Potentially a dumb question but I'm asking anyway.
So, life on Earth has existed for roughly 3 and a half billions years give or take. Life developed using the elements that were avaiable in the primordial environment, such as oxygen, hydrogen and, you guessed it, carbon. All the elements that are needed for a strand of DNA to create proteins and to replicate itself can be considered the building blocks of life.
But living beings aren't just MADE of these elements, they use them for metabolic functions, as in the cells themselves need these blocks either for energy, for protein production or for replication. So you'd assume that, given enough time, the finite amount of these elements on Earth would just run out, burned up in exogenic metabolic reactions, like a form of biological enthropy (i don't remember what happens when cells use glucose exactly)
But thankfully that hasn't been the case, for life developed a system of balance where most of these elements are somehow recycled, and passed on from generation to generation, from one living being to another, from life back to the earth or the atmosphere and viceversa. Ergo that means we've been running on the same atoms for billions of years.
So here is the question... Don't atoms decay? I'm a little rusty in physics and chemistry, so I don't know if gas elements have a half-life, but Carbon does. It decays after a while, and we use that for carbon dating. So I wonder... Shouldn't it decay in living beings too? What's stopping C14 from turning into C12 while inside a person?
And if that's possible, wouldn't that mean we would have ran out of these decaying elements billions of years ago, preventing life from developing further?
So, life on Earth has existed for roughly 3 and a half billions years give or take. Life developed using the elements that were avaiable in the primordial environment, such as oxygen, hydrogen and, you guessed it, carbon. All the elements that are needed for a strand of DNA to create proteins and to replicate itself can be considered the building blocks of life.
But living beings aren't just MADE of these elements, they use them for metabolic functions, as in the cells themselves need these blocks either for energy, for protein production or for replication. So you'd assume that, given enough time, the finite amount of these elements on Earth would just run out, burned up in exogenic metabolic reactions, like a form of biological enthropy (i don't remember what happens when cells use glucose exactly)
But thankfully that hasn't been the case, for life developed a system of balance where most of these elements are somehow recycled, and passed on from generation to generation, from one living being to another, from life back to the earth or the atmosphere and viceversa. Ergo that means we've been running on the same atoms for billions of years.
So here is the question... Don't atoms decay? I'm a little rusty in physics and chemistry, so I don't know if gas elements have a half-life, but Carbon does. It decays after a while, and we use that for carbon dating. So I wonder... Shouldn't it decay in living beings too? What's stopping C14 from turning into C12 while inside a person?
And if that's possible, wouldn't that mean we would have ran out of these decaying elements billions of years ago, preventing life from developing further?
