Re: Dating an alien base on Mars

Jens Egon Nyborg wrote:

Geoffrey A. Landis wrote:
Assuming that a manufactured material (e.g., steel, aluminum, plastic)
would be used to make a base, count cosmic ray tracks.

I doubt carbon dating would work. Carbon dating relies on cosmic rays
turning nitrogen into carbon 14 in the Earth's mostly-nitrogen
atmosphere, and then trees turning carbon dioxide into organic carbon.
It would have problems in a majority carbon dioxide atmosphere, and
problems if Mars doesn't have trees.


Still we might try assuming that all organic carbon was C14 originally,
that should give us an upper bound if any measurable C14 remains.

It's not that simple. Carbon 14 decays into Nitrogen 13, not Carbon 12.
However, if the original inhabitants were considerate enough to put
something with carbon into an airtight box that we could somehow know
contained no N13 originally, we could then use the amount of N13 present
now to get a date (or a minimum date if there's no C14 detectable
remaining). That's probably a long shot, though.

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