▲ | rimunroe 5 days ago | |||||||
> The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang. Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons. Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially. | ||||||||
▲ | spwa4 5 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
> These processes can and do happen terrestrially. ... and at rates that mean that the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total. | ||||||||
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