In 1999, it comes up that we don’t know how far in the future we are. This is as a consequence of the Orokin destroying all the old history. However, Loid mentions that there are still palaeolithic cave paintings. Could Loid and Albrecht or literally anyone else not just carbon date pigment samples or something?
I can forgive bugs. I don’t know if I can forgive this.
We’re viewing it from the lens of the Tenno. Someone might know this, but that information might not be widely available, thus we don’t know it. Our children lived while the Orokin were still around, so presumably that sort of information was well controlled at the time.
Plus, the drifter grew up in a storybook. I don’t think they cared too much about the distant past once they were freed, on account of having to deal with that whole Narmer mess.
Carbon datings lowest margin of error is decades, only getting larger with time. Its thus reasonable to assert we could say, “Yeah its like a thousandish years into the future.” but not be able to say “It is Saturday December 28, 3024.”
I’d even take resolution down to the millennium!
One problem I think could happen with radiodating is that at some point the Orokin irradiated the Earth, so presumably we’d lack calibration curves in the future. I don’t know how much that would affect things.
It is the 41st millenium. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
It might help, if we knew roughly how long ago the irradiation happened. One fairly reliable way of telling age is looking at major events: counting rings on trees, for example. If any are old enough, you could literally find the ring where the irradiation occurred, then count the rings forward. Even without trees, you can do something similar with core samples - it’s just less precise.
What if the trees were also irradiated and pumped full of growth hormones?
Isotope dating probably isn’t too useful considering how frequently we encounter and spread radiation across the starchart.
What if they just used a rock to draw them and didn’t actually use any organic material? Carbon dating would be useless.
It would also be useless if you don’t even know what the date is now. What are you comparing it to?
On the first point, actually, some cave paintings in Australia were actually (specifically) radiocarbon dated by sampling organic crystals left by growing microbes. A lot of Australian cave art was previously considered difficult to date due to the lack of organic pigments used in many regions by the First Australians.
Second point: say in the pre-Orokin time, a cave painting is dated at 40 kya ± 1000 years, and then in the Tenno’s time it’s dated at 50 kya ± 1500 years, I think I’m missing something for why that doesn’t give an interval of possible times between pre-Orokin and Tenno time.
In the future, everybody has much bigger problems than trying to figure out what date it is. And it gives DE much more freedom narratively.
