There is a saying that "The dose makes the toxin."
Oxygen is the substance you most need a constant supply of. You will die after just a few minutes without oxygen.
But oxygen toxicity is real. Too much oxygen can harm or kill you. In fact, for billions of years all the organisms on Earth had no use for oxygen. When oxygen concentration increased in the atmosphere most life forms on Earth died off. Only the ones that adapted fast enough to tolerate and even to depend on oxygen could survive in the more oxygen rich atmosphere.
The same goes for every other necessary substance or environmental factor. And the same goes for every other dangerous substance or environmental factor. In high enough doses, even the most necessary things are deadly. In low enough doses, even the most deadly things can be harmless and maybe even useful.
Since visible light and all other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation are environmental factors, the preceding is also true for them. 978
Too much of any frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, even the most beneficial, can be harmful or deadly, and small enough exposure to even the deadliest frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, such as X-Rays or gamma rays, can be harmless or even beneficial.
I remember a story by <PERSON> in which a character criticized the way that death rays in science fiction were visible to the human eye, saying that if visible light was deadly, humans couldn't live. But humans have evolved to survive the concentrations of visible light that are common on Earth. A human exposed to a concentration of visible light that was a thousand times, or a million times, or a billion times, stronger could be killed, cooked, or even instantly vaporized.
I also remember two other stories by <PERSON>, perhaps even in the same collection, where humans found plausible ways to create death rays out of visible light using the primitive technology of the 1950s and 1960s.
Some forms of radiation therapy for cancer involve using beams of X-Rays, Gamma rays, or charged particles to help kill cancer cells. So people undergoing radiation therapy are often benefited by being struck by death rays designed to kill living tissues, because the death rays are aimed at living tissues that would kill their host bodies eventually.
As we all know, antimatter is the most dangerous substance imagined by physicists. If a normal particle collides with its opposite antiparticle, both are annihilated and radiation is emitted.
You may have heard of people having PET scans for medical diagnosis. PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. A positron is an anti electron, and thus an antiparticle. So people who had PET scans have survived, and perhaps benefited from, having minute amounts of antiparticles in their bodies.
So even with something as supremely deadly as antimatter, the dose makes the toxin.
A microwave oven does to food something very similar to what camp fires and stoves do to food, and requires about the same amount of energy per meal. The amount of energy received per second of being microwaved is many times the amount of energy per second in natural or artificial light for illumination. much
So being exposed to the same energy in visible light frequencies as an open fire or a stove imparts to a meal is not likely to be much better for someone than being microwaved in a microwave oven would be. 70