Radiocarbon dating -Useful?

[BC_Programmer]

Anti-carbon 

As far as carbon dating goes it's very useful but not exact as we all know. It does help to give us a better understanding of the evolution of our world. Can't wait for silicon-dating if we find silicon based lifeforms.

um... Carbon dating is based on the decay of radioactive Carbon-14... I don't think there are any radioactive silocon isotopes.

Also, Carbon dating is relatively accurate, the tricky part is getting an accurate reading of the remaining carbon-14.

[Mulreay]

I was joking about the silicon 
Also I said not 'exact' so were kind of saying the same thing.

[BC_Programmer]

it's exact if you get an exact reading.


Assuming you know logarithms, of course.

[Geek-9pm]

Isotopes of silicon
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Silicon (Si) has numerous known isotopes, with mass numbers ranging from 22 to 44. 28Si (the most abundant isotope, at 92.23%), 29Si (4.67%), and 30Si (3.1%) are stable; 32Si is a radioactive isotope produced by cosmic ray spallation of argon. Its half-life has been determined to be approximately 170 years (0.21 MeV), and it decays by beta emission to 32P (which has a 14.28 day half-life [1]) and then to 32S. The standard atomic mass is 28.0855(3) u

[BC_Programmer]

that's OK, like I said,

I don't think there are any radioactive silicon isotopes.

On the other hand, Carbon-14 is present in all living things in specific amounts... (can't recall the details) but once they die it will decay. So using the carbon-14 half-life and the remaining carbon-14 it's possible to determine how long something has been dead.

the radioactive silicon isotope, however, appears seemingly randomly, and therefore would not be suitable to determine the elapsed time since a silicon-based lifeforms death (although it is entirely possible that another isotope similar to Carbon-14 would be a by-product of it's life processes)