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wizardzz wrote: what about radiation
Radiation is completely natural, we're just better at concentrating it.
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Context. I meant radiation therapy or chemo therapy.
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Radiation therapy is just aiming it. That would be like saying apples are natural, but the act of moving them to your mouth is not.
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I'd possibly agree with you, if eating an apple required a linear accelerator machine.
Would you consider nuclear bombs natural, since such reactions occur naturally?
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In this case the device isn't natural, but radiation is the same whether it comes from a man made device or from a star, the particles that compose it are identical.
In the bomb, the bomb itself (i.e. the ignition device, delivery system, etc.) isn't natural, but the fission (or fusion, depending on the bomb) is. If a critical mass of fissile material were to accumulate and explode on it's own (highly unlikely, but not impossible to my knowledge) in the ground it doesn't become unnatural, nor are the natural fusion processes within our own Sun.
I guess a better analogy is focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass, just because you've used an unnatural device (though, lenses are also found in nature), the sunlight focused by it doesn't become unnatural, just unnaturally concentrated.
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lewax00 wrote: I guess a better analogy is focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass, just because you've used an unnatural device (though, lenses are also found in nature), the sunlight focused by it doesn't become unnatural, just unnaturally concentrated.
Still fails to prove your point; radiation therapy is unnatural. Focused radiation to kill cancer cells and leave healthy cells unaffected occurs nowhere in nature.
Perhaps you didn't get my clarification is the first reply. I said radiation and chemo therapy, and I meant radiation therapy and chemo therapy.
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I think instead we may have come up with a better point: terms like "natural" (or "organic", the usage of that one annoys me, gasoline is organic but that doesn't make it healthier to eat...) are mostly meaningless because they can be defined in any number of ways, one person may call it natural because any ingredient or component composing the system is natural, another might argue it isn't because the use of the system as a whole is not...and in the end (in this case) the cancer cells are no more alive or dead because of the origin of their killer.
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lewax00 wrote: Radiation is completely natural, we're just better at concentrating it.
So stars don't concentrate it?
What about gravitational lensing?
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jschell wrote: So stars don't concentrate it?
Not exactly, sure they produce a lot of radiation, but it leaves in a very unfocused way.
jschell wrote: What about gravitational lensing?
Sure. That's on a much larger scale than what I was thinking though.
At the very least, we make it very concentrated for our environment (don't see many stars or dense enough bodies for gravitational lensing occurring on Earth's surface), but I think a better word to use may have been "focusing" rather than "concentrating".
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Bergholt Stuttley Johnson wrote: If the idea catches on we could have Nuclear waste spread (may have to think up a catchier name)
Vegemite 
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Marmite, being yeast based, is actually more suited to what they're doing.
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