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Plutonium is particularly dangerous because it essentially does not exist in nature and evolution has had zero opportunity to create mechanisms to handle it.
by colechristensen 4y ago
Plutonium is particularly dangerous because it essentially does not exist in nature and evolution has had zero opportunity to create mechanisms to handle it.
- brendoelfrendo 4y agoIt's particularly dangerous because it is a heavy metal and an alpha particle emitter. There are plenty of both of those in nature, and evolution can't do a lot against them. Unless you can evolve tiny shields around your chromosomes to protect them from getting bombarded by high-speed particles.
- dTal 4y agoWe evolved elaborate error-correction mechanisms instead.
- dragonwriter 4y agoWhich still suck against ingested nontrivial alpha emitters. There are lots of things that exist in nature, that humans have been exposed to, and which we don’t have particularly good defenses against beyond the intelligence that enables “if a group of humans encounters this problem, some of them will die and the others will observe this and generally avoid it”.