Like Fluoride or Oxygen.
Just about anything including water or salt
Not just about. Literally everything is lethal at a high enough concentration.
LD50’s are fun!
Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.
All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.
Paracelsus, 1538
The word for poison in German is Gift?!
The word has been used as a euphemism for “poison” since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”). The original meaning “gift” has disappeared in contemporary Standard German, but remains in some compounds (see Mitgift). Compare also Dutch gift (“gift”) alongside gif (“poison”).
Well that’s dumb.
“gift” means both “poison” and “married” in swedish. languages are fun :)
I’d argue gravitational force isn’t lethal. As long as you don’t arrive at whatever is pulling you & the gradient of gravity doesn’t change across your body length. You could be perfectly fine (for a while) orbiting a black hole at enormous speeds (assuming you don’t collide with matter in the accretion disc.
I’d argue against that. For one thing it is impossible to imagine a situation where there is no change in the gravitational gradient across your body over time. Your orbiting a black hole situation is a perfect example of a situation where the gradient alone would tear you apart. The conditions you’ve specified are tautological. There’s no way to maintain a zero gravitational gradient while also simultaneously having extremely high gravitational field. The two are mutually exclusive in any conceivable scenario.
It’s like saying a human being in a hypersonic wind stream won’t necessarily hurt you, burn you alive and rip you to pieces (not necessarily in that order) as long as there is no turbulence and you have a sufficient boundary layer – but you’re a non-aerodynamic human body in a hypersonic wind stream, so of course there will be turbulence and the boundary layer will not protect you at all, you’re going to die, basically instantly.
You argue that it isn’t, and then provide several examples where it is.
I think General Relativity is based on the idea that a frame of reference that’s in freefall is equivalent to one that in a gravity free region of space (at least that was one of Einstein’s Gedankenexperiments that led him to his theory of GR).
Having said that, in reality a sufficiently strong gravitational field will cause a tidal effect, which will crush you along one axis and pull you apart along another.
Wouldn’t a high enough force cause the gradient of gravity to differ?
Unless I misunderstood how that works. I’m picturing a downed powerline that causes large differences in voltage across the ground, which is why you are supposed to shuffle instead of taking a normal step. Would a high enough gravity cause a harmful gradient across the length of a human body?
The term spaghettification comes into mind.
Like if you were free falling into a black hole, the gravity forces would rip you to shreds long before you ever actually impacted anything because the difference in the force of gravity on the parts of your body that are closer to the black hole and the parts of your body that are farther away are enough to shred you like lettuce.
The first part of the question asks what is safe in small amounts
I thought about this a bit and concluded that it only applies to physical materials and forces.
For example: There certainly are lethal ideas, but most of them are not, and much like bosons they can overlap, so filling a person with multiple copies of the same (benign) thought has a diminishing effect.
But yeah, anything physical has a lethal concentration.
I love nerds.
Panadol / Paracetamol / Tylenol / Acetaminophen / C8H9NO2 is exceptionally easy to overdose on. I’ve done it accidentally a couple of times. It causes liver damage at even lower overdoses, you really don’t want that.
The maximum dosage is 1g every 4 to 6 hours, maximum total 4g a day. I am no doctor but I strongly recommend 6+ hours between doses (I set a timer) and I try very hard to not get to 3g or above per day. It’s even worse that plenty of medications just throw it in to the mix casually.
Unfortunately as the only first line of defence I have against pain, I cannot avoid it altogether. Redflags for me were light abdominal pain and yellowing of skin under eyes. Plus fatigue, but that’s normal in my world.
Huh. That might explain the last two weeks. Dental pains. Lot’s of tylenol. And why I feel much better now.
For dental pain I recommend ibuprofen (advil). Seems to work significantly better than acetaminophen (Tylenol) and seems to be much safer.
Some people can’t take NSAIDs unfortunately
I was dual wielding.
NSAIDs can be just as bad in different ways. They cause your digestive tract to bleed and can cause perforations.
Tylenol can be taken with ibuprofen to increase pain or fever relief. Just follow directions for both.
Definitely ease up on it if you can, especially if you’ve been taking it for more than a week regularly. If you can’t reduce usage/dose, then be much more generous with the minimum gap between doses, especially if your liver is already under a bit of pressure from other meds or alcohol.
Pain sucks, and pain management causes pain. Sorry about the dental stuff, my issue isn’t teeth but I know that is no fun too.
Can you not use ibuprofen?
Sadly no, the entire NSAID class are off the table. I’m one of the “lucky” few who gets one of the rare but serious side effects.
Age
I think this is one of those “any amount is bad” things.
Optimal age to be is blastocyst. It’s just downhill from there.
To quote, poorly from memory, the wisdom of Silenus “The best fate for a man is to never have been born at all, the second best fate is to die quickly.”
Ain’t that the truth lmao
Took a Hazmat class today and the big thing they drilled into our heads was “Everything is toxic at scale.” So make anything you want and there is an IDLH concentration.
Weed. A gram will get you high. A woolpack full of it can crush you like a grape if falling from the hay loft.
woolpack From Middle English wolpak, wullepak, equivalent to wool + pack. A bag of wool, traditionally weighing 240 pounds.TIL, Thx
Woolie Nelson
dying is a pretty big red flag, you ask me.
Okay. Do you think dying is a pretty big red flag?
I guess I did ask for that.
I also guess you like to tell dad jokes.
According to people I know, I’m only ok in small doses.
Then they leave.
So you’ve never had so far the opportunity to test whether or not you are lethal at higher doses ?
Everything is good in moderation. Even drinking too much water can lead to death.
Botulism can kill you, botox can kill your wrinkles.
And your migraines!
ionizing radiation, according to some hypothesis, vitamin E, selenium, zinc,
there’s no single “red flag” everything is different
There are lots of things that our body needs in really small doses. But anything above can be lethal.
Some things needs to be in really specific compounds. Like chrome we need really small dose of Cr3+ but Cr6+ is carcinogenic.
The human body is pretty weak so anything in high concentrations can probably kill us. It’s no steel
Everything. Literally everything can be fatal in large enough quantities. Quote from one of my chemistry professors: “there are no lethal substances, only lethal doses”
Remember the Wii craze in 2007? There was a radio competition called Hold Your Wee for a Wii in which the contestants had to drink throughout the day without going for a piss. One died.
I remember. I didn’t think it was possible before then.
“The dose makes the poison” -some old dude that like found the pharmaceutical industry
Acetaminophen/Paracetamol. The safe therapeutic dose is very close to the toxic dose. While most people don’t intentionally overdose, at least not for treating illness symptoms, the problem arises when they take multiple medications that all contain acetaminophen, following the label for all of them can easily net you a toxic dose.
Chubbyemu video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSqrCgFMsCI
Some good fan service in that video
Cocaine. A red flag being your heart beating itself to death inside your chest.
Huh. I kinda thought that was supposed to happen.
