You are radioactive! Life on Earth would be impossible without radiation

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Many people are frightened of radiation, thinking of it as an invisible, man-made and deadly force, and this fear often underpins opposition to nuclear power. In fact, most radiation is natural and life on Earth wouldn’t be possible without it. In nuclear power and nuclear medicine we’ve simply harnessed radiation for our own use, just as we harness fire or the medical properties of plants, both of which also have the power to harm. Unlike some toxins found in nature, humans have evolved to live with exposure to low doses of radiation and only relatively high doses are harmful. A good analogy for this is paracetamol – one tablet can cure your headache, but if you take a whole box in one go it can kill you.

The Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, generated radiation in the form of atoms known as primordial radionuclides (primordial meaning from the beginning of time). These now are part of everything in the universe. Some have very long physical half-lives, a measure of how long it takes for half of their radioactivity to decay away: for one radioactive form of thorium it is 14 billion years, for one of uranium 4.5 billion and one of potassium 1.3 billion.

Primordial radionuclides are still present in rocks, minerals and soils today. Their decay is a source of heat in the Earth’s interior, turning its molten iron core into a convecting dynamo that maintains a magnetic field strong enough to shield us from cosmic radiation which would otherwise eliminate life on Earth. Without this radioactivity, the Earth would have gradually cooled to become a dead, rocky globe with a cold, iron ball at the core and life would not exist.

Radiation from space interacts with elements in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and some surface