No, knowing for sure would have practical implications. The world entire is radioactive, and LNT has had really major impact on the regulation of all things nuclear, so the small effects get multiplied by very large numbers of people affected. It LNT is wrong, not transitioning to an all fission grid ages ago was 100% certainly a dire, dire mistake, and radio-logical medicine can be used somewhat more aggressively.
It thus actually matters that we don’t know the answer to this question for sure. It is just an obnoxious experiment to design.
I mean, what practical difference would it make whether the optimal level of radiation is exactly zero or non-zero but a couple orders of magnitude below the natural background?
(besides the health effects of working in places like LNGS—but then again people who work in such places take a larger-than-average number of flights (e.g. in order to attend conferences) and the cosmic ray exposure during flights would compensate for that)
We do not know that the optimal level isn’t 3 times average background. Or that the body does not adapt to constant low exposures in a way it does not to acute ones. Both of which are theoretical possibilities. - Earth has been getting less radioactive over geological time, and the mechanisms of cell repair are of very ancient origin. LNT isnt just an unconfirmed theory at levels below background. It is a line which is extrapolated from data derived from people who had doses much higher than that. “Hiroshima survivors”. “Ill advised handling of multiple naked near-critical masses”. sort of doses. The correlation is rock solid as we go from 90% mortality to 50, to 25, and it points at “Zero exposure, zero morbidity” more or less.. but once you get to doses within an order of magnitude of background, the expected morbidity is a very small percentage, and detecting it among all the other things that cause similar damage is just impractical. So we assume. It’s a solid assumption, but it is an assumption. It could be wrong.
No, knowing for sure would have practical implications. The world entire is radioactive, and LNT has had really major impact on the regulation of all things nuclear, so the small effects get multiplied by very large numbers of people affected. It LNT is wrong, not transitioning to an all fission grid ages ago was 100% certainly a dire, dire mistake, and radio-logical medicine can be used somewhat more aggressively. It thus actually matters that we don’t know the answer to this question for sure. It is just an obnoxious experiment to design.
I mean, what practical difference would it make whether the optimal level of radiation is exactly zero or non-zero but a couple orders of magnitude below the natural background?
(besides the health effects of working in places like LNGS—but then again people who work in such places take a larger-than-average number of flights (e.g. in order to attend conferences) and the cosmic ray exposure during flights would compensate for that)
We do not know that the optimal level isn’t 3 times average background. Or that the body does not adapt to constant low exposures in a way it does not to acute ones. Both of which are theoretical possibilities. - Earth has been getting less radioactive over geological time, and the mechanisms of cell repair are of very ancient origin. LNT isnt just an unconfirmed theory at levels below background. It is a line which is extrapolated from data derived from people who had doses much higher than that. “Hiroshima survivors”. “Ill advised handling of multiple naked near-critical masses”. sort of doses. The correlation is rock solid as we go from 90% mortality to 50, to 25, and it points at “Zero exposure, zero morbidity” more or less.. but once you get to doses within an order of magnitude of background, the expected morbidity is a very small percentage, and detecting it among all the other things that cause similar damage is just impractical. So we assume. It’s a solid assumption, but it is an assumption. It could be wrong.
OK, I think I misunderstood what you meant by “in the vicinity of” in the ancestor.