Re: C14 cryonics question

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Nov 11 1998 - 06:41:39 MST


Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> writes:

> Anders Sandberg wrote: According to the chemistry textbook I have
> > in my bookshelf the abundancy in living material is one in 10^12.
> > The human genome is roughly 6e9 nucleotides, each having around
> > 10 carbon atoms ...
>
> thanks anders. i cant find in my modern physics book the number
> of C14 abundance. if it is one in 10^12, my calc was off by
> a mere 5 orders of magnitude. {8^D i think peter passaro wrote:

The number is from General Chemistry by PW Atkins, Freeman 1989, page
820

> > ...Only one in roughly ten million carbon atoms
> > is a C-14 atom and with a half life of 6000 years this is not a very
> > frequent event...
>
> im a space type not a biology type. which of the above is right,
> 10^7 or 10^12? spike

I must admit I don't know. I just trusted the textbook (*very*
dangerous! :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:45 MST