I'm not sure that that accurately describes the situation in Lithuania.

Many of the people who are rich there are perceived, rightly or wrongly, of having made their money, not by working hard, but by having influence. When Lithuania privatized large sections of the economy, state assets were often bought at a bargain price by those who were friends of the officials handling the privatization. These may have been former communist officials, kingpins of organized crime, or both (assuming that there's a difference). Or so the perception is.

Some of this "if I can't have it then nobody can" mentality and suspicion of neighbors may have been there for centuries, but Soviet communism added its own twist. Under the communist system, it was almost impossible for someone to lose their job. They would get paid, no matter what they did. On the other hand, the work that they did was often useless, in the sense that if the farmer harvested his potatoes, they might end up rotting in a warehouse somewhere anyway, so why bother working hard to harvest the potatoes? Especially because you wouldn't be paid any less, since they were not YOUR potatoes anyway. The only way to get ahead, in those days, was by stealing from your employer (and boy, do I have a lot of stories, but that's for another time). But the ordinary person would only have a limited ability to steal without getting caught. The big shots, however, could get away with a whole lot, and they were resented by the ordinary people. Even people who may have made their wealth legitimately were suspected of doing so by theft and fraud, because that was just the way the system worked.

People who were not in positions of influence (i.e. the Party) didn't have much hope at all of EVER bettering their situation through any legitimate means.

Keep that in mind when you read about politics in any of the ex-Soviet states. It explains a lot.

So, in Lithuania (and also presumably Russia and any of the other countries that haven't fully recovered from sovietism yet), it seems perfectly understandable to me that "ordinary" people would be glad to see rich people get caught and punished for any kind of cheating. It's not the same dynamic as one might expect here.

I agree that there are much bigger risks in this mission than radiation, but, from what I remember from working in the nuclear industry:
- the annual limit of how much a nuclear plant is allowed to add to the exposure of a member of the general public is 100 mREM (1 mSv)
- the annual occupational dose limit for an Atomic Radiation Worker is 5 REM (50 mSv)
- acute effects start showing up at 50 REM (500 mSv) exposure "over a short period of time"
- the LD50/30 (the dose at which 50% of those exposed will die within 30 days, even with treatment) is 500 REM (5 Sv)

On that sort of scale, 100 REM *IS* a big deal.

Now, the fact that the exposure takes place over months may make all the difference, but it's still a large dose, isn't it?

Okay, could somebody check my math here?

From the NRC's web site, The LD50 is "The dose of radiation expected to cause death to 50 percent of an exposed population within 30 days (LD 50/30). Typically, the LD 50/30 is in the range from 400 to 450 rem (4 to 5 sieverts) received over a very short period." If I understand correctly, this shouldn't depend on TYPE of radiation, because the Sv or REM is a measure of BIOLOGICAL effect, i.e. it has built-in correction factors for how much biological effect a given amount of absorbed energy has.

So, somebody absorbing 662 millisieverts "over a very short period" would be worried about eventual cancer risk, but would also be dealing with acute radiation sickness, which would start to be a problem at any dose over about 500 millisieverts (50 REM).

So, my reaction was actually the opposite of cjameshuff's. Rather than dismissing this dose as not causing any effects, I was wondering why they are only concerned about long-term effects and not acute effects.

Or is it that spreading the dose over a period of months gives the body enough time to recover, so that there is no immediate radiation illness?

Citation needed.

Any ocean sailor knows that the world is round. If it were flat, a ship going off into the distance would just get smaller and smaller, rather than the hull disappearing first and the tops of the masts disappearing last.

It is a myth that people of Columbus's time thought he would fall off the edge of the earth. Rather, the opposition was due to people saying "the distance is much farther than you think, and your crew will starve to death before you reach the Far East". In fact, they were right, and Columbus was just lucky that there was an unexpected continent in the way.

Although most of you guys were still in diapers back when it was worth participating in. :-)

Now get off my lawn!

I haven't read any explanation of why they think this is happening, but is it actually true that "the sun is the suspected source of this cause"? I would have thought that it was some change in the environment (the local properties of space) that would cause both the change in decay rate and the solar flares.

Who is going to staff this "home"? Other 80 and 90 year olds? Or other people's kids and grandkids?

The grandparent post overstated the case, because of course there's no need for everyone to have their own kids to look after them when they're old. But we still need young people to follow us. So it's perfectly fine for lots of people to choose to be "evolutionary dead ends", as long as not everyon makes that choice. :-)