Thursday, December 1, 2011

If Body Scanners cause some people cancer then?

I was watching a segment on PBS News about Body Scanners of the type used to scan for bombs and weapons which are used at many of the bigger airports worldwide. It was said that about 100 of every 1,000,000 people would get cancer directly from the radiation of being scanned. But it also said that the radiation is equal to only 2 to 3 minutes of flying at 30,000 feet. This got me to thinking, "IF 100 of every 1,000,000 people are going to get cancer from the radiation of someone flying at 30,000 feet how many people are going to  get cancer from flying many hours at 30,000 feet?

Here is my graph if this is true:

100 die from cancer from every 2 to 3 minutes of flying at 30,000 feet of every million that fly.
So, if we divide 60 minutes by a conservative 3 minutes we get 20.
 Then if you multiply 20 times 100 you get 2000. So then 2000 of every million people who fly one hour at 30,000 feet get cancer that they get from flying during that hour at 30,000 feet.

For example, I just flew to and from London at 30,000 feet plus at approximately 11 hours each way. So, then I can multiply 22 hours (both ways) times 2000 people or 44,000 people of every one million that fly this amount of time at 30,000 feet will get cancer from flying 22 hours at 30,000 feet. As the amount of time one spends at 30,000 feet or above grows so does the chance of getting cancer from that experience. So, therefore flying into space likely would be much worse than flying at 30,000 feet. Likely this is one of the many reasons we haven't yet had manned missions to other planets (at least that we presently know of). The other reason is that flying in space makes those people incapable of making babies anymore whether they be male or female. This is why they ask astronauts to have their kids before they go into space.

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