitrary.
- Eh, it could be non-radioactive next week. That's not very likely, but it could be
  
  eh, i could randomly teleport to the moon suddently, but things like theese are unlikely enough to be in effect completely and utterly impossible.
  
  !remindme 10¹⁰10 universe lifetimes
  
  I could also phase through a wall by sheer coincidence of all my molecules missing the molecules of the wall, but yeah, not going to happen unfortunately
  
  It would imply a significant energy release within a short time in order to become non-radioactive right?
- If you only think about half live then yes it would be radioactive forever but in reality after a long time every atom would've decayed into non radioactive elements.
  You can even calculate the expected time it would take for the random process of decay to terminate.
  
  "after a long time" - that is exactly my point. Where do you draw the line? It will never be non-radioactive, which the headline suggest would be the case in 1'500 years. As far as we know, everything might decay after some time. It will always have some Radon get trapped in it. Scatter some cosmic rays. Blablabla.
  
  By that logic, everything withing a few kilometers of the surface is radioactive, especially all life. That's not a useful definition of radioactive.
  
  Hence my post, the relevant metric is "how much", not "if".
- I wonder how long it would take for the radioactivity to be indistinguishable from the atmospheric average.

63 comments