Although that&#x27;s totally the common understanding, surprisingly there&#x27;s rather a lot of evidence (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radiation_hormesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radiation_hormesis</a>) at this point that it isn&#x27;t actually true; it&#x27;s just a little hard to say &quot;a little radiation might be good for you&quot; without people writing you off as some sort of crazy person at the outset, so it&#x27;s not talked about very much.<p>What you&#x27;re describing -- and what most people who don&#x27;t have a specialized education in the nuclear field commonly believe -- is something called the &quot;linear no threshold&quot; hypothesis (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Linear_no-threshold_model" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Linear_no-threshold_model</a>) of radiation exposure, and although it&#x27;s commonly used because it&#x27;s definitely the safest and most conservative way of responding to radiation exposure, it&#x27;s rather controversial and probably wrong.<p>If you&#x27;re curious and want to find out more, there&#x27;s a lot of fascinating material about the subject available publicly, including some analyses of life expectancies in areas that have much-higher-than-normal background radiation (off the top of my head, Kerala, India is one such locality).