From: Jed
... > The Fukushima reactor disaster is going to on for years and years. > Probably decades. I doubt that people will go back to living in places > where the wild boars are 600 times too radioactive to eat. If the local wildlife has ingested 600 times the amount of radioactivity to be eaten by humans, I find myself asking myself: how the hell can they continue to survive and presumably reproduce? Are we watching nature & evolution performing an unprecedented kind of natural selection here, where what wildlife that manages to survive and subsequently reproduce is due to the fact that their genes are better equipped at withstanding obscene amounts of radiation? I'm really not trying to be flippant here. It would appear to me that something similar happened at Chernobyl. Surveys noted flourishing herds of dear and/or elk and wolf packs pursuing them in the heavily irradiated lands surrounding Chernobyl. I'm going to take a stab here and speculate that Evolution may have worked out a shrewd way of propagating many kinds of complex species that took Her millions of years to craft, even when Her evolutionary designs are forced to survive in dire inhospitable environments. Evolution, by ensuring that they live long enough into adulthood to reproduce enough offspring before succumbing to all sorts of radiation induced afflictions is probably the key to continued success. With each successive generation, they may get a little better at withstanding the harsh conditions they are subjected to. I suspect a side-benefit of excess radiation may be an increased rate of evolution happening due to increased mutations. With increased mutations, it seems to me that there may also be the possibility of increasing the number of positive mutations, however small that percentage is likely to be. If they are good mutations, they will reproduce themselves and pass it on. I wonder what the trade-offs are living in this kind of an increased evolutionary environment. Boars that eventually reach the size of minivans? I hope they don't take a hankering to the flavor of "long-pig". > When it works, nuclear power is cheaper than coal, oil, wind or any other > source of electricity. Now we have seen that when it fails, the cost can > be catastrophic. The critics predicted that. I did not think so, but I now > see the critics were right. I am pretty sure this one accident wiped out > all the savings that nuclear power every made in Japan. Probably it cost > more than all the savings in the world, not just Japan. God! What a mess. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson svjart.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/newvortex/
