5 ms·

> never evolved the ability to detect it How much of a problem was it before we started mining uranium and putting it into glass? That was only 100-200 years a

• ncmncm 4y ago
  There was a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon. But that was 2 billion years ago. It ran for long enough that a microbe evolved to harvest the radiation to use in place of regular chemical energy sources. Which still exists.
• nerdponx 4y ago
  Hasn't there always been a risk of radon appearing in basements and groundwater? Regardless, it's clear that radiation was not enough of an evolutionary "problem" for our bodies to evolve to cope with it, beyond whatever we get from the sun. But that's just the thing! We are so used to our bodies mostly doing the right thing in response to various dangers: bitter is poison, cold is frostbite/hypothermia, burning pain is fire/burns, nausea/disgust is disease, thirst is dehydration, etc. Ionizing radiation is weird because it literally destroys our tissues, but does so indirectly by destroying our DNA (as far as I understand anyway), but we never had any evolutionary reason to be able to "feel" our DNA being destroyed, so we evolved neither the ability to detect it happening nor the ability to see or detect radiation in the environment. I suspect that many industrial chemicals and poisons in a similar category, e.g. many poisons are either neutral or sweet-smelling/tasting. But radiation is especially weird and scary because it's such an unfamiliar phenomenon to begin with, unlike poison which most humans seems to understand instinctively.