explain xkcd:Museum
Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all [[:Category:All comics|3235 xkcd comics],
and only 62
(1.9%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!
Latest comic
| Carbon Dating |
 Title text: This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones. |
Explanation
|
This is incomplete: This page was created recently by a WOODEN PICKAXE. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
Carbon dating is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. This method is commonly used by archeologists and is invaluable in terms of predicting the time an piece of organic matter came from, like fossils. The punchline of this comic stems from the fact that carbon in the universe was created in the first round of stars fusing elements, and thus a cosmologist's only conclusion from the presence of carbon in a skeleton is "this skeleton is less than 13.6 billion years old", which is not useful information for judging artifacts found on Earth (a planet which is less than 5 billion years old).
The title text talks about how stone tools were found at the site of the excavation, most likely dating from the Stone Age. Tools made out of stone are often solid and durable, making them great choices for heavy duty tasks. Helium, however is a gas and is difficult to shape into a solid mass[citation needed]. However, it was produced in great quantities after the Big Bang, accounting for about ~25% of the elements produced by the Early Universe.
Carbon dating or radio carbon dating is is method used by archeologists to determine the age of an organic object. The method uses the fact that carbon consumed by livin organisms contains a fixed ratio of the carbon isotopes C12, C13, and C14. Since C14 is radioactive, it decays over time. By checking how much C14 is left in the leftover of an organism, archeologists can determine how long ago the organism consumed carbon and thus how long ago it lived.
First carbon was created roughly 13.6 billion years ago in supernova explosions of the very first stars. Thus, astronomers can determine that any specimen they find that contains carbon must be younger than 13.6 billion years. Compared to the accuracy of radio carbon dating, can determine the age of an organic object younger than 50000 years within centuries of accuracy, this is highly unspecific.
In the very beginning of the universe, as part of the primordial nucleosynthesis, only hydrogen, helium, and a very small amount of lithium was created. All other elements firts occurred in stars and thus are also less than 13.6 billion years old.
Transcript
|
This is one of 43 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [Ponytail, standing, is pointing at a blackboard containing a drawing of a skull and some bones/bone fragments, as well as a graph and some lines of text. She is speaking to Cueball and Megan, who are standing beside her.]
- Ponytail: The high carbon content of the skeleton indicates that the individual lived less than 13.6 billion years ago, after the first round of stellar nucleosynthesis.
- [Caption below the panel:]
- Cosmologist carbon dating
Add comment 
Create topic (use sparingly) 
Refresh Discussion
Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
pixels-assembly-3.png
how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. βWhile False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!
- (Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
Add comment
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
Is this out of date? .
New here?
Last 7 days (Top 10) |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for comics, characters, themes and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.
- If you're new to wiki editing, see the explain xkcd:Editor FAQ for a specific guidance to this Wiki and the more general help on how to edit wiki pages. There's also a handy wikicode cheatsheet.
- Discussion about the wiki itself happens at the Community portal.
- You can browse the comics from List of all comics or by navigating the category tree at Category:Comics.
- There are incomplete explanations listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!
Rules
Don't be a jerk!
There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.
If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.
Please only submit material directly related to (and helping everyone better understand) xkcd... and of course only submit material that can legally be posted (and freely edited). Off-topic or other inappropriate content is subject to removal or modification at admin discretion, and users who repeatedly post such content will be blocked.
If you need assistance from an admin, post a message to the Admin requests board.
