Life is not exactly what we think it is. Even if we are right about most of what being alive is, we are wrong or uninformed on the rest of the issues. An example of this is how people are effected by natural events. When we are young and strong we certainly are more able to fight off the effects of such things as magnetism. Yes you heard me right, magnetism. You thought that I was going to talk about diseases, didn't you? If you did, you couldn't have been more wrong. There is much that really hasn't been thoroughly investigated as pertains to things like magnetic storms and their effect on the elderly human body. We know that things like sunspots, play havoc with communications on Earth, and seem to cause magnetic storms by pushing around the solar wind, but there are some medical people that believe that this also raises the blood pressure of the elderly. Along with the change in blood pressure they believe that the blood flow itself is effected and this effect is felt mainly in the capillaries. It is also said that that blood adrenalin is boosted. All these things could be harmful or even fatal to an elderly person.

For many centuries it was thought that the full moon had an effect on human behavior. This led to the word lunatic and those werewolf stories that became the staple of Hollywood films in the thirties, forties and fifties. This belief still exists today, to some extent. I am talking about the full moon causing changes in behavior not activating some werewolf gene. The theory is that the fluid that surrounds the brain is pulled on or tugged on by the full moon the same way it tugs on the oceans and causes tides to rise. Some people in positions to observe human behavior, such as police, hospital workers and the like, state that they do get more problems or more patients when there is a full moon, yet when studies are made, no correlation can be found between the moon's phases and human behavior. I wonder if these studies are missing something? Maybe a study by age group would be more productive? Maybe the moon does have some effect, but only the very old or very young or both? The moon might even cause people to be more violent without increasing the number of incidents. I think that this would be interesting to find out, once and for all.

We know that certain natural things do have an effect on us. Just look at sunlight. It is necessary for all life on earth. We would have a dead planet without it. Sunlight is responsible for breaking down the compounds in the Earth's Atmosphere. We even get vitamin d from sunlight. It is our skin that creates it when it reacts with UVB ultraviolet light at certain wavelengths. This light can be sunlight. But all is not good with sunlight. As with anything else, you can have too much of a good thing. Over exposure to sunlight can cause not only sunburn, but severe damage to your skin and even skin cancer. Who would have thought that something as benign as sunlight could be so dangerous? If sunlight can cause reactions, what about moonlight? Moonlight is nothing more than reflected sunlight. As reflected light, it is much weaker than sunlight falling directly on the Earth. Is it possible to get a moonburn? No because the reflected sunlight is 500,000 times weaker than direct sunlight. You would have to lay out under the full moon for about 29 years to get burnt.

There are all sorts of particles bombarding this planet, maybe some of them might be harmful in ways that we never thought of? Neutrinos are particles that pass through everything, including us. The neutrino is poorly understood, but it is know that it has no electric charge and thus is unaffected by magnetic forces. Some scientists claim that they have just proved that neutrinos have mass. For years scientists believed that they had none. If something with mass, no matter how small, passes through our bodies, wouldn't it collide with some other structure on the way through? Maybe not, since neutrinos are said to be one of the tiniest things in nature and may just pass through us without hitting anything or, because of their size, doing so little damage that it is instantly repaired. As people age and we manage to keep ourselves alive longer, will the common place things like neutrinos passing through us, cause us problems? Could it be that someone's human repair system might slow down to a pace that could be adversely affected by collisions with neutrinos?

What about cosmic rays? We are protected from cosmic rays by the atmosphere of our planet. This is not true for astronauts that travel in space. As of this minute, heavy shielding is required in any space ship that would undertake a long voyage. Solar flares are an extreme danger to the crew as they cause intense radiation. While there is no practical way for us to undertake long space voyages due to these dangers, scientists are working on different ways to shield humans from cosmic rays and radiation. The atmosphere on Earth is the equivalent to a 12 foot thick aluminum plate, to a cosmic ray, according to NASA. Secondary cosmic rays, which are a product of a cosmic ray striking the atmosphere, do reach Earth sometimes. Even the amount of cosmic rays that make it to the atmosphere is small since most cosmic rays are deflected away from Earth by our magnetic field. I guess a person could be struck by a secondary cosmic ray, but this is highly unlikely. They seem to pose no threat to any life on earth.

We hear so much about the ozone hole over the Antarctic. What is this hole? It is a reduction in concentrations of ozone in the stratosphere above Antarctica. Overall the Earth is losing about 3% of it's ozone in the stratosphere per decade for the past twenty years. What does this really mean to humans? It is expected that there will be increases in skin cancer, plankton will be reduced and other biological consequences may occur. Things may be happening now that we are not aware of yet. Will these consequences strike the population equally? Probably not. Those with more resistance will most likely not be effected as much as those with less resistance, such as the infirm and elderly again.

It is a tough world out there and in a hundred years, scientists may laugh at the primitive state of our knowledge on this subject. The problem is that if nothing changes way before then, this place is going to look like the desolate planet shown in the Mad Max movies. As more research is being done, we are bound to find out that things that we though had no effect on us, actually did. When long space flights begin, that will be the perfect lab to see how the human body reacts to being away from the Earth and not receiving the constant bombardment of particles, waves, smells and light, along with other things that takes place. It will be interesting to see the results.