this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Afaik its always going to have some parts of uranium right? 50% after one half life, 25% after two half lives and it will keep on halving practically forever (or till the last atom decays). In the end it comes down to when you consider it a negligible amount.
after a certain point, you're going to get to where you have to split an atom or two.
fairly sure that'd be far less exciting than normal.
Edit: i decided to try and figure out how long that would take.. and per usual the law of large numbers caused my eyes to glaze over.
half life times log2(amount of atoms), right?
I mean I didn’t get that far, I lost track of how many zeroes were in the half-life.
(It’s 704ish million, right?)
I mean, yes, that's how it would work if there were an infinite number of atoms in the piece. There's a finite amount, though, so eventually there will be a point when all the atoms have completely decayed.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Yeah, thats what I was using to get 14%.
2billion years is about 2.8 halflives, so I calculated (1/2)^2.8 ~ 0.14.
https://xkcd.com/1153/