How to Calculate the Half-Life of Carbon Atoms

The half-life of a carbon atom is 5,700 years. That's much longer than any of us live and so certainly there was no scientist who was sitting around watching these things for 5, 700 years. So it's the statistical nature of the randomness that really helps you because even after 100 years there is a chance that a few of them will have decayed. The earth is not just sitting out in empty space. Space is very far from empty. We are being inundated with high energy particles all the time from the sun from black whole accretion disks from other galaxies. When they hit the upper atmosphere they cause all sorts of reactions. They smash into stuff and they change