Count them, they were few in number

[sathor]

  I've been thinking about Dinosaurs and the lack of knowledge we really have about them. So few in number are their remains - we assume, only a handful have been found the world over so far? And while we haven't excavated every square inch of the planet, the possibility that they were few in number, and quite possibly nothing at all like scientists imagine sticks out in my mind. It's not as though we have real empirical evidence of -what- kind of world they lived in at all. We have scattered remains that aren't indicative at all of the whole reality they experienced.

So, what if they were, say, intelligent beings? What if they were like Gods? And we trust our carbon dating system to appropriately identify relative age of a given thing, however how is it that we comprehend the algorithm perfectly? How do we know the identifiers of a carbon profile from twenty thousand years ago, considering it is only recently we began even using such technology? Certainly, even if we understood how much change occurs in a carbon life form with a verifiable death date between its death and the current day, we do not know if such a pattern holds true, or how much it changes over thousands or millions of years. This is not information we have access to, and more importantly it must be assumed that the amount of change could vary based on the factors innumerable involved with the change of our very specimen and whatever aspect of it are identified by carbon dating, over many years.

Comments

[mystic-waves.livejournal.com]

Yes carbon dating is valid. Read about how it's done, it is perfectly valid. Not algorithms, simple chemistry and biology. But you know what the cool thing about it is. It works well because of all the C14 released into the world from all the atomic bombs we blew up in testing.

[sathor.livejournal.com]

You're talking about something you are calling simple chemistry and biology - how is it that we know what the amount of decay over a period of millenia actually is, for instance? This simply isn't possible, we don't have any instances where we've been able to be proven right by testing something from a millenia ago that we -know- is from a millenia ago, because we don't have any records of that time period and we have determined that we did not even exist in our current capacity at all in that time period.

Even if we are proven right on a much shorter time period this is not a case of proof of principle, because we don't know if the decay rates change over extensive periods of time, we only know what has happened in the short amount of time we've had the technology available for instance, and only as far back as accurate records exist for materials.