Nope, I didn’t say that at all, I explicitly refuted it.
Your implied model seems to be that the cell is factory that “makes” two cells, and that this factory is a separate entity that then dies. But that model is wrong. The cell duplicates its contents, and then divides, all the material present is split between two cells that are the product of that fission. There is no sense in which anything dies. It’s not just semantics, the notion that something dies in the process of cell division is wrong.
We start with one living cell. It divides in two, there are now two living cells.
I appreciate that you may have a desire to disagree with anything I say given our recent discussion on another topic, but this is GQ, and this is not a matter of subjective opinion or semantics.
I don’t know the numbers, but a total WAG is that you may get one neutrino-antineutrino annilation in your body every million years. That number could be off by several orders of magnitude, so don’t quote me on it.
As far as the energy of such an annhilation, when two particles annihilate, the masses of the two are converted to photons. The mass of a single neutrino is so low you wouldn’t even notice if a million of them did it at once.
IIRC, the danger of cancer is greatest when the radiation occurs when the cell is dividing. Radiation can cause mutations in the DNA easier during cell division. Having the radioactive substance internal is more dangerous than just being exposed externally.
This is why certain radioactive particles are more dangerous than others. One of the major concerns is strontium
This is also why radiation is more dangerous for babies and small children because their cells are dividing faster.
Looking at potassium:
So potassium is distributed throughout the body.
Back to strontium.
I found this source for the amount which can cause cancer
If my math done in my head late at night is correct, this is less than 1/1000 of the mass of K-40 referred in the OP as being safe.
I thought of starting a different thread, but since people have already gone this far I’ll ask it here.
If a cell divides we call both cells “new,” right? I mean, if we didn’t, then all of our cells would be the same age–since conception. But I hear people talk about old cells self-destructing, or about other cells killing them because they’re too old (and too likely to have something go wrong, I think). How does cell division sort of “remake” the cell and make it new-ish again? Why kill an old cell when you could just have it divide? How are some cells able to stay new while others don’t? Is it just that some cells aren’t made to ever divide, or that they just didn’t and now they might be too messed up to trust them to replicate themselves?
You can’t. The specialized cells, like a white blood cell, are produced by stem cells. They then operate until they die.
This is a qualified guess, but aging is a consequence of activity. A white blood cell “does stuff”. The stem cell it came from just sits around and occasionally makes a new white blood cell. (As mentioned before it’s slightly more complicated than that and differs between different types of stem cells. Also we haven’t even identified all types of stem cells necessary for producing all the different types of specialized cells, or at least we hadn’t a couple of years back.
I think there’s also a confusion in that there are different kinds of aging. A white blood cell wears out doing it’s job. That’s aging.
The cells that keep dividing have a “countdown clock”, the telomeres and can only divide so many times before they run out of telomere. That’s a different type of aging. There are also mechanisms that can un-age DNA.