Accelerated nuclear decay extinguishes ‘extinct nuclides’ argument

by Dr Russell Humphreys

image by FrankH, wikipedia.org

There are many arguments for an old earth, and one that is widely used is the ‘extinct nuclides’ argument. Notice I use the word ‘argument’ and not ‘measurement’ because we cannot measure age directly. That’s because we can’t travel back into the past to make observations. All ages quoted are based on arguments about evidence observed in the present. They are all based on assumptions and scenarios about the past. When we consider these assumptions and scenarios, we find that the idea of a young earth, one that is consistent with the biblical timescale, is entirely plausible.

Most radioisotopes that we find naturally at the present time are ones with very long half-lives of close to a billion years or longer. Old-earth proponents argue that the short-lived nuclides did exist in the past but they have since become extinct. Their absence, old-earthers claim (based on this assumed scenario), is conclusive evidence that the solar system formed longer ago than the span of these half lives.

Let’s take Aluminum 26 (Al-26) as an example. When produced artificially today, it decays with a half-life of 710,000 years into Magnesium 26 (Mg-26). Mg-26 is stable, comprising about 11% of all the stable Magnesium (the rest being Mg-24 and Mg-25) found in nature today. But Al-26 does not exist in nature today, except as generated by cosmic rays near the surface of bodies in space. Minerals deep within meteorites have been found with evidence of having once contained Al-26.¹ Those minerals contain only the daughter Mg-26, not the other two stable kinds of magnesium, and they look as if they had been locally melted by the heat of Al-26 decay.²

Roger Wiens, Hugh Ross, and other old-earthers argue that early in its history the meteorite contained some Aluminum 26, and that it decayed into Mg-26 slowly over the alleged billions of years since then. Because the Al-26 half-life is short compared to billions of years, it would all be gone today. Hence, they claim, the ‘extinct nuclide’ Al-26 is evidence that the alleged eons actually occurred.

So the concept of ‘extinct nuclides’ is not in itself evidence for large amounts of time, but only for large amounts of nuclear decay. Although I explained this to Drs. Wiens and Ross face-to-face in 2005, they make no mention of this new evidence and explanation in their subsequent publications. It’s as if they do not want to know about it, or have not understood this simple point.