Some say the world will end in flack , some say in ice ; still others say in a atomic Book of Revelation that will annihilate mankind while leave behind cockroaches intact . It ’s an unhappy picture , homo sapiensbeing all pass over out by its own technology as the little plague inherit the Earth , but is the hypothesis fact , or just scientific discipline fable ?
Unfortunately , it looks like the bugs gain this one . They ’ve already survived one atomic attack : The cockroach survival theory surface in the Wake Island of the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , when reports began to propagate that the only signs of life remaining between the two cities were cockroach scurrying among the wrecking . With that kind of evidence , it ’s reasonable enough to infer that even more nuclear weapons wo n’t be enough to keep them down , but it always helps to test a hypothesis . As common , that ’s wherethe Mythbusters step in .
The Discovery Channel team conducted an experiment on German cockroaches to see just how much radiation they can endure before kicking the tiny pail , and it ’s a tidy sum — more than we frail world can care , for sure . A month after their initial pic to 1000 radon units ( rads ) of cobalt 60 — an amount sufficient to bolt down a human in just 10 second of picture — about half of the roach sampling was still alive and thriving , which is all the more impressive considering the normal death rate rate of louse with only a 6 - to-9 - month life span . The 2nd stipulation up the dose of radiation sickness to 10,000 rads , about the equivalent amount of exposure that would ensue from an nuclear turkey , and 10 percent of the cockroaches were still around to tell the narrative a month by and by . The 100,000 rads condition , thankfully , try that at least cockroach are n’t invincible : None of them made it through , which would be more tragic if they did n’t still possess superhuman levels of radiation immunity .
Detractors from the theory that roach will someday rule the Earth do n’t disaccord with the finding that the minuscule creepy - crawlies would well outlive us after atomic fallout ; their arguing is that there are other , even more radiation - resistant insect out there . Wood - boring louse , as well as their eggs , can survive exposure toas much as 68,000 rad , while it would take about 64,000 to take out the coarse fruit tent-fly . The Habrobracon , a character of parasitic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant , easily lead the radiation therapy - resistance championship with its ability to hold out up to 180,000 radian — somewhere around 200 times as much resistance as any human possesses .
