Re: Thundercloud "accelerator" fires gamma-ray beam?

Puppet_Sock wrote:
On Sep 13, 10:12 am, Sam Wormley <sworml...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bob Cain wrote:
Sam Wormley wrote:
Tsuchiya says that bremsstrahlung at MeV energies would be focused
into a beam that only illuminates a small area on the ground, which
could explain why so few long-duration pulses have been seen. The
team plan to verify this by placing many radiation detectors over a
wider area.
Could this radiation have an effect on the genetic material in the balls
of a critter under such a beam?
In other words, can gamma radiation, at these measured levels damage DNA
in vertebrates?

Gammas in the MeV range can certainly disrupt
organic molecules. The effects are known to
include cancer, cell death, and at very high dose,
death of the organism. There are other possible
health effects as well, depending on the dose and
the exposure method.

How far do they penetrate? That's why I specifically mentioned balls.

Mutation is a much more difficult thing to prove.
Mutations have been observed in test animals
exposed to large doses of gammas. Particularly
fruit flies. Biologists love to zap those fruit flies.
That's because they can prepare a huge population
of genetically similar test subjects, and zap them
all at the same value. Then anybody who shows
up with an unusual feature is a good candidate for
testing for genetic issues.

Sounds reasonable but getting to the sexual DNA in a fly may be much easier than getting at it in humans for the radiation we are discussing. Do you know about that?

There has been no confirmed case of mutation in
humans. However, it seems mighty unlikely that
humans are significantly different in this way. It is
most likely that humans have simply avoided the
dose whenver possible, and so the statistics are
such that we have had a reasonable chance of
dodging the bullet. And, the usual variation in
humans masks to some extent any mutations
that might exist. Plus, when guys get zapped by
some accident, they tend to be told not to breed.
And for some types of radiation, it can cause
sterility anyway.

Got it. Where I'm going with this is that the random mutation part of Darwin's thesis has been attacked in that there aren't enough mutagenic sources available to explain the incredible diversity. Dunno whether or not there is any gas in that bag but if you can get zapped from storm clouds then that new source ought to be compared in its potential for change to other known sexually mutagenic sources.

I wouldn't begin to know how to do that or even to possibly rule out its significance with a Fermi answer. I'm hoping someone knows how and can hazard a decent guess.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler."

A. Einstein
.

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