On Sun, 01 Jun 2003, Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
With regard to cell phones, we already live in such a radiated world their small amount doesn't matter at all.
A breezily superficial observation, and totally wrong. You imply that all radiation is equivalent, a notion which a few minutes of gamma flux would cure for you quite handily. As to microwaves, the culprit in cellphones (a spawn of the devil, but not because of their mechanics), you should learn to appreciate one of the lovely concepts of physics known as "one over r squared". This is the factor of proportionality for the intensity of anything spread through all directions from a point source, where r is the distance from the source. What it means is the big microwave broadcast tower emitting megawatts over across town is not putting nearly the flux of radiation into your head that the one watt transmitter glued to you ear is doing. Whether that means you will drop over dead from it at some point is a different question, but if you don't it sure as hell won't be due to the line of thinking you express above.
We live in radiation and are probably immune to harm from it.
No, we live in radiation of a vast variety of different types, some of which, like EM from 330-780nm, are very beneficial, in that they keep us from tripping over things, while some others are harmful to varying degrees, like EM from 200-330nm, which will kill the top layer of your skin, and provide you with a probability of dying of cancer. Lots of other sorts of radiations are good at that latter, but because it's always a matter of chance, you might get away without ever suffering the results due to the low level of flux, but the person beside you might have a few decades cropped from their life. It all shows up in the epidemiology. If you live where there is more natural radiation from the ground, or high in the mountains where the atmospheric shielding is thinner, your probability for various radiation linked afflictions is elevated.
In fact, as
I said to Keith, it's likely that our continuous exposure to low level radiation is good for us. Not higher amounts such as radon gas, but normal small amounts are probably inconsequential.
In the same sense that nature is in love with the idea of the
individuals, but not with actual instances of individuals,
radiation is very good for us, because without it we would
most likely still be single celled animals. By generating
point mutations on germ cells, we are provided a means to evolve. Unfortunately, most of those point mutations turn out to be horribly toxic failures to the individuals bred from them, so what benefits us
generally, over the long run, tortures individual instances
of us, in the short term
In another area, there is much as 10,000 times as much natural pesticide in the food we eat as we might get from our application of pesticides. But we are used to them, so they don't harm us.
It is not just us who are used to them, but the ecology as a whole. The problem with the manmade pesticides you like to go on about, is that in order to be patentable, they need to be something which doesn't occur in nature. The handiest way, chemists thought, to alter naturally occuring pesticides, was to knock out some hydrogens and replace them with chlorines. This had many happy results - not only was the new substance patentable, but containing a bond rarely seen in nature, it was not metabolizable by any creature, so it could be stored without fear of degradation, and, it turns out, even used without fear of degradation. In fact, the stuff is almost immortal. It never goes away. Keep using it, and it just builds up in the environment. Now if it turns out that it has a slow toxicity to humans, too bad, you're out of luck, you'll never be able to get rid of the stuff to protect ourselves or any other vulnerable organism. Even if you ban it globally, what's already out there will persist for centuries. And most of these pesticides are fat soluble, sequestered in fatty tissue, and collected and concentrated by higher level predators up the food chain.
Like the mercury you claim is naturally present in the oceans,
yet for centuries top predators weren't concentrating mercury
in their bodies, and people weren't at risk of mercury poisoning
from eating them, as they are now. Why do you suppose that is?
Do you suppose it might have something to do with the amount
of mercury being dumped into rivers where it travels to estuaries
where high numbers of prey fish habitually feed.
...just trying to knock down a few bits of disinformation while I'm at it...
-Pete Vincent
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