Life After Radiation: Sickness, Death and Sustenance

While fictional monsters and superheroes consume rads like video game power-ups, radiation is a trickier matter in reality -- from everyday radiation to the destructive exposure associated with nuclear accidents and nuclear war. In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe explore the nature of radiation, its effects on living tissue and the curious world of radiotrophic fungi.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And actually, no,
you're not Robert Lamb. Your DJ Radio tropism. Oh yeah,
and uh and what your dad today? Oh, it would

(00:24):
clearly be DJ cryptococcus. We'll get to that later. So
today we're gonna be talking about radio activity and radio
friendly organisms. But to start us off, I wanted to
take us back to something that happened a couple of
weeks ago. So we sometimes go on Facebook Live, the
live streaming media service, and uh talk about in Aine

(00:48):
garbage movie trailers and we're not in Maine garbage important
B movie uh and sometimes non B movie trailers and
discuss the way that they tie into our discussions here
on the podcast. The topics that we cover, well, there's
nothing wrong within a garbage that wasn't inherently a pejorative.
I mean, I love in a garbage, right, So we
went on Facebook Live and we were talking about giant

(01:10):
crab movies, a a film genre that I think is
severely under realized. It has a lot of potential. There's
just not enough there. The young aspiring filmmakers out there
need to get on the giant crab movie train. Yeah.
It's as easy as buying a real crab or catching
one on the beach and filming it right, put it
in close up the little people. Yeah, it's amazing. Uh.

(01:35):
And one of the movies we talked about was Attack
of the Crab Monsters. So this was released in nineteen
fifty seven, directed by as I would call him the
crud Wizard, Roger Corman, and it is a plot you've
heard a million times before, as scientists go to an
island in the Pacific where there has been atomic testing

(01:55):
and eventually they have to square off against a couple
of giant, intelligent, sort of psychic crabs that project their
voices into your dreams. Stuff. It's it's odd. It's a
script by Charles B. Griffith, who is a regular Corman writer.
He's the same guy who wrote who wrote Little Shop
of Horrors. Uh, not of This Earth and one of

(02:16):
my favorites it Conquered the World, where Earth is attacked
by an art of choke with an underbyte. Yeah, and
of course you end up with a long The best
part of that movie is you have lengthy scenes in
which Levan Cliff and Peter Graves discuss that the philosophical
quandaries related to alien invasion? What does freedom really mean?

(02:40):
So I I I have a special place in my
heart for that film too. Anyway, In an interview, Griffith,
the screenwriter of Attack of the Crab Monsters, tells the
story about where this screenplay came from. And he says,
Roger Corman came to him and said, I want to
make a picture called Attack of the Giant Crabs. Obviously
the name evolved a little, and then Griffith says, I asked,

(03:03):
does it have to be atomic radiation? And Corman responded yes.
And you know, that's kind of the way it was
in the sci fi and horror of the nineteen fifties
we went through the atomic age. It was we we
of course, had just had a World war that was
concluded with the use of atomic weapons, and it was

(03:25):
almost like if your Corman thinking about Griffith coming to
you saying does it have to be atomic radiation? Again,
it's like, why are you even asking? Of course, this
movie has to be about atomic radiation making animals bigger,
more powerful, sometimes more intelligent, more rampage e versions of
those same animals. Well, I love what you just said,

(03:46):
because that, I mean, that's essentially what atomic power did
for the human race, right once a society acquired it. Yeah,
we became this this, this thing that was more rampage e,
more dangerous. The movies are always uh, the the initial
uh sounding chamber for for cultural anxiety, and so it's

(04:08):
you can think of it as as Oppenheimer uh invoking
his famous uh uh quote from Hindu scripture and sing
is saying, now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Imagine him speaking that into the amplifier of of B
movie culture, and what you get are all of these
atomic of super creatures and atomic Superman spiraling out into

(04:31):
comic book characters, etcetera. As this this anxiety works its
way through our fiction. Now, I know you're like, you're
sort of joking and sort of serious, and I want
to agree with you on both halves, especially the sort
of serious part. I totally agree that B movies are
often where we work out are sort of taboo anxieties
and uh, and it's where the conscience of the common

(04:54):
person comes through into the arts and entertainment. But another
fun fact act I cannot leave this subject without divulging,
is that Griffith thinks, he says in the same interview
that in in some scenes in the movie, the person
operating the giant crab monster prop may have been Jack

(05:15):
Nicholson because he was working on sets there at the time. Man.
That that's a great fact. That's magical to think of. Yeah,
especially look up this crab and think it could be
Jack under there. Yeah, we we gotta give you. How
often do you encounter that with us? Someone in a
monster suit turns out to be an important, acclaimed actor

(05:35):
later on. But then, of course, sometimes the monster itself
becomes a character. Now, obviously there are not a whole
franchise of giant crab movies. Uh, the the giant crab
monsters never caught on as a beloved folk hero, but
some giant radioactive monsters do. Yeah. The best example of

(05:56):
that would be, of course, so Gohedra Godzilla, who continues
to rampage through our our cinematic history here. Now, is
it officially part of the Godzilla cannon that Godzilla was
created by atomic radiation? Yes? Yeah, I mean that's when
you go back to the original Godzilla. That's the the
idea that uh and and and it's really kind of

(06:19):
beautiful in its own way, right. I mean this is where,
in the same way that all these other monsters managed
to emerge from, you know, largely Western contemplations of the
atomic age, Godzilla is a frightening manifestation of of the
Japanese contemplation of the atomic age. And and it really

(06:40):
shines through in that first film because that first film
is a spark darker. Yeah, it's a dark film. Uh,
it just becomes campy over time as people and grow
used to the idea of a giant rampaging lizard creature,
and when the giant rampaging lizard creature becomes the hero
rather than the villain. Yes, you know, I I watched
part of the shin Godzilla, the new Godzilla film out

(07:03):
of Japan on an airplane recently, and I need to
sit down and watch it in in you know, in
complete form, because it seems like there are a lot
of scenes of experts setting around tables discussing the political
ramifications of combating Godzilla, which I love films like that
they take the monster or whatever, the sort of fantastical

(07:26):
element and just really get down and start teasing it
apart with the real world factors. But of course, more recently,
more recently, for most American audiences, we had this um,
this this new treatment of Godzilla that to introduce some
additional radioactive elements, the idea that that Godzilla and his

(07:47):
fellow massive unidentified terrestrial organisms or mudos were radiation dependent organisms, uh,
radiation feeding leftovers from a primal terrestrial era in which
there was a lot more radioactivity on the Earth and
organisms had evolved to depend upon it. Now, that could

(08:08):
play into some of the science we actually discussed later
in this episode, So keep that in mind. Yes, Now,
of course there's plenty of people who would argue that, oh,
you can't really nail Godzilla down. He's he's he can't
throw too much science at godzilla is even though we
can't stop doing it. It's more like a scaly zeus. Yeah. Yeah.
In fact, there's a wonderful quote that I ran across.

(08:28):
This is from film producer A show Go, Tomi Yama,
and it was a two thousand four interview with the
now defunct Penny Blood dot com. But you can find
archive versions of this, and he said this is a translation.
I believe Godzilla is closer to being a god. He's
not just a living animal or a monster. The fact
is that humans cannot control or judge the gods. They

(08:51):
have their own will, they have their own way. In Japan,
there are many gods. There is a god of destruction.
He totally destroys everything, and then there is a rebirth,
something new and fresh can begin. Godzilla is closer to
being that kind of god. Now this brings us to
the Godzilla youthfro dilemma. Is the righteous righteous because it's
loved by Godzilla? Or is it righteous because never mind? Uh? Yeah,

(09:16):
what is love by Godzilla? It is that. There's an
answer to that, but it changes, I think from film
to film. It's obviously rampage. Yeah, I mean, it's easier
to nail down gammera. What does gammera love the children? Right?
And and that's why I think I'm ultimately more drawn
to Gammera. Okay, we shouldn't look at some other radiation
eating organisms that are either powered up by radiation or

(09:36):
or derived their their everyday energy from it. All right, Well,
Christian and I recently did an episode dealing with some
of the science of the expanse. And if you're watching
that show, or if you've read the first book, you
know that there's this thing called the protomolecule that shows
up and it's an extrasolar biolot biology reassembling system that
enters the picture. And it's as shown that I and

(10:00):
razing radiation is an energy source to this thing. So
I'll say no more about that without getting into into spoilers.
But yeah, radiation eating organisms of of of a sort
do play into that series. Now, I see you have
a note about it here. I know the Ghouls and Fallout,
yeah series they get they get love from the radioactive energy. Yeah,

(10:23):
and even and also the main character, at least in
the main you know recent games, uh, the character that
you play with, the Wanderer, the vault Walker or whatever
the descriptions are that they throw out for him. You
can pick up perks where the radiation heals you and
you kind of like feed off the radiation. So this

(10:44):
is a path you can choose to take in the
game to say, I want to live on radiation. Yeah,
I want to be able to drink radioactive water, which
one of the things I love about the recent Fallowout
games is they'll be these these moments where you're standing
like ankle deep in maybe not full blown radioactive water,
but bad water that you should not drink, like you're
standing in a sewer, and you look down and you go, oh,

(11:05):
there's an AMMO clip down there. I better pick it up.
But you accidentally click on the water next to the
clip instead of the clip itself, and so you reach
down with your hand and you get a big scoop
full of the water and you drink it. And yeah,
because I love I love the idea of that happening
where it's, oh, crap, I just meant to pick up
the clip and I just drank radioactive water instead. Such

(11:28):
such a duface. So those are just a few radiation
eating radiation absorbing creatures to consider, but fiction is full
of many examples of radioactive mutants, and giant mutant animals
are a big one. So we we've talked about all
a number of these examples before. You mentioned the crabs already,

(11:49):
but it brings up another B movie icon. The director
of of real one of my my favorite films from
this era, the amazing Colossal Man. Right, I haven't seen
this one still, this is the one where there is
a man who gets some kind of radiation and he
grows huge and it of course it's directed by Birt
Eye Gordon, Mr Big himself, who mostly made movies about

(12:14):
things getting big, about big spiders, big dinosaurs. Uh, there's
one movie of his that made a great Mystery Science
Theater three thousand episode called The Beginning of the End,
where it explores the sort of downstream food ecosystem effects
of radiation radiation gigantism, where this scientist makes some giant

(12:38):
vegetables but I think he I may be remembering this wrong,
but I think he injects them with radiation with a needle.
I apologize if I've mischaracterized there, but that's my memory.
And then some bugs eat the radioactively injected fruits and
vegetables or grains, and then the bug has become huge

(13:00):
and attack Chicago. He Berney Gordon must have had either
a needle phobia or a needle fetish because because there
are some fabulous needle scenes in The Amazing Colossal Man
as well. Yeah, yeah, there he like they have bring
a huge needle to inject a huge man with and
then it is a wonderful scene. It's in the trailers

(13:21):
and all where he picks it up and he kind
of looked at Glenn Manning, the amazing glossal man does this,
picks this this uh, this hypodermic needle up and it's
it's regular size to him, and then he just with
with with expert precision. He just throws it like a
dart down at one of these soldiers who just pricked
him with it, and it just skewers him. It's a
wonderful scene, but one of cinema's finest moments. Now, in

(13:45):
addition to these examples, and you have legions of other
mutant humanoids from telepathic nu nutants in beneath the planets,
beneath the planet of the Apes, which I'd love to
see those guys uh explored in some of these reboots
that are coming out for the Apes movies. These are
the ones that worship a giant bomb. They like sing

(14:05):
hymns to the to the atomic bomb. Yeah yeah, yeah,
they worship with the atomic bomb, and they they have
crazy mental powers. You also have the Chud's from Chud,
the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. Um. We've mentioned the ghouls
of Fallout. You've got the mutants of Total Recall. Nice, Yeah,
they were. They were a lot of fun. You have

(14:26):
the mutants of the Hills have Eyes not so much fun.
Not not so fun pretty much an any installment of that.
They are generally not that fun, but but certainly a
good B movie example as well. And uh, of course,
let's not forget atomic superheroes. That is a huge area
of of fictional exploration here, right, you've got the Hulk.

(14:47):
So the official Marvel approved origin blurb I looked it
up on Marvel dot com for the Hulk reads as follows.
Caught in a blast of gamma radiation, alliant scientist Bruce
Banner is cursed to transform in times of stress into
the living engine of destruction known as the Incredible Hulk.

(15:11):
So got that straight right. The origin story is gamma radiation,
then a curse. The curse is that when he gets
his briefs in a twist, he changes colors, becomes huge, strong, invincible,
rampage e. Now obviously this is not I don't need
to tell you, but this is not what happens to
a human who's caught in a blast of gamma radiation.

(15:34):
We know this in theory and principle but even if
we didn't, we would know it in practice because this
is literally actually happened. I want to talk about one
example of a quote brilliant scientist caught in a blast
of hard radiation which included gamma rays among other types
of radiation, and that man was Louis Slotan, a Canadian

(15:54):
physicist working at the United States Atomic Testing Facility at
Los Alamos, New Mexico, go UH shortly after the conclusion
of the Second World War. So on May one, nineteen six,
at about three in the afternoon, Slotan and colleagues were
performing a nuclear criticality test on a core of plutonium.

(16:16):
And the way a test like this worked is that
you would take a mass of physile material and then
bring it almost to the point of going critical by
nearly covering it with a beryllium cap. Now what would
that do well. The reason a substance like plutonium is
dangerous is that the heavy atoms inside it are unstable

(16:37):
and they start to split apart and shoot neutrons off
in every direction, releasing a lot of energy in the process.
This is a nuclear fission. By covering a hemisphere of
physical plutonium with this thick reflective material like beryllium. You
reflect those neutrons back into the plutonium where they hit

(16:59):
other atomic nuclei, knocked them apart, producing more free neutrons,
releasing more energy. And as this happens more and more
you come closer to producing a runaway criticality event. The
physicist Richard Feynman, upon hearing this type of experiment described
in the forties, compared that compared it to quote tickling
the tale of a sleeping dragon. Now that's because the

(17:23):
dragon presumably breathes fire when it wakes up, and about
the same as true of a plutonium core. Now, this
beryllium cap, called a tamper, it was supposed to be
kept from going completely closed, from completely covering the core.
As long as there was a gap through which some
of the neutrons could still fly out and it wasn't
completely covered, the dragon would not fully wake up. But

(17:46):
on the day I mentioned earlier in ninety six, while
Slotan was performing this experiment holding the tamper cap open
with a screwdriver, an accident happened. His hand slipped, the
screwdriver came out of place, and the tamper briefly fell
completely over the plutonium mass, causing it to go critical.

(18:07):
People in the room described that they saw a flash
of blue light, which was the secondary result of the
air itself being ionized by a blast of hard radiation,
and they also felt this wave of heat wash over them,
so their primary radiation exposure lasted really only a split
second before Slotan was able to knock the tamper off.

(18:29):
He sort of reached out and knocked it away, and
he stopped the chain reaction, but he had already in
that tiny split second, received more than enough radiation to
kill him. Uh. There's a good short New Yorker article
about the history of this accident, and it reports that
quote Slotan's whole body dose was around twenty one RIM
of neutrons, gamma rays, and X rays. Five hundred RIM

(18:54):
is usually fatal for humans, so this was an incredibly
powerful close up door. Right after the exposure, he went
outside and vomited, and then the hand closest to the
core that he'd been holding right up next to the
plutonium turned blue developed large blisters. Uh, and he started

(19:14):
experiencing systemic effects that developed for the next nine days
before he died. UM. He was in continuously deteriorating health.
His white cell count dropped, his temperature and pulse became erratic.
He had digestive distress. According to one medical professional who
was trying to explain the nature of his his wounds,

(19:35):
his internal radiation burns. They described it as quote a
three dimensional sunburn if you can imagine being sunburned on
the inside that is rough. Now here's a really crazy fact.
This was not even the first time this had happened
at this lab. Just months before, a Los Alamos worker

(19:56):
named Harry dag Lean Jr. Had Been killed by radiation
exposure in a similar criticality experiment. Not exactly the same
they were using some like a tungsten carbide bricks I think,
but by the exact same piece of plutonium, which thereafter
got its nickname, quote the demon core. And of course

(20:18):
Slotan is not the only person to suffer death from
radiation exposure. You know, victims of the atomic bombing in
Japan at the close of World War two tragically suffered
many of the same effects. But what's sort of morbidly
fascinating about the cases of Slotan and Daglian is that
there's no explosion, no fire, there's no uh conventional physical destruction,

(20:40):
just the pure isolated, almost instantaneous dose of hard radiation
that makes every tissue in your body start to fail.
There's almost a magical element to it. Yeah, in that
with it would being devoid of the explosion and the
sort of the the traditional um atrobutes of warfare. Yeah,

(21:01):
it does. It does have this kind of magical feel
to it because you can't see the mechanism. Uh. And
it kills you slowly then, because now everything in your
body is irreparably damaged, but you can't see exactly what happened.
So I think maybe we should take a quick break
and when we come back we can talk about radiation.
We we know now obviously it doesn't actually make you bigger, stronger,

(21:25):
more intelligent, at least for large complex mammals and most
other organisms. But if it does kill, how does it kill?
Why does it cause this problem? All right, we're back,
so let's take a moment to just really talk about
what radiation is. We've been, we've been, we've been talking

(21:46):
about it, and I think most of our listeners have
a you know, a reasonable working knowledge of radiation. But
I think it's it's a it's a good opportunity to
just stop and try and boil it all down here.
So it's important to note that our lives are filled
with radiation, and much of it is harmless, and much
of it is natural, not all radiations of the apocalyptic variety.

(22:08):
Soil and underground gas is exposed us to radiation, and
we're also exposed to cosmic radiation from the sun and
outer space. It's mostly mostly all right, mostly fine if
the doses are right and uh, and you're dealing with this,
this natural mode of radiation, well, I guess it depends
on your definition of fine. But you might say it's unavoidable.

(22:29):
That's part of being. And with all radiation, you know,
it's going to depend on the type of radiation, the
dosage level, and how long you're exposed to it. Because
obviously radiation is coming from the sun. You can get
too much sun, and they're varying their varying definitions of
too much sun. There's too much sun over the course
of a lifetime. There's too much sun over the course

(22:52):
of a day at the beach, right, But that's a
good illustration of the different kinds of risks that are
posed by radiation. For example, too much on it one
day at the beach, you risk the sort of the
slotan version, the acute radiation poisoning from the sun versus
too much sun over a lifetime will tend to cause
things like skin cancer, right, and not enough exposure to

(23:15):
the sun can leave you with the vitamin D deficiency.
So you know, there's a balance in all in all
things here. Uh. And one of the key aspects we'll
get back to two is that just as radiation is
around us, radiation has always been around us. Radiation has
been there in the background of varying degrees throughout the
evolution of life on our planets. So it's not like

(23:37):
it's not like radiation. Even though radiation as this theme
as this uh, this fear and this anxiety really arrived
in the nineteen fifties, uh, you know, and we see
it echoed in these B movies. Radiation did not arrive
on the scene. Then, radiation had always been with us. Now,
in terms of radiation, the stems from human inventions. That

(24:00):
that's that's a different area here. So we're when this
we're talking about medical procedures. We're talking about television's, cell phones,
microwave ovens. Uh. And again it all depends on dosage.
The strength to type, the length of exposure. Electromagnetic radiation
is merely a stream of photons traveling in waves. So
we have you know, low energy photons such as radio waves,

(24:23):
and these spend These are just waves. They behave like waves.
And while we also have high energy photons such as
X rays, those behave more like particles. Uh So in
this we're getting into this idea of the electromagnetic spectrum,
you know, radio, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultra violet X rays.
Although we have to to gamma raise. Yeah, that's an

(24:45):
ascending scale of the energy of of these photons and
starting somewhere at the upper end of the ultra violet spectrum,
so that the upper end of the ultra violet, the
X rays, the gamma rays, those are the really dangerous,
the ionizing types of radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, that's right,

(25:06):
So ionizing that that brings up the main distinction we
should probably make about the different kinds of radiation, because
as we said, we're always surrounded constantly by radiation. It
makes a big difference whether that radiation is ionizing or
non ionizing. Right, And you had that wonderful example earlier
about the flash of blue light is the the air
uh ionized. Right, So the radiation that was coming out

(25:29):
of that plutonium core was doing something to the to
the atoms in the air. It was making some changes
to the structure of the very atoms themselves. Right Now,
These lower forms of of radiation, the non ionizing variety,
they don't have enough energy to ionize atoms or molecules,
thus the name. They're located at the low low end

(25:51):
of the electromagnetic spectrum and a non ionizing radiation sources
in our life include power lines, microwaves, radio waves, infrared radiation,
visible light lasers. Although considered less dangerous than ionizing radiation,
over exposure of course can cause health issues because again
it comes down to uh to the degree and the

(26:13):
length of exposure, right, I mean it can still non
ionizing radiation can still for example, heat tissues which can
have an effect. Yeah. But ionizing radiation is energy in
the form of particles or waves uh. And it's so
high in energy that it can break chemical bonds, meaning
it can change or ionize an atom that interacts with it.

(26:35):
At a lower energy, it can strip off a couple
of electrons. At higher energy, it can destroy the nucleus
of an atom, it can damage DNA. So this is
the stuff of radioactive material, very high voltage equipment, nuclear
reactions and stars. And by the way, as long as
we're talking about natural versus unnatural radiation, even though there's

(26:57):
you know, sometimes there's a you can kind of blur
the lines there. On a terrestrial basis, the levels of
radiation you would need to cause radiation sickness and really
you know, acute form uh, pretty much require human technology
after a point. So naturally occurring occurring sites of radioactivities
such as prinstance, if you were to travel to Ramsar

(27:18):
around but that's like a naturally radioactive site, right, Yeah,
if you were to travel there, you would you would
encounter this, you know, in this radioactive environment, but it
wouldn't be enough to produce anything near the high level
of doses required to inflict the sort of harm we've
seen via the detonation of atomic weapons or accidents at
nuclear power plants. Well that's good, yeah, I mean I

(27:42):
appreciate that the Earth is like that. Yeah. And and
this kind of I guess is a nod to this
idea of you know, the the atomic age, what is
invented in the atomic age. What is unleashed in the
atomic age um. So while while we are naturally surrounded
by all kinds of radiation, while we are naturally in
a universe of highly radioactive stars and things like that,

(28:03):
we're not naturally any universe of of you know, regular
human life scale nuclear reactors and atomic weapons. Right. It
brings some very high radiation events uh and uh and
items into our local environment that generally are not there.
So ionizing radiation, the dangerous kind of radiation comes in

(28:26):
a handful of main varieties. You've basically got high frequency
electromagnetic radiation, and then you've got radioactive particles. So let's
look at the particles first. You've got alpha particles and
beta particles. Alpha particles are relatively large, and they're made
of protons and neutrons, right. And because you've got protons
without any electrons, what does that mean? It's charged positive

(28:47):
charge uh. And this means it wants to interact with
matter to break bonds and strip away electrons. That's the
ionizing part. So what it can do is turn atoms
in your body into other differently behaving atom charged ions uh.
And alpha particles tend to shoot off of atoms when
they undergo radioactive decay. Now, alpha particles can only travel

(29:08):
a short distance. In fact, they can be stopped with
just a piece of paper or even your skin. However,
inhalation or ingestion of any material that gives off alpha
particles that can be dangerous. Once inside your body, alpha
particles can ionize your internal tissue. And this is what
happens in some cases of like radioactive poisoning. Somebody has
given a poison that contains a radioactive material and it's

(29:29):
putting off alpha particles inside your body. But now, what
about beta particles. Beta particles are fast moving electrons that
they can travel and penetrate far more than alpha particles.
Beta particles can be stopped or reduced by a layer
of clothing or a substance like aluminum. However, some beta
particles have enough energy to penetrate the skin and cause

(29:50):
damage that's very similar to burns. As with alpha particles,
beta particles are quite hazardous if you inhale or ingest
something that releases them, right because yet again they have
a charge, and for this reason they're going to interact
electrically with the tissues inside your body, trying to change
stuff around. Now, another type of particle radiation would be
neutron radiation, and this just means a free neutron from

(30:13):
the nucleus of an atom shooting off all by itself,
and this happens during nuclear fission. Neutrons can travel a
really long distance, and they can penetrate deeply through many
types of objects. And I've read that the best thing
for stopping this material is actually something that's rich in hydrogen,
for example water H two. Oh. This is a good
reason water makes a good radiation shield. Um and neutron

(30:36):
radiation is a major part of what actually happened at
the Los Alamos criticality accidents when the demon core went
super critical. Lewis Slotan's body was bombarded by neutrons and
this is part of what killed him. But you might
be thinking, wait a minute, ionizing radiation. Why would neutrons
be ionizing radiation, because if you remember your atomic chemistry,

(30:57):
neutrons don't have a charge positive or negative, So why
would they break chemical bonds and change atoms into other
things that behave differently. Well, the answer is that neutrons
are sort of indirect killers. They themselves don't ionize your tissues,
but If a neutron is absorbed into the nucleus of
an atom in your body, that atom can now be

(31:19):
an unstable isotope. It's got too many neutrons and it's
and its nucleus, so the nucleus becomes unstable, meaning it
could now undergo fission and emit radiation. So neutron radiation
has the power to turn normal, safe materials into radioactive materials,
which in turn with then emit ionizing radiation and harm you.

(31:41):
But I guess we should now let's look at the
pure energy radiation, like gamma raise. Gamma raise are a
type of electromagic magnetic radiation. Gamma rays often a company
alpha and beta particles. Unlike alpha and beta particles, however,
they're extremely penetrating. In fact, several inches of lead or
even a few feet of concrete are necessary to stop
gamma ray. Uh. They're a radiation hazard for the entire body,

(32:03):
meaning that although they'll pass through you, your tissue is
going to absorb some rays. Yeah. And then also, of
course there are X rays, lower energy than gamma rays,
but still ionizing and potentially very dangerous depending on the dose. Basically,
the way that X rays and gamma rays hurt you
is by introducing huge amounts of energy into the atoms
and your body, which again breaks molecular bonds, strips electrons

(32:26):
away from atoms, creating free charged particles that want to
interact with other atoms and molecules to change them. Now,
of course, in a lot of cases where you're getting
a dose of hard radiation, it's not going to be
just one of these things or another. You're getting a
mixture of different types of radiation all coming at you simultaneously.
So overexposure to ionizing radiation can cause mutations in your genes.

(32:49):
This can cause birth defects, raised risk of cancer, and
then you go get burns, radiation, sickness, etcetera. But in
order to kill you, it would just need to damage
or kill enough cells to cause as a more immediate
or immediate death, or just to cause cancer. Yeah. So,
for a really rough analogy, imagine a huge machine like
a like a aircraft carrier or battleship that is bombarded

(33:13):
by millions of invisible, tiny pin pricks, and each of
these pin pricks has a certain random chance of hitting
a component within that ship and then changing it into
something else, like a maybe a screw turns into a
nut or a copper wire into a piece of foam.
Uh And a ship might be able to survive a

(33:33):
certain number of these magic pin pricks and still run,
but a certain at a certain level of exposure, you're
basically guaranteed to make enough changes to the ship that
it no longer functions as a machine and maybe even
sinks when the hull itself fails. Now, one thing to
notice is that the harmful effects of radiation are based

(33:53):
on atomic physics and chemistry. Any complex system that's made
out of atoms should be somewhat vulnerable to radiation, and
for this reason, it really should affect any organism, right,
it shouldn't be just humans or something. All organisms are
made out of atoms and molecules. No organism wants to
have its atoms and molecules broken up changed into different

(34:14):
atoms and molecules like no I need that. Uh So,
the molecular structures in our bodies are the way they
are for a reason that has to do with survival.
But but where it's interesting is, again for the probably
fifth time, if it comes down to to the dosage
level and the exposure length and h and also varying species,

(34:37):
varying organisms are gonna have different levels of resistance to
radiation as well, exactly. So this is a concept in
biology of radio resistance. Not all organisms are equally susceptible
to radiation. Some are able to withstand more than others,
and as we'll get into in a bit, some might

(34:57):
even go. Uh, I don't know what you'd say, go
across the line to the other side of the ledger
and not just resist but benefit indeed. Alright, So on
that note, shall we go to Chernobyl? I think we
should probably try to take a trip okay, just scenic Ukraine.
So Chernobyl is one of those um, it's one of

(35:19):
those places, one of those events where that the name
continues to resonate. Uh. And you know, listeners out there,
we're going to have varying degrees of familiarity with Chernobyl.
But I thought it would be helpful just to to
very quickly run through what where, where Chernobyl is, and
what occurred and now we should keep in mind that.
I think in the future we might want to do
a whole episode on the science of the Chernobyl disaster

(35:41):
and it's many downstream effects through time. Because there have
been a lot of studies about not just what happened
at this nuclear meltdown, but but what happened in the
decades since, right, I mean, even the story of how
it occurred is is fascinating as well. So tell me
about it. Right. So, when it comes to environmental disasters, uh,

(36:03):
we're the nineteen eighties six Chernobyl catastrophe is often kind
of at the top of the list or its It
certainly has some of the uh, it has the name
value that you you don't find with a lot of
other environmental disasters. So this was this explosions fewed fifty
tons of radioactive material into the air and the reactor

(36:23):
burned for ten days, forcing the evacuation of at least
thirty thousand people from the Ukrainian town of Pripyat. In
the decades to follow, we have we've had continuous study
pretty much of how this affected not only the local environment,
but but the broader environment. Now, when people here melt
down in the United States, a lot of them might

(36:44):
have the the the US point of Three Mile Island.
You know something, they know something happened there, but it's
not comparable. Right, So nineteen seventy nine three mile Island
incident that was a partial nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl was a
total meltdown. Um So Russian teams chased the melted remnants

(37:05):
of the plants reactor core into the facility's basement. They
flooded it with water to cool off the materials, keep
them from from burning down um to you know, to
try to try and stop it before it could burn
through the containment building and pollute the groundwater. Next, they
dumped a bore on clay, dolomite, lead and sand onto
the burning core by helicopter to put off the fires

(37:28):
and limit the radioactive particles that were now rising up
into the atmosphere. And in the months that followed, the
encase the ruined plan and a concrete shielding that's often
referred to as as the sarcophagus, which puts you know
a suitably dark um darker uh note on everything here,

(37:48):
But of course, the damage was already done by that
point um and subsequent inquiries would reveal just what the
damage amounted to as far as humans were concerned. The
World Health Organised zation puts the fatality estimate set four
thousand deaths uh. This is a quote from World Health Organization.
They said this includes some fifty emergency workers who died

(38:10):
of acute radiation syndrome and nine children who died of
thyroid cancer, and an estimate in estimated total of thirty
nine hundred and forty deaths from radiation induced cancer and
leukemia among the two hundred thousand emergency workers from nineteen
eight six to nineteen eighty seven, One hundred sixteen thousand
evacuees and two hundred and seventy thousand residents of the

(38:33):
most contaminated areas total about six hundred thousand, so food
contaminated with radioactive iodine was a major factor, especially with children.
Radioactive iodine ended up in the milk from cows who
ate contaminated grasses. Yeah, and then the environmental impact overall.
This is a major release of radio nucleides that continued

(38:54):
for ten days and contaminated more than two hundred thousand
square kilometers or seven seven thousand, two hundred twenty square
miles of Europe. Most of the strontium and plutonium isotopes
were deposited within a hundred kilometers or sixty two miles
of the damage reactor, so the radioactive iodine luckily had
a short half life and that's all gone now. Um

(39:16):
the strontium and the cesium with has a longer half
life of about thirty years, so that's going to remain
an issue for decades um. And but then this, this
quote comes to us from a World Health again they said,
although plutonium isotopes in americium to forty one will persist
perhaps for thousands of years, their contribution to human exposure

(39:37):
is low. This this shows the kind of crazy way
that radioactive material can behave almost kind of like a
plague spreading throughout except it's not like a plague because
generally a plague is more contained to certain types of organisms.
It'll it'll target rats or bird or humans or something

(40:01):
like that. This is almost like a you know, a
material plague that split spreads all throughout the ecosystem. And
because of the way that different organisms in the ecosystem
absorbed materials, trap them and then get consumed and decompose
and redistribute them, it just kind of goes everywhere. Now,

(40:22):
one could quick note on the idea of giant mutants. Now,
obviously no giant animals came rampaging out of the forests
surrounding Chernobyl and even giant Ukrainian crabs. No, no, giant
Ukrainian crabs. The U S Department of Energies, Office of
Human Radiation Experiments, they're they're very quick to remind us
that genetic mutations due to radiation, they do not produce

(40:44):
the visible monstrosities of science fiction. You know, it just creates,
produces a greater frequency of the same mutations that occur
continuously and spontaneously in nature, so that the natural world
does not produce radioactive giants, at least in the animal kingdom,
because the realm of plants is another matter entirely in
the in the wake of chernobyl uh and other radioactive accidents,

(41:06):
we have seen various malformations including dwarf is m, strange growths, glowing,
and yes, even gigantism, especially concerning pine needles. So that's yeah.
So that's one of the few areas where we can say, yes,
we have seen atomic gigantism pine needles. But who's going
to watch attack up the pine needles, right, I would, dude,

(41:29):
do you think predatory animals are ruthless? Imagine predatory atomic plants.
Plants have no compassion whatsoever. That I don't even process
the concept of cuteness. A giant lion might want to
kill you, but at least it recognizes that large eyes
are cute. The pine tree does not. All right, well,
maybe there's some potential there, you know. I would say, though,

(41:51):
if if I was going to get killed by killer
pine tree, I would hope it was a Jeffrey pine.
Oh yeah, the best kind of pine. Well it has
a friendly name. Yeah. Uh So, despite what organisms you
might see like this surviving resisting and environments contaminated with
radiation and radioactive particles, whether or not they've got apparent mutations,

(42:14):
you would still expect that ionizing radiation is always a
net negative influence on an organism, right, except in those
rare cases maybe where the you know, it causes a
free commutation that provides a survival advantage. Those are going
to be the minority, right, Some radio resistant or just
plain lucky organisms might survive despite the hardship of ambient radiation.

(42:39):
But what if there were organisms like the Hulk or
like the crab monsters that seem to actively benefit from
the universal high energy death magic of ionizing radiation. We
are going to answer that question when we get back
from this break. All right, we're back. All right. So

(43:04):
we've talked about ionizing non ionizing radiation. Well, ionizing radiation
has always been a part of the terrestrial environment. Comes
from space. Yeah, and early life forms here on Earth
had to have considerable resistance to it in order to
survive and to advance into other forms. Oh yeah, I
should mention radioactive rocks as well, just on Earth. So

(43:25):
background radiation levels are much lower now than they were
on the early Earth, but terrestrial life still exists in
a field of radiation. Fungi in particular show a strong resistance.
So you see this stuff thriving aboard space stations, adapting
to extreme conditions. We've all I've we've covered on this
on the show before. And imagine everyone out there from

(43:47):
run across constant articles about the extreme file organisms in
our world and how they force us to re examine
what life is and where life can thrive. There's a
reason there are limits to how you can spend on
the International Space Station. If you go up there, they
won't let you stay forever. You need to come back,
and that's for your own good. Uh. There are multiple reasons.

(44:09):
I mean, some of them might have to do with
like the long term effects of micro gravity on the
human body, which we don't fully understand yet, but a
lot of it is clearly due to the known risks
from exposured ionizing radiation. While you're up there outside the
Earth's atmosphere. There are elevated levels of radiation in space,
and you shouldn't get too much of this or it's

(44:30):
going to hurt you. Now, as you say, there there
are these micro organisms, these uh, fungal microbes that survive
up there in the I s s for for generations apparently, uh,
in space, and they seem to be doing just fine.
And it's true you mentioned the radio resistance of fung gui.

(44:52):
I think generally fungi are considered the most radio resistant
uh kingdom of life. I hope I'm not wrong about that.
I think that's generally correct. Yeah, we're up there in space,
you know, sort of barely managing when we come back.
The fun Guide is saying, get me on that generation ship.
I'm ready to go. Right, let's see some new worlds. Well,
they might need to be on the generation ship if

(45:14):
we need something to eat while we're going going out there,
But we'll get to that in a minute. So we're
going to talk about a study by several authors, one
of whom is the distinguished microbiologist and immunologist Arturo Casadival,
and he tells this story about how years ago he
was reading about how robotic exploration of the Chernobyl ruins

(45:37):
that from the Chernobyl disaster. We were just talking about
the total meltdown of the power plant. So there's a
robotic exploration of these ruins, and they revealed that something
was growing on the walls of the abandoned reactor, some
sort of matt of dark fungus. But this is definitely
weird because this was a dangerously radioactive environment. You know,

(46:01):
the pin pricks, the pin pricks of ionizing radiation are
going all over the place all the time. Be kind
of like if you just let the demon core go
critical for a while and discovered that a bunch of
squirrels began nesting in the test check, you'd want to
know what's the deal with those squirrels, and and please
stay away from those squirrels. Yeah, not as bad as

(46:22):
the pine needles that there, might be worse than the crabs.
So one of the first things to notice about this
fungus that's growing in the presence of radiation is that
it's specifically dark fungus. This is an indication of the
presence of the pigment melanin. Now, melanin is a natural
polymer pigments found in all kinds of organisms. In humans,

(46:45):
varieties melanin are produced by special cells known as melana sites,
and the melanin itself is responsible for providing the pigmentation
of body parts like your iris, is your hair and
your skin, and of course there are a couple of
different kind of melanin. There are several kinds actually, like
there is you melanin. This is the common kind that's

(47:05):
black or brown in color. So if your hair is dark,
if you have black or brown hair, it probably has
a lot of you melanin in it. There's also phia melanin.
This is usually what's seen in like the hair of
people who have red hair or maybe light brown reddish hair,
and in the skin. Melanin is believed to play a
role in the natural human relationship to radiation because scientists

(47:30):
think that it protects our cells, especially our d n A,
from damage by an everyday form of ionizing or near
ionizing radiation, which is the ultraviolet or UV radiation found
in sunlight, so naturally, dark objects tend to absorb more light.
This is, in fact, by definition, what makes objects dark

(47:53):
uh so black or brown. Melanin has properties of absorbing
electromagnetic radiation, including UV radiation, and dissipating it by converting
it into heat. In this way, it is thought to
be able to protect the nuclei of your skin cells
from being constantly bombarded, damaged, and mutated by the invisible

(48:13):
death rays of the sun, and the pigment absorbs the radiation,
so your genetic material doesn't have to So melanin in
that way is a natural shield against radiation. It's one
of the ways that organisms have evolved natural radio resistance,
and even our own bodies make use of it. But

(48:34):
the role of melanin doesn't stop there. There's some evidence
that melanin may play other roles in the human body
and in other organisms. For example, uh, the fungal microbe
Cryptococcus neoform us. Oh yeah, that's your DJ name, DJ
Cryptococcus neoformons. Okay, I'll have to be able to say
that really fast over a beat with you need to

(48:55):
be able to stay in the house at the end
of the dame. They need to know that not only
are you here, but you are in the house else.
And if you were playing house music, you need to
be able to tell everyone that that is what they're
listening to. I'm not in the house. I'm in the
abandoned reactor room. I'm just telling you the rules. So
Cryptococcus neofemans is a fungus that's found everywhere, just pretty
much everywhere in nature. It's also potentially pathogenic, causing diseases

(49:18):
and people, especially with impaired immune function. For example, it
often causes lung infections and people who have AIDS. So
for some reason, it has been observed that melanin production
in this fungal germ is associated with virulence. More melanin
production means a more powerful germ, and it's been suggested

(49:39):
that this is because melanin helps the fungus protect itself
against the host's immune response. So we're seeing that melanin
may have a diverse role essentially in in different life
functions and for all different kinds of organisms. I mean,
this is weird to remember we're talking about a fungus here,
but this is also a pigment that animals share. It's

(50:01):
in all the kingdoms of life, which tends to be
an indicator that it's probably quite ancient in origin. That
melanin goes way back. Now, Robert, you mentioned earlier that
in previous geological eras, and you know, past life on
Earth was exposed to a lot more ionizing radiation than
we are on the surface of the Earth now. And uh,

(50:22):
if you look at the role of melanin as a
very ancient thing emerging very early in life on Earth,
that that may that may sort of provide an explanation. Right,
if there was a lot of radiation back then, and
melanin has this role in protecting organisms from radiation, you
can see one reason it might have emerged. Now, let's

(50:42):
go back to the paper I mentioned earlier. So as
we saw hinted in the blasted concrete dungeon of the
Chernobyl reactor room, this dark pigment in some types of
fungus plays an even weirder, more fascinating role, not just
protecting or is ms from harmful radiation, but allowing them

(51:03):
to thrive on it. Yeah. This uh, this paper, This
is a two seven paper published in pl Os one
titled Ionizing radiation changes the electronic properties of melan and
enhances the growth of melanized fung Guy. Right, And that
was by a long list of authors data Cova, Brian, Hung, Model, Schweitzer,
Ien Nosen, Chuck, and Cassadaval. Yeah, and they found they

(51:27):
found some interesting evidence that the fungi containing the pigment
melan and can utilize the ionizing radiation portion of the
electromagnics spectrum to transform radioactive energy into biological energy. And uh,
this would be in keeping crazy enough with the way
that chlorophylling plants converts sunlight into bio energy. That is crazy. Now,

(51:48):
if that's correct, it would be absolutely bizarre and fascinating.
That essentially a a cosmic dark kind of parody of Oh.
I shouldn't say parody, I don't mean to demean it.
A fascinating, weird parallel of photosynthesis, the kind of photosynthesis

(52:08):
we see in plants and blue green algae and things
is going on with mushrooms. But instead of regular sunlight,
they're using gamma radiation, this high energy stuff that should
kill any organism. So if this is correct, how did
they determine it, Like, how did they determine the fun
fungi were not only surviving in the presence of this,

(52:30):
but we're actively benefiting from it. So here's the basic experiment,
or this part of the experiment. There were multiple experiments
in in this study. The basic experiment on the fungus
was the two species of fungus contained melanin, the Cryptococcus
neoformans and the Wengiella dermatiditis it's got a lot of

(52:53):
dental consonants in it. Both were placed in environments with
strong ionizing radiation than five hundred times what you'd get
from standard background radiation on Earth. And then these melanized
cells in radioactive conditions were found to have had quote
higher cf use, more dry weight biomass, and threefold greater

(53:16):
incorporation of C fourteen acetate than non irradiated melanized cells
or irradiated albino mutants. Now that's a mouthful. What did
that mean? In other words, by several measures, the melanin
fungus exposed to strong radiation was more biologically successful, It

(53:37):
grew more, it did better than fungus that was not irradiated,
or fungus that was irradiated but didn't have significant melanin
in it cells. So put a pale fungus in radiation
that doesn't like it. Put have a regular non irradiated fungus,
you know, it does its thing. But you put one

(53:58):
of these dark pigmented funguses fungi under radiation and it thrives,
It loves it. It's a power up to it, it's
food to it. In a sense, that's what appears to
be happening. Now this isn't fully confirmed, but but that's
what they think they observed here and and to further
bols through this idea, they tried to uncover leads as

(54:20):
to what the mechanism might be. Right. So, if you
if you find something in nature that looks very odd,
one of the ways that you can really help build
your case that it is that what you're seeing is
really what you think it is, is to find out
how it works. Right, So they tried to uncover a
possible mechanism and uh and their mechanism of how ionizing
radiation might be converted into usable energy went like this.

(54:43):
They found through experiment that exposure to ionizing radiation increased
the electron transfer properties of melanin. Again, what does that mean, Well,
essentially it changed the electronic capabilities of this pigment. The
best way I've seen it put into simple, understandable terms

(55:04):
is from a two thousand seven article and Scientific American
by David Biello, who claimed that the melanin in this
case quote acts like a step down electric transformer transformers
you might see, you know, turning the electricity from the
power grid into something that you can use in your house. Yeah,
taking something that would normally just fry to the Jesus

(55:24):
out of everything, you know, dear, into something that was
his tame enough, domesticating the current for you. Right. So,
what what the pigment does under this model is it's
hit with incredibly high energy radiation that should destroy life. Instead,
the pigment absorbs it through some electrical electrical transfer. It

(55:45):
manages to tone it down a bit into some kind
of energy that can be used by the organism to
sustain its life function. So some of the far reaching
effects of the study are pretty fascinating. The researchers suggests
that radiation grown fungi might one day feed human travel
space travelers. Yeah, because out in space, you're exposed to

(56:07):
a lot of ionizing radiation um and if you're say
far from sunlight, Uh, and you don't want to have
to use your own power on grow lamps to to
to grow plants in your in your spaceship. What do
you have to work without in deep space? While if
you could actually grow something on ionizing radiation that you
could eat, that would be amazing. And what if it

(56:29):
glowed as well, and you have like glowing fungal of
spheres that are lighting your environments. You can really go
go wild with some of the possibilities here. But they
they they also speculate that this could even unlock unlock
the possibility. Uh that no, this is just a possibility
that this is not proven, that melanin in human flesh

(56:51):
might provide energy to skin cells. Now that, like you say,
it's just a speculation. It would be consistent with their findings,
but it's not something that's proven. But really interesting if
that were true, it would also provide an interesting twist
on this old claim. I know you've heard Robert the
idea of the sun eaters, the people who that it's

(57:11):
basically a supernatural claim. But these people claim that some
monks and holy people can live for years without eating food,
getting all of the nourishment and energy their body needs.
Just straight from the sunlight. Now, obviously, I don't think
that even if this were true, that we were getting
usable bio energy through the melanin in our skin cells,

(57:33):
I don't think it would make those claims plausible. I
think that's still pretty much nonsense. But it would be
a cool twist on it, because even if you could
get some tiny amount of usable bio energy from the sunlight,
it wouldn't come close to the amount of concentrated chemical
energy you get from eating food. Right for for a
rough analogy, think about the electromagnetic energy harvested from solar

(57:55):
panels versus the dense chemical energy contained in gasoline. You know,
it does make me think back to our episode on
Chinese immortality where we talked about the idea of these
aged individuals living just on undo and the wind. Uh

(58:15):
would kind of fall in line with with that vision
of this almost um you know, ephemeral of a life
form that's just just barely subsisting on the things around it. Well,
I mean, it just makes me wonder if this were
the case that you get some usable bio energy through

(58:37):
your skin cells, what I would want to see is
the thought experiment that explains, Okay, given how that works,
what would the naked surface area of your body need
to be in order to replace certain amounts of food?
Like could you live on five hundred calories a day
if you had x amount of naked surface area and

(58:57):
sat out in the sun all day? Like if you
had like a large skin flap like a demetridon, Yeah, exactly,
something that that nature basically human solar panel, Like if
you had giant wings to stretch out and uh and
absorb all the life, But then you'd also be losing
a lot of heat energy against But I don't know.

(59:17):
I do love, I do love the idea of it.
The big thing is that this, this study does force
us to reevaluate life and uh and how life not
only interacts now but has just evolved in the presence
of radiation. Yeah. I mean it's weird how the stuff
that seems so normal to us on Earth is maybe

(59:40):
not normal. In fact, it's just a circumstantial byproduct of
what Earth is like, and that life on another planet,
the same kind of biology, the same kind of relationship
with energy in the universe that seems so intuitive to
us might be very weird to them. I mean, what
if there's a planet that really thrives on gamma radiation.

(01:00:01):
I'm not sure if that's plausible. That might not make sense,
but uh, you know, I can imagine it. You know
what if they're really just confused by the idea of
a whole food ecosystem that's built off the energy from sunlight,
which is where everything on Earth comes from. Yeah, yeah,
this is This is something that came up in the
episode that did recently with Christian on butter. Like you

(01:00:23):
you really break down butter, Butter comes from the sun.
Everything comes from the sun. It's all solar. I mean,
your steak comes from the sun, Your your your whatever,
your milkshake comes from the sun, and all of it
is essentially solar energy that has been transformed into into
something else, something that you can consume. You're just you're

(01:00:44):
just gobbling it up further down the food jake. All right,
we gotta end with crazy ideas. I've got one. Here's
one has matt suits made entirely out of mold. I
like it like a black fungus, black fungus body suit
to cover you up and protect you when you wade
into the nuclear waters. Especially if it's rare. It grows rapidly,

(01:01:05):
So it's essentially like it's kind of like a glow stick.
You just break this in half in two fluid chambers,
converge and then this black mole just grows all over you.
And it's because it's alive. It's self healing. So instead
of your has mat suit getting punctured and now you're like,
oh well I'm ruined now. Uh, instead it would it
would grow back, seal itself up. That wouldn't really work

(01:01:28):
with it, maybe not, but you know, it makes me
think think about the various theories have been thrown out
over the years about the future of of the human
species in space. The basic cyborg idea that that human
and must become more machine. It has been be this
the synthesis of of biology and technology in order to

(01:01:49):
make this adaptation possible. What if the future is is
is Homo sapiens becoming a symbiotic more of a symbiotic
go organism. Uh and uh and and bringing in this
this fungal existence is the space You know, this idea
of the living suit. But what if that is the

(01:02:10):
future of the human race. Yeah, well, I mean it
goes to the idea of when we think of the cyborg.
It's it's humans joining with human made artificial technology that's
you know, made of metal and plastic and molded pieces.
I like the idea of the biocyborg, the hybrid organism. Yeah,

(01:02:30):
especially if we end up with a big mushroom cap
head and then then you know, it's it's it's all worth.
It will become space Lins. Yeah, space Lins Invasion of
the Space Likens. There's the next the next movie I'd
like to see, along with The Killer Pine Trees and
some of the other hypothetical B movies we've discussed in
this episode. Have I told you about the B movie
that I I've recently been thinking, we've got to rite

(01:02:52):
and produce what's this? This the No? No, it's called
Planet of the Satan's, of the Satans, of the Satan
all Satan's. Yeah, well, I mean you got Planet of
the Vampires, but you gotta go step up. Planet of
the Satan's. That would be good. Yeah, that or a
Planet of the Frankenstein's. I would like that as well,
but Planet of the Satans. It would be kind of

(01:03:16):
like everyone on the planet is a Satan. And then yeah, okay,
well not the people who arrived there they've got to
deal with the native Satan's. Oh, what if you do
a Santa Claus versus the Martians kind of thing where
you have a world where there is no Satan. And
they said that children need Satan. Without Satan, how are
they to live their lives? And then they decided, well,

(01:03:37):
we're gonna go and we're gonna steal a Satan from
the planet of the Satans, and then that will be
our world Satan and then will put everything in balance.
And then that's the origin story for life on Earth.
Big spoiler at the end, Yeah, the Fall of Man.
All right, you lived up to the name. That's how
we do it, all right. So hey, if you want
to more on this topic and other topics, head on

(01:03:59):
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(01:04:19):
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