the timboucher experience

Had an interesting conversation with my brother today. We were talking about increased doses of radiation from different electronics and things, as well as cancer. And how people whose biology reacts negatively towards all this rampant radiation, in the form of cancer, will be put increasingly at an evolutionary disadvantage. And people who can tolerate these low level radiation doses will continue.

I thought this was especially interesting because of various advantages which could be seen in people tolerant to radiation. One, obviously is nuclear war or catastrophe, and the ability to survive it. The other (and more interesting one, I think) is the possibility of non-terrestrial human evolution.

Outer space.

I’d imagine there would be some benefit to being able to withstand radiation for a person who spends their entire life on a spaceship, outside the protective shell of the Earth. Thinking about it from this angle, I also started wondering about food additives, chemicals, transgenic crops, stuff like that. Maybe another effect of those is that humans will build up an increased tolerance towards all these different non-natural compounds. This might be of assistance in deep space living, where all you were able to eat was food which had been synthesized from chemical compounds, or had been grown on board your ship using various additives and things.

To me, this puts sort of a new spin on what’s happening currently with public health and food, etc. I mean, it doesn’t make it all seem like fun and games merely because I’m connecting it to post-planetary survival. But it does kind of make me wonder if while on the one hand we’re digging our own graves, on the other, we may be accidentally ensuring our survival in a whole other form.

On that note, here’s a website about alternative cancer treatments, which I’d like to come back and look at in greater detail.

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