Staphylococcus radiofurans is one bacteria that not only survives hard radiation, but thrives in a radiation intensity about 5000 times more intense than what would kill an average human.

“Cleaning up” cesium 137 would really only be useful at the source, before it had a chance to become diluted by the environment. Heavy neutron bombardment would then be one way to accelerate the decay process and make it harmless(more or less). Most of the radio nucleotides formed by such irradiation last only seconds to minutes,,,

Side note: We are already experimenting with micro organisms that concentrate heavy metals at toxic dumps into insoluble forms. Combining these organisms with the radiation resistence of radiofurans would potentially allow us to clean the environment of such contaminants. Someday,,,

Gary 7

a) Would aliens, bombarding the Earth with radioactive meteors (good tactic for obliterating a planet) actually be able to live in a highly radioactive environment? If all life on the surface of the Earth were wiped out by radioactivity, could another life form take it’s place?

Sure, why not? We know that there are extremophiles here on Earth that can survive even in cooling pools for spent nuclear fuel. So it is possible for some forms of life to colonize hypothetical irradiated Earth.

b) The Iscandarans (the good aliens) produce a cure for the radiation-saturated Earth. Is there any way to instantly negate radiation, even theoretically? Would it be possible to use scientific theory to ‘cure’ places like Chernobyl and the Japanese disaster of a few years ago? Is that just technology so advanced that it would seem like magic? Or is it just fantasy?

Well, not fantasy, but close to magic, imho. Problem with places like Chernobyl isn’t so much radiation itself but rather source of said radiation. It’s all about contamination and isotopes. For example, during Chernobyl steam explosion a lot of Cesium 137 was spread all around and now it’s everywhere – in dust particles, in the soil, in the groundwater. It’s there and still emits radiation with almost steady rate, and with half-life of 30 years it will take some time until it will reach background radiation level. The only conceivable way to stop it would be to bind it chemically (or, I don’t know – with nanorobots) and then remove mechanically. It’s conceivable, but needs a lot of work and much more advance tech levels than we have at our disposal – we are basically talking about terraforming here.

Or, alternatively, we can summon our magic-level tech and transmutate Cs-137 into stable isotope.

They also claim that Houdini believed they were real. In real life, he knew they were fake, and spent quite some time trying to convince his friend Arthur Conan Doyle of that fact.