4 ms·
"I don't consent to any form of non-necessary irradiation, regardless of the quantity." Standing in front of the US capitol building for about an hour is also
by VLM 11y ago
"I don't consent to any form of non-necessary irradiation, regardless of the quantity."
Standing in front of the US capitol building for about an hour is also about 0.1 uSv. Granite is quite radioactive, you know. Some kitchen countertops are much worse.
0.1 uSv is also the generally accepted as the "banana equivalent dose". Bananas are a decent source of potassium, which aside from being an essential element is also somewhat radioactive.
There is no fixed accepted dose rate for flying. More than a couple and less than a dozen uSv/hr is about as accurate as you're gonna get. Depends on flight path and altitude and who knows what all else. The claim that its a couple minutes of flight is not all that far from the truth, more or less.
People who don't really understand what they're afraid of can't rationally minimize risks anyway. Perhaps the granite in a kitchen countertop or architectural decorative feature would increase cancer death rate by 0.0001% but cancer due to chemical catalyst contamination in a replacement laminate countertop MIGHT be ten times the cancer death rate of radioactive granite. Or maybe not.
Assuming they're telling the truth about the dose, I wouldn't worry about the radiation dose. Its small enough to be measured but biologically irrelevant.
What is highly suspicious is a police state violating constitutional amendments probably isn't very concerned with citizen health and probably feels no need to tell the truth. I could see some PR guy claiming its only 1 banana-equivalent-dose or an hour sitting at a granite countertop or whatever because he knows its irrelevant, even if the actual dose is so high that passersby hair is falling out and they're getting radiation burns because its an enormously higher dose. I mean, the government would never lie to us, would they?
- colordrops 11y agoYour argument is fallacious. An analogy of your argument: gravity exerts harmless levels of physical force on your body, therefore the government has the right to exert harmless levels of physical force on your body. By the way, radiation exposure is cumulative throughout your lifetime. There is no safe minimum level of radiation exposure. How much radiation you get on a flight is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
- hugh4 11y agoThe government already entitles itself to do far worse things than bounce a few photons off me now and then -- eg every year they pry open my wallet and entitle themselves to a very large fraction of my income.
- nosuchthing 11y agoYou're free to move to other municipalities without public services, infrastructure, and taxes.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoYou should also be wary to chose the new place carefully, there are many areas on Earth where the background radiation is higher than in NY with a scan-van on every corner working constantly.
- dguaraglia 11y agoSo, by that argument, we should just let the government do anything then? I once had a similar argument with a friend who insisted there should be stricter gun laws "because the government already has tanks and planes, so the second amendment doesn't make any sense anymore; they could always bomb the shit out of the public if they wanted." I think the opposite is truth: we need to act now while we still have some power, rather than assume a defeatist attitude and let our children and their children at the mercy of a fully omnipotent government.
- 11y ago
- suneilp 11y agoThe problem is that x-rays use ionizing radiation which is more dangerous. Some people could be more sensitive or in a more likely scenario they get a lot of x-rays and/or ct scans due to medical issues which requires them being very careful about spacing out scans and exposure to other sources. Then there is the possibility someone walks in between the van and target. At some point you have to stop the argument that this and that does x and y so z is ok. People are afraid of excessive radiation and the government isn't listening to people. One thing that infuriates me is that people making these arguments don't even know that x-rays (and cats) use ionizing radiation which is what carries real risks. Incidentally, MRIs do not use ionizing radiation so you can stay in there a "while". Thats how they can do so many cool studies using MRIs.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThe problem is people refuse to do the math, or to listen to people who did the math. All they hear is "that scary r-thing". At this point I think this link will beat Meditations on Moloch in the "most often posted in comments by this user" statistic, but once again I'm pointing to this helpful chart: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/. > People are afraid of excessive radiation and the government isn't listening to people. People are afraid of a lot of things, and at this point I'm not sure how we should deal with it on a social level anymore. They are scared of radiation, therefore allow for lots of unnecessary deaths, destruction of the environment and even more radiation by refusing to replace coal plants with nuclear ones. They're also afraid of vaccines, microwaves and cell-phone EM radiation (how they were never afraid of radio waves in pre-cellphone era is beyond me, but maybe they initially were but got over it). That people are afraid of things that aren't dangerous doesn't mean we should stop doing that things. As for how to make people not afraid, I don't know anymore. Maybe we should just pay the advertising industry to fix that with propaganda?
- caf 11y agoInterestingly, due to the altitude it flew at Concorde included a radiation detector that triggered a cockpit warning light when the incident ionizing radiation exceeded a preset limit. The standard operating procedure if the warning was triggered was to descend to a lower altitude. (Presumably this was more about the aircrew's cumulative dose than the passengers).