resistance is futile, you will be assimilated

[Paleophyte]

No, it isn't. You need a few hundred micrograms at best. You've got a few nanograms. You're short by a factor of roughly a million.

is nanograms even visible? lol

Not to the naked eye. 100 nanograms is roughly the mass of a red blood cell.

[Paleophyte]

No, it isn't. Bosonic matter doesn't experience space-time and always moves at the speed of light. You're hadronic matter, do you move at the speed of light? How do you interact with your keyboard?

what does "experience space-time" mean?

Space and time contract as you approach the speed of light.

Bosonic matter moves at the speed of light, and at that speed space and time are contracted to nothing. To a photon, the universe doesn't exist. Its source and destination are the same point and it takes no time to get from one to the other. Entirely counterintuitive to our understanding of the universe, but that's how photons do.

[Paleophyte]

That depends a little on the exact minerals. For a silica-rich rock I'd look for zircons, titanite, monazite, or other uranium-rich minerals to date by U-Pb and/or potassium-rich minerals (K-feldspar, biotite, hornblende) to date by Ar-Ar and/or Rb-Sr. For a silica-poor rock you have a more limited selection. There are still a few minerals (apatite, baddeleyite, titanite, rutile, and possibly even zircon) that you might be able to get an age from but the selection is more limited and you have to be a little more selective. If you have strong metamorphic overprint that may have reset the ages on your minerals you may need to pass on the trickier silica-poor volcanics in favour of the more robust minerals in the silica-rich rocks.

U-Pb for example; how do you know how much U is in the zircons by dating?
-------

That is one of the quantities that you'll need to measure, along with the amount of Pb decay product. You have a couple of options for that:

• Extract the zircons and dissolve them. Once dissolved, run them through an ion exchange column to separate the U and Pb from everything else (mostly Zr and Si). Spike the separated U and Pb, load it onto a filament, and analyse by TIMS. That'll get you the most precise result, but tends to be very labour-intensive.
  
• Put the zircons under a microscope and shoot them with a laser (LA-ICPMS). Feed the material that the laser ablates into a plasma mass-spectrometer and it'll tell you how much U and Pb you have. Much faster and cheaper but less precise.
  
• Instead of a laser, use an ion beam for in situ analysis. The ions can be produced inside of a mass-spectrometer that can tell you how much U and Pb you have (SIMS). A middle ground between LA-ICPMS and TIMS.
  

Those are the common techniques.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Plenty of carbon, not plenty of carbon-14.

Boru

can you prove that?

Yes. Scaling up from the amount of c14 in human body, a T. Rex would have about 100 micrograms of that isotope. Since the half life is 5700 years, a T. Rex corpse could theoretically contain no more about 8 nanograms of c14, far too small for a test.

Boru

[SubtleVirtue]

if most of the tests are based on 'stardust' isotopes... how does that date the rocks in an eruption?

The radiometric "clocks" in a mineral don't start "ticking" until the mineral forms. And they don't actually start "ticking" until they cool below something called the "closure temperature", which can be a problem if the rock gets heated up again and ceases being "closed". Put simply, we're measuring two important quantities when we date any mineral: abundance of parent isotope and abundance of the daughter isotope. So how much 235-U and how much 207-Pb? Above the closure temperature the system behaves as if it were "open" and the daughter product diffuses out of the mineral, resetting the age to zero. So yes, the primordial isotopes do decay before the mineral ever forms, but until the mineral starts accumulating the daughter product the radiometric clock doesn't start ticking.

OK, that isn't quite true, you can use the decay of radiometric systems in an open system along with some interesting assumptions to produce something called a "model age", but that's a whole other can of worms. No point in going down the rabbit hole of Sm-Nd systematics and TDM just yet.

These minerals form from the cooling of magma?!

Are you claiming that heated atoms don't radioactively decay?

Can you prove that?

[SubtleVirtue]

is nanograms even visible? lol

Not to the naked eye. 100 nanograms is roughly the mass of a red blood cell.

How many nanograms was the connective tissue?

[SubtleVirtue]

what does "experience space-time" mean?

Space and time contract as you approach the speed of light.

Bosonic matter moves at the speed of light, and at that speed space and time are contracted to nothing. To a photon, the universe doesn't exist. Its source and destination are the same point and it takes no time to get from one to the other. Entirely counterintuitive to our understanding of the universe, but that's how photons do.

longitudinal electromagnetic waves move faster and slower than light

[SubtleVirtue]

can you prove that?

Yes. Scaling up from the amount of c14 in human body, a T. Rex would have about 100 micrograms of that isotope. Since the half life is 5700 years, a T. Rex corpse could theoretically contain no more about 8 nanograms of c14, far too small for a test.

Boru

So, if you measured more than that, your theory would be falsified!

[SubtleVirtue]

Space and time contract as you approach the speed of light.

Bosonic matter moves at the speed of light, and at that speed space and time are contracted to nothing. To a photon, the universe doesn't exist. Its source and destination are the same point and it takes no time to get from one to the other. Entirely counterintuitive to our understanding of the universe, but that's how photons do.

longitudinal electromagnetic waves move faster and slower than light

the longitudinal electromagnetic radiation would interact with light... and that would be it's universe

[Astreja]

intention to me is the established patterns of activity and thoughts that make up your action potentials

your intention produces all of your actions

Intentions by themselves do nothing. It's the action that's important. I doubt very much that we can make people happy solely by intending for them to be happy. At some point you have to act, or nothing changes.

Wishing for happiness for someone outside my circle of influence does nothing at all. It's an empty platitude until you do something to help them.