https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lea...

I saw a talk on one of these experiments while I was a grad student. Apparently their lead source had "historical significance" according to the government of France, and getting it out of the country required beurocratic maneuvers of questionanable legality.

But what compound? PbH4 isn't stable. PbF4 is barely stable. Maybe Pb(CH4)4 ??? Naively, I guess that you'd get even better mass resolution. Molectual mass of UF6 being ~352, vs ~267 for Pb(CH4)4. Good use for all those leftover centrifuges ;)

Well, it would be infinite until you run out.

Edit: it appears that someone disagrees with me. No worries, healthy disagreement is a good thing.

But I'm curious: how would you produce an infinite amount of product?

I won't worry about it further, time to go enjoy my unlimited internet.

Similar to carbon-14 dating - the isotopic ratio of carbon in the atmosphere is maintained by cosmic radiation hitting the carbon-12 and carbon-13 atoms, but as soon as the carbon is incorporated into solid matter it ceases to be part of the process that renews the carbon-14 levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_German_fleet_...

In Britain's defence, the Germans did later try to capture the remnants of the French fleet, and the French scuttled their fleet to avoid capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_...

Another interesting story involving the scuttling of a ship is the Battle of the River Plate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_River_Plate). The German ship, the Admiral Graf Spee, was forced into a neutral port due to damage. Rather than be forced out to face an overwhelming force they were certain to lose against, Captain Langsdorff instead scuttled the ship and committed suicide.

We could mine ore that hasn't been exposed to the atmosphere since then, and use air (either purified or found in some air pockets underground) for the furnace behind an airlock.

This would be much more expensive than just finding some pre-WWII steel, there's a lot of that around, but I don't think it's the case that if we somehow didn't have it we'd be screwed.

Am I wrong?

From article "Breathing Everyone's Air" - scroll down to that heading in http://www.scifun.ed.ac.uk/card/facts.html

This one only exaggerates things by a factor of 2, at least.

If some sort of catastrophe befalls our current civilization and future archaeologists attempt to C14 date our fossils and artifacts derived from carbon sequestered during this era, their results will be wildly unreliable.

If you plot human body temperature in Kelvins, the difference between someone with hypothermia and someone with a raging fever are relatively slight (under 2%).

Zero can be just as arbitrary a starting point as non-zero.

(My point is that temperature is probably an odd man out in graph terms, our usual reference points are not actually at zero.)

Far less interesting a read, an article about how many molecules of Beyonce's breath you inhale with each breath. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/beyonce-breath_n_6...

Granted, paleontology looks back in the span of millions to billions of years, so those ancient fossils are ok, but I imagine future scientists will grind their teeth an awful lot when trying to make scientific sense of our present day.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130403200836/htt...

Chernobyl is just a tiny blip.

Before the industrial revolution, silver did not tarnish. Burning coal introduced enough sulfur in the air that silver started tarnishing.

> While coal-burning power plants are responsible for producing most of the sulfur dioxide out there (and thus acid rain), they don’t contribute that much of the compounds that actually cause silver to tarnish, namely hydrogen sulfide—best known as a key player in the smell of rotten eggs and flatulence—and the similarly pungent carbonyl sulfide. About 90 percent of the hydrogen sulfide and more than two-thirds of the carbonyl sulfide in our atmosphere come from (you guessed it) volcanoes, salt marshland, undersea vents, and other natural sources.

[1] https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/ar...

And here I thought they were going to say rotten eggs and flatulence...

There are vacuum furnaces that lack this atmospheric air, but their process is much more expensive.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel