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Not sure where his 500k years figure comes from. A cursory search gives 521 years:

https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1...

Chemical decay tends to follow Arrhenius equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation#Equation

so indeed a difference of maybe 40C should lead to a difference in half life of about 20-30%. I think about 30 half lives (~10^-9 degradation factor) should be the limit of recoverability, so perhaps 521x30 = 15k years in normal conditions up to 521x30x1.25 = 20k years in low temperature.

Of course, other factors such as humidity could contribute as well to the half-life, and reactivity is a lot more complicated than the Arrhenius model in reality. But even then I would be surprised such a vast difference in reactivity outside of true cryogenic conditions (maybe even shielding from radiation?).

edit: your second edit is interesting :) is that curve polynomial or exponential?




Looks exponential to me. After all, the Arrhenius equation (whose constants seem different here than your earlier assumptions) is exponential.


Oh yes, I definitely messed up my calculations. Half life is (inversely) proportional to the reaction rate itself I guess (I were associating it with the exponent, because half life is usually in the exponent), so the half life itself would be proportional to exponential reciprocal of temperature (e^(a/T)).

This means significant differences in HL for minor temperature variations under e.g. Arrhenius model (consistent with your graph I think). To extrapolate it some parameters need to be estimated though, which sounds interesting, I'll get around to that later...




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