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Originally Posted by tsimer
But maybe the others were the original partners in the experiment...and something happend (the button wasn't pushed or they used to computer for something they weren't supposed to.) They fled the hatch and now wander around radiating nuclear waves or something....
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I can agree that radiation damage could have occured to sterilize the others but a dose large enough to cause a human to be radioactive would have destroyed all their body tissues. Complex organic compounds that make up the 30% of the body that isn't water can't be made to be radioactive and still function. In order to be radioactive but alive, they would have had to breathe in or otherwise ingest fine radioactive isotopes (which are forms of elements, not compounds) such that these isotopes became imbedded in their bodies. Depending on the dose of radioactivity, they would then succumb either to traumatic tissue damage or, from a lesser dose, to cancer caused by cell mutation induced by the radioactivity. The corpse and subsequent decayed remains would retain some level of radioactivity for presumably a long period.
I think the explanation for the others needing children for reproduction is that they simply need to introduce genetic diversity into their group to avoid in-breeding. You can get by with in-breeding in animals (to an extent) but not in humans -- genetic problems show up within the first generation.