The process in which humans carbon date things involves the subject to be unliving, or rather, by the end of the process they would be unliving.
Radiocarbon dating is used to date very recent artifacts, and is usually useful only for archeological purposes. It cannot be used to date rocks, both because of its short half life (about 5,000 years), and because it can only be used to date the remains of living things (such as bones, or wood). Rocks are dated using other methods, such as Uranium-Lead dating, which has a much longer half life (over 700 million years).
There are a number of types of radiometric dating. Carbon-14 dating, which is perhaps best known, can only be used for things some thousands of years old at most, and so is not particularly useful for fossils. Other types of radiometric dating, however, are good for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, and these are very useful for fossils. In fact they can be used to estimate the ages of various kinds of rocks. Radioactive waste is a pollutant that affects some radiometric dating techniques, skewing them. For example, above ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s produced waste carbon-14, almost doubling the amount in the atmosphere for some time. This would make samples from that period appear too new. Most radioactive materials in nuclear waste or pollution would not have this sort of effect, however. In order to influence radiometric dating, the material measured has to be part of the pollution or has to be generated from it. Carbon-14 results from a collision of a neutron with nitrogen-13 (a hydrogen atom is also generated). But this happens in the upper atmosphere as a result of cosmic rays. There are very few sources of neutrons on Earth, with uranium-235 probably being the most common. So ordinary nuclear waste from such sources as power plants will not usually skew carbon-14 dating. On the other hand, the isotopes other than carbon-14 that are used in radiodating may be among those in nuclear waste. Among the isotopes that might be affected are those used in iodine-xenon dating, rubidium-strontium, and potassium-argon dating. Nuclear pollutants might include these isotopes in them, and so exposure would possibly skew results. There are other forms of pollution that affect carbon dating. Burning of fossil fuels increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without increasing the amount of carbon-14. This would make some samples from the period after about 1700 appear too old.
Carbon dating is only accurate up to about 60 000 years. It makes the assumption that the concentration of C-14 in our atmosphere has been relatively constant for the last 60 000 years. If this assumption is correct then carbon dating is accurate. It cannot be used for samples less than around 100 years due to the testing of atomic bombs which altered the 14C levels. Calibration curves are used to date the age of know antiquities (they are mentioned in historical documents so their age can be known). Other than that there are inaccuracies of a few percent as the object gets older than several thousand years.
No, not all radioactive isotopes be used in radiometric dating. Some have very very short half lives and would entirely disappear before any useful period of time passed.
they are useful for both offence and defense
It depends on what material you are trying to date. For example, carbon 14 is absorbed by living things and so is good for dating organic matter but is useless for dating inorganic matter.
So you can find out how old your mom is. Roast!!!
Old
Carbon 14 is useful for dating organic remains less than 60-70,000 years old. It is not useful for fossils as the vast majority are much older than that.
carbon-14
It is not useful in dating rocks. Only organic substances in terrestrial conditions. No carbon in rocks.
Think about it for a minute. Carbon is part of ORGANIC molecules, from living things like plants and animals. When an organism dies the different isotopes of carbon gradually deteriorate; the difference in rates is what enables C-14 dating to give an approximate date range for when the organism was last alive. So the bottom line, naive answer to your question is another question - how many coins were once alive?
Metal artifacts rarely contain residues of organic products. Carbon-14 dating is adequate only for artifacts containing organic materials.
precambrian
Carbon-14 is useful in radioactive dating because it decays at a predictable rate over time. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 remaining in organic materials, scientists can determine their age. This helps in dating ancient artifacts, fossils, and other organic materials.
snails, bees
Carbon-14 is the isotope commonly used for dating wood and charcoal less than about 75,000 years old. This isotope is useful because plants take in carbon-14 while they are alive, and it decays at a known rate after the plant dies, allowing for accurate dating.