{"id":222310,"date":"2025-09-23T04:28:46","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T09:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/lifes-building-blocks-may-not-be-stable-just-really-really-long-lived"},"modified":"2025-09-23T04:28:46","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T09:28:46","slug":"lifes-building-blocks-may-not-be-stable-just-really-really-long-lived","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/lifes-building-blocks-may-not-be-stable-just-really-really-long-lived","title":{"rendered":"Life\u2019s building blocks may not be stable\u2014just really, really long-lived"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/lifes-building-blocks-may-not-be-stable-just-really-really-long-lived2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Although the building blocks of life such as hydrogen and oxygen appear stable to us, many theories of physics predict that they are actually just tremendously long-lived, with the particles found in their nuclei slowly, but ultimately decaying.<\/p>\n<p>To investigate this idea, researchers have been hunting for evidence of this <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/decay\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">decay<\/a> by looking for faint signals of decaying <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/protons\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">protons<\/a> in Japan\u2019s Super-Kamiokande observatory.<\/p>\n<p>So far, no definitive signals of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/proton\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">proton<\/a> decay have emerged, implying that if the proton does decay, it probably has a lifetime exceeding 10<sup>33<\/sup> years\u2014that\u2019s 10 with 32 zeros behind it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although the building blocks of life such as hydrogen and oxygen appear stable to us, many theories of physics predict that they are actually just tremendously long-lived, with the particles found in their nuclei slowly, but ultimately decaying. To investigate this idea, researchers have been hunting for evidence of this decay by looking for faint [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}