Speeded Up Radioactive Decay - YEC's Poisoned Challice

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

Assuming a person is about 60 kg, then something like 50 kGy per day is about right.

@Paraleptopecten

Note too that the related sped up radioactive decay would give Noah a beta-radiation dose (from the 40K atoms inside his own body, which for these purposes is basically all of the radioactive atoms inside a person) of about 50kGy per day (adding the background rate from the crust would up that to about 70kGy). Either way, that’s a fatal dose every few seconds.

That is an insane amount of radiation–10 times the dose inside the worst-contaminated parts of the Chernobyl reactor immediately after the meltdown. Except this lasts for 6 months.

That’s actually enough to kill Thermococcus gammatolerans.

@Paraleptopecten

Given that Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium are the most common radioactive elements, we can get an estimate of the energy released by looking at them. Both Uranium and Thorium require about 1 half-life to go by in six months, and Potassium-40 about 4 to produce the measured ages. Given their abundance in the earth and earth’s mass, that is roughly 6x10^44 becquerels. Alpha decays emit about 10 MeV each. Hence, 4.5x10^32 joules get poured into the earth in that time. For reference, that is slightly more than Earth’s binding energy, or about the amount of sunlight that hits the earth every billion years. That is also enough to raise temperatures at 1000K/s, re-melting the crust in about a second and vaporizing the earth in 10. By the end of six months, the ball of plasma once known as earth would be (assuming that it stayed the same size) about 22.5 kK and shining as brightly as a small star.