Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown.
Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other material.
Why Did People Live for about 900 Years before the Flood?
Life spans suddenly began decreasing after the flood, at least for the patriarchs listed in Figure 194 (also shown in Figure 199 on page 439). This “ski slope” type of decline (called an exponential decay) is one that every engineer and scientist has seen many times. It occurs when a system changes from one equilibrium situation to another.
Figure 194: Declining Postflood Longevity. Notice the sudden downward trend in postflood life spans at the time of the flood. This type of downward declining curve (an exponential decay) strongly suggests that man’s environment underwent a drastic change which reduced human life spans.
Many people have speculated on the cause of this decrease, but few proposals fit all the following facts. The decline:
Unfortunately, proposals that do fit these facts cannot be tested experimentally. Nor can the answer proposed here. However, the flood events I have already described would produce all of these facts and would reduce longevity.
The previous frequently-asked question (pages 396–399) concerns radiocarbon dating and the rapid buildup of carbon-14 beginning at the flood. As explained in that answer and in “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” (pages 323–363), during the flood powerful piezoelectric currents inside the fluttering crust released small but significant amounts of carbon-14 into the atmosphere. Also produced were a few thousand new isotopes—chemical elements that were unusually light or (heavy) because atoms lost (or gained) neutrons.
To illustrate what contributed to some extent to decreased life spans after the flood, let’s first consider carbon-14—one of these few thousand new isotopes. (Slightly different, but related, examples will then be given for the other isotopes produced during the flood.) Imagine a man weighing 160 pounds (72,575 grams). About 30% of his body (by mass) is carbon. Every 12 grams of carbon contains 6.022 × 1023 carbon atoms. One carbon atom out of a trillion (1012) is carbon-14. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years. When carbon-14 decays, it becomes nitrogen-14. Therefore, a 160-pound body experiences 4,200 carbon-14 disintegrations per second!
Note: There are 31,556,736 seconds in a year, and the number 0.693 (-ln 0.5) converts half-lives to rates of decay.
What happens when carbon-14 atoms in your body suddenly decay and become nitrogen? It’s not good. Those atoms bond differently with other tissues, producing distortion (or wrinkling) at the atomic level. Also, if any carbon in your DNA or RNA suddenly becomes nitrogen, the affected genes may not work properly. Both effects age you every second, with clocklike precision, but which organs finally break down or become diseased will be somewhat random and will depend on the genetics you inherited. The negative exponential curve in Figure 194 is a mirror image of the positive exponential curve [line C] in Figure 193 on page 396. Is it because the carbon-14 increase in the postflood atmosphere decreased longevity?
What about the few thousand other new isotopes produced during the flood? They will sometimes produce defective proteins in trillions of your cells. Here’s why. One of your cells most amazing components are ribosomes—complex manufacturing plants that produce your body’s proteins. The new isotopes you eat, drink, and breathe are sometimes incorporated into amino acids which are brought into each ribosome and hooked together (according to the instructions in your DNA) into long chains. When an amino-acid chain exits the ribosome, the electrical charges on the chain fold it in multiple directions simultaneously. The tight, three-dimensional shape produced determines what the protein will do in your body. If the protein misfolds—due to light (or heavy) isotopes that either speed up (or slow down) a particular fold—the protein will be defective and an organ in your body might suffer. These defects build up over time, so your proteins (that include enzymes) steadily, but imperceptibly, degrade. An animation of this folding process in a bacterium can be seen at:
www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/ribo/homepage/
movies/translation_bacterial.mov
Every second, isotopes produced during the flood are slowly aging us on the atomic scale and pushing our organs toward diseased states. Which of the thousands of new isotopes are the chief culprits (poisons) and what other factors and repair systems play a role are open questions.