Radiocarbon dating is an incredibly useful technique. It has been used to date objects from within approximately the last 60,000 years, revolutionising archaeology and finding uses in everything from detecting fake wine vintages to identifying illegal ivory.
Unfortunately, humanity's reliance on fossil fuel combustion may ultimately mean that our species can’t have nice things like handy dating techniques. We’re releasing ancient carbon—in which the carbon-14 has long since undergone radioactive decay—into the atmosphere at such a rate that living organisms are absorbing less carbon-14, making them look old in the eyes of carbon dating.
If we keep going at our current rate, we’ll hit a point in just 35 years where it’ll no longer be possible to tell the difference between modern objects and those that were on this fair Earth 1,000 years ago. In 85 years, we'll no longer be able to use radiocarbon dating to tell whether a sample is modern or from 2,000 years ago.
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