Speaker 1: Imagine you're walking alone through a really dense, dark forest.
Speaker 2: Okay, setting a spooky scene right out of the gate.
Speaker 1: I like it. Well, just picture the air is entirely still.
It's that kind of quiet that literally makes your ears ring.
Speaker 2: You know, oh yeah, the sensory deprivation kind.
Speaker 1: Of quiet exactly. And suddenly, cutting right through that silence,
you hear this frantic, jittery sound.
Speaker 2: Like an animal.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. It's high pitched, almost like a
cassette tape being played at double or maybe triple speed.
Speaker 2: That is deeply unsettling, right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't sound human. It definitely doesn't sound like any
animal you've ever heard.
Speaker 2: So you freeze, naturally, flight or freeze response yep.
Speaker 1: And then, without a single sound being spoken aloud, a
voice echoes directly inside your head saying don't be afraid.
Speaker 2: Which I mean is the universal cinematic queue for absolute terror.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 2: That scenario plays out like the cold open of some
mid century science fiction thriller, right before the ominous orchestral
music swells.
Speaker 1: It really does. But here's the chilling reality for you
listening right now. That isn't a script from some Hollywood archive.
That is a real reported encounter from the dense woods
of West Virginia, which is just why it is. And
it's just one of the countless bizarre, terrifying and someone's
completely unexplained realities that we found ourselves tangled in ever
since humanity decided to crack open the atom.
Speaker 2: It really opened Pandora's box.
Speaker 1: It absolutely did. Welcome to thrilling threads everyone, a really.
Speaker 2: Profound topic to dissect today.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure. Today we are taking you, our dedicated listener, who,
by the way, sent us this massive, fascinating stack of
declassified reports and biological surveys, on a deep journey into
the invisible, terrifying aftermath of the atomic age.
Speaker 2: The sheer scale of what happens when we manipulate the
fundamental building blocks of the universe creates these ripples that
we are literally still trying to map.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we spent the whole week pouring over the sources
you provide, and our mission today is to pull the
thread on those unexplained discoveries.
Speaker 2: The bizarre mutations, the historical tragedies.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and the chilling, unpredictable ways that nature responds when
humans scramble its very DNA.
Speaker 2: Setting the stage for this requires confronting the absolute duality
of nuclear power. I mean, we're talking about a technology
that is in many ways a utopian dream.
Speaker 1: Right, because it's so efficient.
Speaker 2: Exactly, you have this remarkably efficient energy source that releases
practically zero greenhouse gases.
Speaker 1: Which we desperately need.
Speaker 2: Right, And it doesn't require the massive, continuous strip mining
of raw materials in the way that coal or natural
gas does. It provides a consistent baseline of energy.
Speaker 1: So on paper, it looks perfect.
Speaker 2: From a purely mathematical standpoint, it represents the absolute pinnacle
of human scientific achievement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the utopian dream that comes with a very specific
apocalyptic fine print.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect way to put it. The fine
print being a capacity for destruction so profound that it
leaves scars on the earth.
Speaker 1: Designed to last for millennia decades just isn't enough. It
has to be thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Right. When the containment fails, it doesn't just create a
localized mess. It creates environments that become actively, invisibly hostile
to the biological concept of life itself.
Speaker 1: I want you to picture holding an invisible poison in
the palm of your hand.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's a terrifying visual.
Speaker 1: But this isn't a chemical toxin that just burns your
skin or attacks your nervous system. This is a poison
that actively, meticulously rewrites the fundamental instructions of life.
Speaker 2: It penetrates your cells and maliciously edits the blueprint.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is the reality of the atomic age. And
when faced with an invisible threat that can rewrite reality,
humanity tends to start where we always start.
Speaker 2: We invent monsters.
Speaker 1: Ween invent monsters, It's what we do.
Speaker 2: Inventing folklore is a deeply ingrained survival mechanism. I mean,
when a society is faced with an incomprehensible threat, something
you cannot see, smell, or fight off with a weapon
like ionizing radiation, we instinctively construct physical avatars to represent it.
Speaker 1: We need something to punch, basically.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we require a shape for our fear so that
we can process the anxiety.
Speaker 1: And the ultimate manifestation of this is the legend of
the Blackbird of Chernobyl.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: If this one is fascinating, The historical facts are etched
in stone right. Reactor IOV explodes at one point two
three am in April of nineteen eighty six, forcing the
paniced to evacuation of over three hundred thousand.
Speaker 2: People, a monumental disaster.
Speaker 1: But in the days and weeks leading up to that
exact moment, the people living and working near the plant
started reporting something that sounds like it flew straight out
of a medieval beastiary.
Speaker 2: The primary accounts described this massive, mutated bird like creature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, boasting a twenty foot wingspan.
Speaker 2: A vaguely humanoid torso, and piercing glowing red eyes.
Speaker 1: The glowing red eyes are such a specific visceral detail
in these reports, and the psychological toll on the workers
was immediate.
Speaker 2: They were terrified totally.
Speaker 1: Workers claim they were seeing this creature not just in
the sky, but intruding into their dreams. The sightings hit
a fever pitch right before the explosion.
Speaker 2: And then during the disaster itself. Things got even weirder.
Speaker 1: Right after the explosion, when the Soviet helicopters were dispatched
on those doomed missions to drop sand into the burning core,
Several surviving liquidators claimed they saw this massive, ominous silhouette
gliding through the radioactive smoke plumes, and then the moment
the disaster was fully realized, the sightings completely ceased, just stopped.
Speaker 2: The sudden cessation of the sightings is the absolute key
to understanding the phenomenon. The creature operates purely as a
psychological harbinger of doom, like.
Speaker 1: A warning siren made of feathers.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The workers at Chernobyl were living under immense subconscious stress.
They were operating a flawed RBMK reactor in a culture
of intense Soviet secrecy and massive quotas.
Speaker 1: So their brains were basically picking up on the microques
of an impending disaster.
Speaker 2: Yes, if we look at the historical parallels and the
sources you provided, the architecture of this myth is literally
identical to the Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Speaker 1: Oh Man, the Point Pleasant case from the late sixties
maps onto Chernobyl perfectly, it really does. Witnesses in West
Virginia describe an almost identical entity, you know, the massive wings,
the human like posture, the hypnotic red eyes, and.
Speaker 2: The timing is what's crucial there too.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The community was whipped into a frenzy of sightings
right up until December fifteenth, nineteen sixty eight. That was
the day the Silverbridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing forty.
Speaker 2: Six people, a horrific tragedy.
Speaker 1: And the second the bridge fell, the mothman vanished from
the local zeitgeist, just gone.
Speaker 2: So we have to analyze what these creatures actually represent.
Biologically speaking, an environmental stressor does not cause sudden, massive
gigantism in avian species.
Speaker 1: Right A bird isn't going to suddenly grow a twenty
foot wing span because of a bad reactor.
Speaker 2: Radiation does not spontaneously generate that. But psychologically, these stories
serve as a collective pressure valve that makes a lot
of sense. The idea of an invisible splitting atom or
a microscopic flaw and a bridge suspension is incredibly difficult
for the human brain to conceptualize, let alone fear effectively.
Speaker 1: Yes, you can't see it exactly.
Speaker 2: A giant, red eyed harbinger of death, however, is a threat.
We intuitively understand it provides a focal point for diffuse
overwhelming anxiety.
Speaker 1: But let me ask you this. If our brains are
inventing these giant bird monsters just to process the trauma
of an invisible threat, what happens when the actual physical
reality of the disaster starts producing things that look exactly
like our nightmares.
Speaker 2: That's where it gets truly disturbing.
Speaker 1: Because some of the stories that emerge from the aftermath
aren't just sightings of distant birds. Some are claustrophobic, violent,
and deeply disturbing, like the Ukrainian elevator spider from your
research stack.
Speaker 2: Oh, the elevator's spider narrative is a masterclass in modern
urban legend, acting as a conduit for nuclear trauma.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of story that makes you want to
take the stairs for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I'll blame you.
Speaker 1: So the setup is this brutalist apartment building in Ukraine
in the years following the Chernobyl disaster. Two residents are
found dead inside a stalled elevator. The coroner's report allegedly
notes extreme blood loss. But the strange part is the environment.
The elevator car is completely pristine, no signs of a struggle, none,
There is no blood spatter anywhere. The victims just have
these deep symmetrical puncture wounds on their necks, as if
their circulatory systems had been surgically siphon.
Speaker 2: Which naturally immediately primes the local population to suspect supernatural involvement.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, specifically vampirism, and the terror absolutely paralyzes the building.
Nobody will use the elevator as you would expect, so
the local police dispatched two detectives to investigate. By the
third day, these detectives are writing this janky, dimly lit
elevator and it violently halts between the fifth and sixth.
Speaker 2: Floors, the classic horror movie setup literally.
Speaker 1: They hear a rhythmic, metallic clicking noise emanating from the
roof of the car. They managed to pry off a
ceiling panel, shine a heavy flashlight up into the dark,
greasy shaft.
Speaker 2: What do they see?
Speaker 1: They see a foot long jet black shape scuttling rapidly
down the cables toward them.
Speaker 2: A massively overgrown, erected a.
Speaker 1: Foot long spider that aggressively lunges into the car. One
detective unholsters his weapon and fires blindly, but the spider
overpowers his partner.
Speaker 2: It supposedly drained his fluids in seconds.
Speaker 1: Right when the heavily armed back up finally breaches the
elevator doors, they find the surviving detective backed into a corner,
completely catatonic with terror.
Speaker 2: Understandably, his partner.
Speaker 1: Is dead and this massive mutated spider is standing over
the body. The police sweep the shaft and find it
completely infested with unhatched pulsing egg sacks.
Speaker 2: Oh that's horrific.
Speaker 1: The local authorities supposedly had to requisition milliitary flamethrowers to
incinerate the entire shaft.
Speaker 2: The local lore surrounding that event immediately attributed the spider's
monstrous size and vampiric behavior to the radioactive fallout drifting
over from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Speaker 1: But let's look at the biology here. I mean, could
an influx of ionizing radiation actually cause a common house
spider to mutate into a foot long, blood drinking apex predator.
Speaker 2: The short answer no, The mechanics of radiation exposure make
that scenario entirely fictional.
Speaker 1: Really, no giant spiders.
Speaker 2: I know, it ruins the movie plot. We have this
lingering cultural trope heavily popularized by nineteen fifties atomic horror
cinema like the movie them, that radiation acts as a
generic growth serum for insects.
Speaker 1: And arachnets, like they just get bigger and angrier exactly.
Speaker 2: But the scientific reality is the exact opposite. High doses
of radiation cause fatal cellular breakdown. It just melts them, yes,
and lower chronic doses typically stunt growth, cause severe deformities
or render the organism sterile.
Speaker 1: So they definitely don't grow to the size of a dog,
not at all.
Speaker 2: The biological constraints of a spider's respiratory system physically prevent it.
They rely on book lungs and passive diffusion. They couldn't
oxygen eate a body that size, regardless of their genetic mutations.
Speaker 1: So the myth of the giant spider survives precisely because
the trauma of Chernobyl was so massive.
Speaker 2: It feels deeply unjust if a disaster of that magnitude
doesn't produce tangible physical monsters.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. We need the environment to look
as broken as we feel inside, and we see this
projection happening globally, not just in Ukraine. Oh, definitely look
at the mossman sightings in Florida. Back in nineteen seventy
eight at Red Reef Park, a couple walking the beach
at dusk reported seeing what they thought was a man
in a bulky raincoat.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't a raincoat.
Speaker 1: No. When the figure stood up, it was a seven
foot tall, lumbering humanoid covered entirely in trailing Spanish moss
that seemed to be growing directly out of its flesh.
Speaker 2: Let me guess it had glowing red eyes.
Speaker 1: It had bright red eyes. It's a recurring motif we
just can't ignore. And it supposedly left a pungent clump
of moss behind on the sand when it fled.
Speaker 2: The projection of our anxieties onto the environment extends into
the digital age as well.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like the flying flesh carrot.
Speaker 2: The phenomenon documented around twenty nineteen on Japanese and Korean
hiking forms exactly. It perfectly illustrates how our modern fears manifest.
Speaker 1: I still can't get over the naming convention of the
flying flesh carrot. I mean, it sounds so absurd.
Speaker 2: It does, but the eyewitness accounts are incredibly eerie.
Speaker 1: Hikers in remote deep forest trails describe seeing a silent,
floating mass. They described it as hovering between the appearance
of a brightly colored overgrown root vegetable and a raw,
pulsating chunk of muscle tissues.
Speaker 2: Disgusting.
Speaker 1: Truly, it didn't have wings or propulsion. It simply drifted
silently through the canopy, completely defying gravity and basic biology.
Speaker 2: The absurdity of the name masks of very deep seated
modern agasnxiety. Oh so well. These cryptids, the mossman, the
hovering flesh, the giant spiders, they're all symptomatic of how
we view the natural world post atomic age.
Speaker 1: Like it's turned against us.
Speaker 2: Exactly Prior to the splitting of the atom, the wilderness
was something to be tamed or feared for its natural
predators like bears or wolves, normal things. Right now, there
is a subconscious expectation that because we have fundamentally polluted
the very building blocks of the Earth, nature is no
longer just wild. It is becoming alien.
Speaker 1: Like we broke the rules, so now nature is breaking
the rules.
Speaker 2: Precisely, we expect the flora and fauna to warp into hostile,
unrecognizable configurations as retribution for our technological overreach.
Speaker 1: Man, we spend all this narrative energy inventing vampire spiders
and telepathic hovering meat because we are terrified of what
we've done. We are, but the truly sobering part of
your research is that we don't actually need to invent
monsters at all. No, we really don't, because what radiation
actually does to buy all, like the microscopic, chaotic ways
it breaks the rules of nature, is far stranger and
infinitely more tragic than any folklore we could ever dream up.
Speaker 2: The reality of radiation exposure is rooted in microscopic chaos,
not cinematic gigantism.
Speaker 1: So what actually happens.
Speaker 2: To understand the true horror of the exclusion zones, we
have to look at the exact mechanism of the immediate
biological scramble.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into the science of it.
Speaker 2: We need to see what happens at the cellular level
when a living organism is forced to inhabit a highly
radioactive environment.
Speaker 1: Let's break down that mechanism, because we aren't talking about
stepping into the immediate core of a detonating bomb where
things are instantly vaporized, right, No, we are.
Speaker 2: Talking about the long term reality of living in the fallout.
When soil, air, and groundwater are contaminated with radioactive isotopes
like caesium one thirty seven or strontium ninety, they emit ionizing.
Speaker 1: Radiation then what does that do well?
Speaker 2: These emissions alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. They
act like sub atomic.
Speaker 1: Bullets 's abotomic bullets.
Speaker 2: Yes, they possess enough energy to detach electrons from atoms
or molecules. When one of these microscopic bullets passes through
a living cell, it physically tears through the DNA double helix.
Speaker 1: So it's actually severing the rungs of the DNA ladder precisely.
Speaker 2: It causes double strand breaks in the genetic code. Now
the cell isn't immediately destroyed.
Speaker 1: It tries to fix itself.
Speaker 2: It does. It recognizes the damage and frantically attempts to
repair the severed strands through a process called non homologous enjoining.
Speaker 1: That sounds complicated.
Speaker 2: It's basically cellular triage, but the repair mechanism is panicked
and sloppy. It frequently glues the wrong ends together, completely
scrambling the sequence.
Speaker 1: Like putting a puzzle back together blindfolded.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The architectural blueprint that tells a plant how to
synthesize chlorophyll, or tells an animal embryo how to develop
a nervous system, becomes corrupted with catastrophic errors.
Speaker 1: That cellular panic explains the bizarre agricultural anomalies documented by
researchers who plant it excs experimental wheat inside the Chernobyl
exclusion zone.
Speaker 2: Yes, the wheat studies are fascinating.
Speaker 1: The seeds they use looked entirely normal, but once planted
in the heavily irradiated soil, the resulting growth was pure chaos.
Speaker 2: It didn't grow like normal wheat at all.
Speaker 1: Not even close. The wheat began mutating at a staggering
rate up to six times higher than control crops. Some
stalks rocket it upward, growing incredibly fast and thick well.
Speaker 2: Others barely grew at all.
Speaker 1: Right, Neighboring seeds in the exact same soil barely sprouted,
producing these stunted, blackened roots, and a massive percentage of
the crop was entirely sterile, just incapable of producing seeds
of their own.
Speaker 2: The persistence of those mutations is the truly alarming factor here.
Speaker 1: Because it's still happening today.
Speaker 2: Yes, we are seeing these chaotic growth patterns decades after
the initial disaster. The environment inside the exclusion zone might
appear green and lush from an aerial.
Speaker 1: Photograph like nature is healing right.
Speaker 2: But at a microscopicular level, the flora is engaged in
a desperate, losing battle to maintain its genetic integrity.
Speaker 1: We saw the exact same botanical madness immediately following the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in nineteen forty five, too.
Speaker 2: The historical records on that are heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: The survivors the Hibakusha documented how the flora in the
ruined city went completely haywire in the months following the.
Speaker 2: Blasts, huge mutations.
Speaker 1: Widespread reports of monstrously oversized sunflowers erupting from the irradiated ash.
But they weren't just big. Their stems would fork and
split unpredictably, growing multiple malformed flowerheads.
Speaker 2: It's a complete breakdown of cellular organization.
Speaker 1: And the morning lorries they are traditionally these delicate, perfectly
symmetrical blooms, but they grew petals that were so thick
and misshapen they look like twisted ribbons of.
Speaker 2: Wax, a phenomenon that was meticulously documented again sixty six
years later in the wake of the twenty eleven Fukushima disaster.
Speaker 1: The daisies right, yes.
Speaker 2: Roughly one hundred miles outside the primary tsunami triggered meltdown zone.
Residents and biologists began finding fields of severely mutated daisies.
Speaker 1: One hundred miles away, and they're still mutating.
Speaker 2: The stems were flattened, thickened, and twisted. They looked less
like a plant and more like a green caterpillar.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's creepy.
Speaker 2: The flower heads were elongated, with petals fused together in
chaotic clusters. It gave the appearance of multiple daisies violently
mashed into a single, grotesque organism.
Speaker 1: And there's a specific botanical term for that mutation, which
is fascinating. It's called fasciation, right.
Speaker 2: Fasciation or cresting. It occurs when the apical maristom, which
is the growing tip of the plant, usually a single
concentrated point, becomes elongated perpendiculable.
Speaker 1: So it grows wide instead of.
Speaker 2: Essentially yes, it produces flattened, ribbon like or elaborately contorted tissue.
It is a severe malfunction of the plant's hormonal growth signals.
Speaker 1: Can that happen normally.
Speaker 2: It can occasionally be caused by frost or bacterial infections
in normal environments, but the sheer volume and severity. A
fasciation observed around Fukushima clearly points to the radioactive fallout
violently disrupting the cellular division of the plants.
Speaker 1: I read those reports and I just think about how
incredibly difficult gardening is under pristine, perfect conditions.
Speaker 2: It's tough enough keeping a houseplant.
Speaker 1: Alive, exactly. Plants are so sensitive to slight changes in
pH or sunlight. So imagine trying to cultivate life in
a landscape where the soil itself is actively hostile dictating
this chaotic, monstrous, unpredictable growth.
Speaker 2: It feels deeply apocalyptic.
Speaker 1: It really does. And if that is what ionizing radiation
does to a relatively simple organism like a daisy, the
scars it leaves on the animal kingdom are just heartbreakingly visceral.
Speaker 2: Because animals rely on incredibly complex, interconnected biological systems.
Speaker 1: Right nervous systems, blood flow.
Speaker 2: Intricate organ development, the embryological error is caused by radiation
manifest as severe physical deformities. The margin for error in
analgestation is incredibly narrow.
Speaker 1: The most shocking examples of this and the sources was
the discovery made back in two thousand and four at
the Green Umbrella Nursery in the UK.
Speaker 2: Oh the frog case.
Speaker 1: Yes, a student was playing in the garden and found
what they initially thought was a cluster of three frogs
huddled tightly together.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't a cluster no.
Speaker 1: Upon closer inspection, it was a single, fully mature frog
that had developed three distinct heads and six fully formed legs.
Speaker 2: A polycephalic mutation of that extreme nature surviving to adulthood
in the wild is profoundly rare.
Speaker 1: A biology professor from the Open University examined the photographs
and stated it was an almost unheard of biological anomaly.
Speaker 2: I bet they wanted to study it.
Speaker 1: They did. The staff placed the frog in a secure
glass tank overnight to wait for researchers, but by morning
the creature had managed to escape.
Speaker 2: Of course it did.
Speaker 1: The joke is that if you have three brains, you
can probably figure out the latch on a terrarium. But
the grim reality of that story is.
Speaker 2: The geography ah location.
Speaker 1: Look, that nursery was located directly adjacent to a decommission
nuclear power facility.
Speaker 2: The proximity to the decommission plant is the critical variable.
It strongly indicates that localized environmental pollution, likely a leak
of radioactive isotopes into the groundwater, interfered with the frog's
embryogenesis while it was still an egg in the pond.
Speaker 1: Because frogs are super sensitive to that stuff.
Speaker 2: Extremely amphibians are incredibly sensitive to environmental toxins because of
their permeable skin and aquatic developmental stages. Makes sense, and
we have massive tragic data sets from the actual nuclear
blast zones that corroborate this kind of catastrophic developmental failure.
Speaker 1: Like the wildlife studies conducted in the ruins of Hirishma,
they cataloged a horrifying array of abnormalities. The rabbits specifically, yes,
local rabbit populations began birthing litters entirely missing their external ears,
just smooth heads.
Speaker 2: And the avian population suffered.
Speaker 1: Similarly, birds that managed to hatch from irradiated egg survived
with yearly twisted, asymmetrical beaks that made feeding nearly impossible,
or they were born missing entirely functional feet.
Speaker 2: The longitudinal studies coming out of Fukushima are equally grim
and perhaps more scientifically rigorous given modern technology.
Speaker 1: What did they find there?
Speaker 2: Entomologists studying the pale grass blue butterflies in the region
discovered that a staggering twenty eight percent of the population
suffered from severe crippling.
Speaker 1: Deformities, almost a third of them.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're talking about malformed antenna, twisted and stunted legs,
and completely altered asymmetrical wing patterns that destroyed their ability
to fly or mate.
Speaker 1: That's devastating.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, primatologists studying the local troops of Japanese macaqus found
that monkeys born after the meltdown possessed significantly smaller brains
and head circumferences compared to macaques living in unaffected regions.
They also exhibited delayed overall physical growth and suffered from
severe chronic anemia.
Speaker 1: The radiation acts as this brutal, invisible equalizer. It doesn't
discriminate between a delicate butterfly and a complex primate.
Speaker 2: It affects everything.
Speaker 1: It seeps into every single trophic level of the ecosystem,
completely dismantling the harmony of nature. The predators lose their
prey because the prey can't reproduce.
Speaker 2: And the plants lose their pollinators because the butterflies can't fly.
Speaker 1: Exactly you end up with these massive, silent voids in
biodiversity because the most sensitive species are simply erased from
the map.
Speaker 2: However, the natural world abhors a vacuum.
Speaker 1: It does it always bounces back somehow.
Speaker 2: Adaptation is arguably the most relentless, unstoppable force on the planet.
While radiation undoubtedly destroys countless sensitive species. Humanity's evacuation of
these exclusion zones leaves behind massive completely untouched habitat because
we just up and leave right and certain robust species
don't just survive the residual fallout. They rush in to
exploit the lack of human interference. They weaponize the wasteland.
Speaker 1: This is where the story pivots from tragic to absolutely wild,
because the ultimate example of nature reclaiming a toxic throne
has to be the Fukushima boars.
Speaker 2: Oh, the bores are a massive problem.
Speaker 1: When the Japanese government established the twenty kilometers strict exclusion
zone in twenty eleven, the human population vanished overnight, and
the local wild boars looked around, saw empty streets and
abandoned farms and just took over.
Speaker 2: It was free real estate for them.
Speaker 1: In the span of just five years, their population absolutely exploded,
rocketing from around three thousand individuals to over thirteen thousand.
Speaker 2: The removal of their primary apex predator, which is human hunters,
allowed them to breed entirely unchecked, and they got bold,
very bold. Their behavior changed. They became incredibly brazen, moving
out of the forests and making their dens directly inside
abandoned homes and storefronts.
Speaker 1: The economic and logistical nightmare they've caused is staggering. We're
talking about nearly a million dollars in damage to the
farmlands sitting on the edge of the exclusion.
Speaker 2: Zone because they're rooting the crops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these are aren't timid animals. They are aggressive, massive,
and completely unhuntable in any traditional sense.
Speaker 2: Look ause of the contamination.
Speaker 1: Right before the meltdown, local hunters controlled the population and
the meat was sold or consumed. But now, because these
boers spend all day rooting through the contaminated soil, eating
irradiated roots, tubers, and mushrooms, their muscle tissue is completely
saturated with seasion one thirty seven.
Speaker 2: Their meat is profoundly toxic. It cannot be legally sold, transported,
or consumed.
Speaker 1: Exactly so there is zero economic or dietary incentive for
hunters to go after them. The local governments are literally
forced to pay bounties to specialized culling teams just to
keep the numbers down.
Speaker 2: But killing them creates an entirely new logistical nightmare.
Speaker 1: How do you even dispose of a radioactive bore?
Speaker 2: You can't just leave a massive, highly radioactive carcass rotting
in the woods, and you can't process them in a
normal facility, right The government had to build specialized, heavily
shielded incineration facilities specifically designed to burn radioactive animal bodies,
which is a massive, dangerous and incredibly expensive headache.
Speaker 1: That is insane, just giant ovens for radioactive pigs.
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, we see a remarkably similar ecological phenomenon occurring
in the waterways surrounding Chernobyl.
Speaker 1: The catfish Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, the reactor cooling ponds and the Pripiet River are
heavily contaminated with radioactive sludge. From a conventional standpoint, you
would assume those waters would be entirely devoid of.
Speaker 1: Life because it's toxic soup.
Speaker 2: Right, But because the water is completely off limits to
commercial and recreational fishing, and because there are no higher
aquatic predators left. The aquatic life that did survive has
adapted and thrived.
Speaker 1: The videos of those cooling ponds from around twenty sixteen
are mind blowing.
Speaker 2: They're huge.
Speaker 1: You have these absolutely massive, giant wells catfish swimming freely
in water that would set off a Geiger counter from
the shoreline. They look prehistoric, easily growing over eight feet long.
Speaker 2: And people assumed they were mutants.
Speaker 1: Of course, when the footage first leaked, the Internet immediately
branded them as mutant monsterfish, assuming the radiation had caused
them to grow to godzilla proportion.
Speaker 2: But they aren't.
Speaker 1: No biologists confirmed they aren't mutants at all. They are
just regular catfish that have been allowed to live out
their full natural lifespans, which can be over fifty years,
with an unlimited food supply and zero human interference.
Speaker 2: The catfish and the bores are thriving despite the radiation
purely because the absence of humans is a greater benefit
to their survival than the radiation is a detriment.
Speaker 1: Humans are the bigger threat exactly.
Speaker 2: However, if we want to discuss organisms that are thriving
because of the radiation, we have to examine one of
the most astonishing biological discoveries of the modern era.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the organisms that are literally eating the radiation.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: When I read this part of the research, I had
to read it three times to make sure I was
understanding it correctly.
Speaker 2: It sounds like science fiction, but it is pure reviewed
cellular biology. Deep inside the ruined remains of Chernobyl's Reactor
four and increasingly documented in the Fukushima Zone, scientists have
discovered specific species of fungi that have fundamentally altered their
energy processing mechanics.
Speaker 1: Explain the exact mechanism of how a fungus eats radiation
because it defies everything we learn in high school biology.
Speaker 2: It really does. These specific radiotrophic fungi, such as Cladusporium Spherrospermum,
contain extremely high concentrations of.
Speaker 1: Melanin jelanin like in our skin, the.
Speaker 2: Exact same dark pigment found in human skin, hair, and eyes,
which typically serves to absorb and protect against ultraviolet light
from the sun.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it blocks radiation usually, right.
Speaker 2: But these fungi are utilizing their melanin to perform a
process called radiosynthesis.
Speaker 1: So it's like photosynthesis, but with nuclear fallout instead of sunshine.
Speaker 2: That is an excellent analogy. In photosynthesis, a plant uses
the green pigment CLO to capture the energy from visible
light photons, using that energy to get carbon dioxide and
water into glucose.
Speaker 1: So it makes food from light.
Speaker 2: Yes. In radiosynthesis, the fungi use their heavy melanin concentrations
to capture highly toxic gamma radiation. The high energy gamma
rays strike the melanin molecules, violently exciting the electrons within
the pigment. The fungus then channels those excited high energy
electrons through an electron transport chain, fundamentally converting the deadly
ionizing radiation directly into chemical energy to fuel its own growth.
Speaker 1: They are taking the exact microscopic bullets that tear human
DNA apart and using them as a protein shake.
Speaker 2: Basically, yes, that.
Speaker 1: Is unbelievable, and it allows them to spread rapidly in
environments that would be instantly lethal to almost any other
carbon based life form.
Speaker 2: It represents a staggering evolutionary pivot and the implications are.
Speaker 1: Vast, which naturally leads to a massive question. If we
know these fungi can literally consume gamma rae radiation and
converted into biomass. Why aren't we blanketing these exclusion zones
in massive industrial scale mushroom.
Speaker 2: Farms like a biological scrubber.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are we missing out on an incredible, naturally occurring
cleanup mechanism to scrub the Earth of our nuclear mistakes.
Speaker 2: The scientific community is intensely focused on studying these radiotrophic
fungi for exactly those applications.
Speaker 1: Are they testing.
Speaker 2: There are active experiments on the International Space Station testing
whether panels of this melanin rich fungus could be used
to shield astronauts from deadly cosmic rays during deep space
travel to Mars.
Speaker 1: That is so cool it is.
Speaker 2: However, using them to clean up a terrestrial exclusion zone
is incredibly complex. The critical misunderstanding is that while the
fungi absorbed the radiation to grow, they do not transmute
or erase the radioactive isotopes from existence.
Speaker 1: Ah the law of conservation of mass. The caesium is
still there, It's just inside the mushroom now.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the radioactive heavy metals are simply incorporated into the
fungal biomass. Matter still exists within the ecosystem, so it's
not gone, just moved right. And as these hyper successful
fungi spread across the contaminated landscape, they become the foundation
for a new, highly toxic food web.
Speaker 1: Which perfectly explains the terrifying explosion of spider populations documented
in the Fukushima zone. The spiders, yeah, the radiation weakens
the traditional prey insects. The flies and beetles become slower,
neurologically disoriented, and physically deformed, making them vastly easier.
Speaker 2: To catch, like a buffet for predators.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The spiders, operating as the apex predators of the undergrowth,
feast on these sluggish, irradiated insects, causing the irraqneve population
to boom.
Speaker 2: And every time a spider eats a contaminated insect, or
an insect eats a radiotrophic fungus, the radioactive isotopes move
one step higher up the food chain.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the most terrifying logistical problem of
the atomic age. These thriving highly radioactive animals, the bores,
the birds, the spiders, they don't understand you political borders.
Speaker 2: They don't respect the invisible boundaries of a government mandated
exclusion zone, they.
Speaker 1: Migrate, and this introduces the critical ecological concept of bioaccumulation
and the reality of a mobile radioactive food web. Let's
break down bioaccumulation for the listener. Okay, how does an
isotope travel from the soil of an exclusion zone into
the broader, supposedly safe environment.
Speaker 2: Let's trace the atomic path. When a nuclear meltdown or
detonation occurs, heavy long lasting isotopes like caesium one thirty
seven and strownium ninety are dispersed and eventually settled deep
into the.
Speaker 1: Soil like invisible dust.
Speaker 2: Yes, plants absorb water and nutrients from that soil through
their root systems. The cellular receptors in a plant's roots
are incredibly efficient, but they can be tricked. Tricked how well.
Caesium one thirty seven, for example, sits in the same
column on the periodic table as potassium. It shares very
similar chemical properties.
Speaker 1: So the plant acts like a bouncer at a club
and the caesium shows up with a fake id that
says potassium.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. The atomic structure of the caesium is
similar enough to pick the biological locks of the plant's roots. Wow,
the plant absorbs the radioactive caesium, mistakenly believing it is
gathering essential nutrients for growth. The plant is now fundamentally toxic.
And then what next. A primary consumer, an herbivore like
a rabbit or a der, eats that contaminated plant.
Speaker 1: And the rabbit doesn't just pass the isotope through its
digestive tract like normal waste.
Speaker 2: No, Just as the plant mistook caesium for potassium, the
rabbit's body mistakes the radioactive isotopes or essential minerals.
Speaker 1: It builds its body with it.
Speaker 2: Yes, strontium ninety is chemically similar to calcium, so the
rabbit's body physically incorporates the radioactive strontium directly into its
skeletal structure, its bones, and its teeth. The caesium is
bound into the muscle tissue.
Speaker 1: That's terrifying.
Speaker 2: As a rabbit continues to forage on contaminated plants day
after day, the concentration of these isotopes steadily builds up
in its body. This defying effect is bioaccumulation.
Speaker 1: And then a predator like a coyote or an eagle,
eats the rabbit ingesting a massive, highly concentrated dose of radiation.
Speaker 2: All at once, exactly. It multiplies up the chain.
Speaker 1: And the true nightmare is that animals move. A perfect
historical example of this is the Hanford site in Washington State.
Speaker 2: Hanford is a fascinating and deeply concerning case study in
environmental containment failure.
Speaker 1: Hanford was this massive, highly classified plutonium production complex built
during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project.
Speaker 2: It was crucial to the war effort.
Speaker 1: It manufactured the plutonium used in the Trinity Test and
the fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It operated throughout
the Cold War, and today it is recognized as one
of the most toxic radioactively contaminated sites in the Western Hemisphere.
Speaker 2: The Department of Energy and teams of wildlife biologists maintain
a constant, active surveillance protocol on the local wildlife.
Speaker 1: There, with a specific focus on the rabbit population.
Speaker 2: Right. Yes, the rabbits are a huge.
Speaker 1: Because these rabbits burrow into the contaminated soil, they forage
on the irradiated vegetation. Their bodies bioaccumulate tremendous concentrations of
caesium one thirty seven, and then they just hop right
past the multimillion dollar security fences of the facility.
Speaker 2: They don't know they're not supposed to leave exactly.
Speaker 1: They become these little furry mobile radiotion dispensers. They spread
highly radioactive particles across the broader public landscape through their droppings, which.
Speaker 2: Spreads the contamination miles away.
Speaker 1: Right, And when an eagle swoops down and catches one
of these radioactive rabbits miles outside the zone, the contamination
enters the broader food web.
Speaker 2: It is an uncontrollable vector of contamination.
Speaker 1: Think of it like dropping a heavy vial of red
food coloring into the deep end of a massive swimming pool.
You can watch the red cloud bloom in the water, but.
Speaker 2: You can't just take a net and scoop the red
die back out.
Speaker 1: Nope. Especially once the fish starts swimming through the cloud
and dragging the die across the entire pool, it seamlessly
becomes part of the water.
Speaker 2: That physical analogy is frighteningly accurate to the atmospheric reality
we observed in Scandinavia following the Chernobyl disaster.
Speaker 1: Wait, Scandinavia, that's so far away from Ukraine, it is.
Speaker 2: But the radioactive plume from reactor I didn't stay in Ukraine.
The prevailing winds blew massive clouds of fallout across northern Europe,
where it eventually rained down and settled heavily into the
soil of Norway.
Speaker 1: And Sweden, where it was rapidly absorbed by the local
fungi and.
Speaker 2: Moss, specifically a type of lichen known as Cladonia rangiferina
or reindeer moss. This specific lichen is unique because it
doesn't possess a traditional root system.
Speaker 1: How does it get nutrients?
Speaker 2: It absorbs all of its nutrients and moisture directly from
the air and the surface moisture. This makes it an
incredibly efficient natural sponge for atmospheric radioactive.
Speaker 1: Fallout, and reindeer moss is the absolute staple diet for
the massive herds of reindeer in the region.
Speaker 2: The reindeer grazed heavily on this saturated, highly contaminated lichen.
The biomation was swift.
Speaker 1: And severe, so the reindeer became radioactive.
Speaker 2: Yes, the radiation levels and the reindeer meat spiked traumatically,
rendering it entirely unsafe for human consumption. To understand the scale,
we measure this in becherels.
Speaker 1: Break down exactly what a becquerel is for everyone listening,
because we see that term constantly in these reports.
Speaker 2: A bekerel is the standard international unit of radioactivity. It
measures the activity of a quantity of radioactive material. One
bekerel is defined as the activity of a quantity of
radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second.
Speaker 1: So if we think of a decaying atom like a
microscopic firecracker popping inside a cell, one beckerel means one
tiny explosion every single second.
Speaker 2: A very apt visualization. In a healthy, uncontaminated environment, the
background radiation in food is negligible. But following Chernobyl, the
reindeer meat in Norway was testing at over one hundred
thousand bekerels per kilogram.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, one hundred thousands.
Speaker 2: That means one hundred thousand sub atomic explosions were occurring
within every kilogram of that meat every single second. That
is insane. Even today, nearly four decades later, the crisis persists.
The caesium has a long half life and it cycles
through the ecosystem during certain weather patterns that cause massive
fungal blooms. The reindeer gorge on the toxic mushrooms, and
the radiation in their meat can suddenly spike back above
two thousand becrels of per kilogram.
Speaker 1: Which completely devastates the indigenous semi populations and local communities
who have relied on reindeer herding for their economic and
dietary survival for centuries.
Speaker 2: It destroys their entire way of life.
Speaker 1: It's an invisible horror. You can look at a healthy,
majestic reindeer grazing on a snowy hill and you have
absolutely no visual indication that its muscle tissue is coursing
with toxic levels of caesium one thirty seven.
Speaker 2: And this exact same invisible bioaccumulation is happening in the
oceans right now.
Speaker 1: The marine ecosystem surrounding the Fukushima Daichi plant is a
primary area of ongoing concern and intense monitoring, very intense.
In May of twenty twenty two, which is more than
a full decade after the melt downe researchers in the
Tokyo Electric Power Company, we're still conducting routine tests on
marine life in the Inner Harbor, and they caught a
black rockfish.
Speaker 2: The species is critical here. The black rockfish is a
benthic or bottom dwelling.
Speaker 1: Species, right it spends its life hovering near the ocean floor,
feeding directly off the sediment where the heavy radioactive caesium
particles have settled over the last ten years, So it's.
Speaker 2: Eating the most contaminated food possible.
Speaker 1: To put this in perspective, the Japanese government's strict safety
limit for radioactive caesium in food meant for human consumption
is one hundred becquerels per kilogram.
Speaker 2: Which is a reasonable safety margin.
Speaker 1: But this single black rockfish was tested and found to
contain levels one hundred and eighty times over that legal limit,
And when they tested the sediment on the ocean floor
where it was feeding, it contained over one hundred thousand
becquerels per kilogram. It was a thousand times over the
safety line. You literally cannot vacuum the ocean floor. The
poison is permanently embedded in the geography.
Speaker 2: And because radiation spreads so insidiously, hitching riodes on wind currents,
ocean tides, migrating rabbits, and bottom feeding fish, human attempts
to contain it frequently border on the deeply absurd or.
Speaker 1: Worse, attempts to cover up the messes left by our
past weapons testing.
Speaker 2: Exactly when we transition from examining the resilience of nature
to analyzing the response of human institutions, we move from
biology into the realm of absolute hubris.
Speaker 1: The sheer arrogance of our containment strategies is staggering. If
you want a masterclass in hubris, we have to look
at the Marshall.
Speaker 2: Islands, specifically the Bikini Atoll.
Speaker 1: Yes. Between nineteen forty eight and nineteen fifty eight, during
the height of the Cold War arms race, the United
States military commandeered this pristine, vibrant Pacific paradise and used
it as a remote testing ground for forty three distinct nuclear.
Speaker 2: Weapons, the most infamous of which was the Castle Bravo
test in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: Castle Bravo was a catastrophic miscalculation. It was a first
delay verable hydrogen bomb, and the physicists wildly underestimated the
yield of the lithium deuteride fuel.
Speaker 2: They thought it would be much smaller.
Speaker 1: They expected a five megaton blast. It detonated with the
force of fifteen megatons, completely vaporizing three entire islands, blowing
a crater a mile wide into the ocean floor and
sending a massive plume of highly radioactive ash into the atmosphere, which.
Speaker 2: Rained down on the surrounding inhabited atolls and a Japanese
fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon Number five. They completely,
irrevocably decimated the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And the subsequent remediation effort, launched decades later, stands as
a prime example of governmental half measures in the face
of deep geological trauma.
Speaker 2: It was a band aid on a bullet wound.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, facing mounting international pressure, the US
government decides they need to clean up the Marshall Islands
so the displaced indigenous population can return.
Speaker 2: So what did they do?
Speaker 1: They allocate roughly one hundred million dollars for this grand operation.
Their brilliant, state of the art solution. They bring in
the military to essentially screep the top layer.
Speaker 2: Of the islands to scrape the dirt away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they scoop up roughly eighty thousand cubic yards of
highly contaminated, irradiated topsoil and debris, mix it into a
slurry with concrete, dump the entire toxic mess into one
of the unlined craters left by a previous nuclear blast
on Rune Island and cap it with a massive eighteen
inch thick concrete dome, a.
Speaker 2: Structure that the local marshal lease populations now chillingly and
accurately referred to as the tomb.
Speaker 1: But the tomb didn't solve the biological problem. During the
years of bulldozing and scraping, all that radioactive sediment in
the lagoon got violently stirred up and suspended in the
water column.
Speaker 2: It just agitated the problem exactly.
Speaker 1: The local sea turtle populations feeding on the contaminated sea
grass ended up swallowing massive amounts of this radioactive sand.
Scientists later studied these turtles and found them swimming around
the Pacific with permanent, measurable radiation embedded directly into the
keratin of their shells.
Speaker 2: Literally, engineered radioactive sea turtles we did.
Speaker 1: And the structural integrity of the tomb is now severely.
Speaker 2: Compromised because the creater was unlined.
Speaker 1: Right. Yes, the radioactive isotopes are leeching directly into the
porous coral rock below, and with modern rising sea levels,
the dome is actively cracking, threatening to spill its contents
directly into the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker 2: And the absolute darkest, most dystopian irony of this entire tragedy.
Speaker 1: Oh, this makes me so mad. Today, if you look online,
Bikini Atoll is actively promoted as a high end niche
scuba diving destination. Thanks are because the US military used
a fleet of captured World War II battleships and aircraft
carriers as target practice during the blasts. The lagoon is
filled with these massive irradiated shipwrecks. People are paying thousands
of dollars to go on vacation and swim through the
submerged graveyard of our nuclear hubris.
Speaker 2: It is deeply unsettling treating the scars of weapons of
mass destruction as a recreational novelty. It's just gross industrative arrogance.
Isn't isolated to the Pacific, we see a remarkably similar
tragic history play out in the deep Australian outback mar Linga. Yes,
between nineteen fifty six and nineteen sixty three, the British government,
seeking to establish its own nuclear deterrent, carried out a
series of highly toxic atmospheric tests at Marlinga.
Speaker 1: They detonated seven full scale atomic weapons above ground and
conducted over six hundred minor highly secretive trials, specifically involving
the burning and dispersal of plutonium and uranium to test
weapons safety mechanisms.
Speaker 2: The impact on the local indigenous Aboriginal communities, the n
Angou people was devastating and largely ignored at the time.
Speaker 1: They were just completely disregarded.
Speaker 2: Many nomadic groups were never properly warned about the invisible dangers,
they were not adequately relocated, and they were directly exposed
to the black mist, the radio octave fallout rolling across
the desert.
Speaker 1: And the British cleanup effort, which didn't truly happen until
decades later, was a mass and sweeping dirt under the rug.
Global scientists have heavily criticized the methodology.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly flawed.
Speaker 1: In many areas, the official remediation strategy was essentially just
bringing in bulldozers, scraping the plutonium contaminated red dirt into shallow,
unlined pits and burying it under a few feet of
clean soil.
Speaker 2: Some of the most heavily contaminated plutonium areas were only
partially remediated. Given that plutonium two thirty nine has a
half life of over twenty four thousand years. Burying it
in shallow trenches guarantees it remains a severe environmental and
health risk for hundreds of generations.
Speaker 1: The full health impact the cancer clusters and the genetic
damage inflicted on the indigenous people remains a profound, largely
unaddressed historical tragedy.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate out of sight, out of my mentality.
If we can't see the glowing dirt, it must be safe.
Speaker 1: We see this exact same panicked bearying mentality with the
massive concrete tombs we construct over our civilian disasters. We
have to discuss the original chernobylsarcos.
Speaker 2: The sarcophagus represents an incredible desperate feet of brutalist engineering
borne out of absolute necessity.
Speaker 1: Desperate is the only word for it. It was constructed
in a frantic two hundred and six days immediately following
the nineteen eighty six explosion. It was this massive, hastily
designed shield of steel beams and concrete, designed with a
single panicked goal.
Speaker 2: Stop the atmospheric venting of.
Speaker 1: Radiation, exactly to throw a heavy lid over the gaping,
spewing maw of reactor four. The environment was so intensely
lethal that machines broke down. The radiation fried the circuitry
of the remote controlled bulldozers they try to use.
Speaker 2: Which meant they had to rely on human capital.
Speaker 1: They called them the liquidators, hundreds of thousands of men
sent into a meat grinder. The radiation levels on the
roof of the reactor were so high that the workers
could only be exposed for a maximum of ninety seconds.
Speaker 2: That's horrifying.
Speaker 1: Some sources say they were doing seven minutes suicide shifts.
Deep in the rubble. They would literally sprint out, shovel
a single load of highly radioactive graphite debris off the roof,
and sprink back inside, because lingering for even a minute
longer meant a guaranteed fatal dose of acute radiation poisoning.
Speaker 2: Thousands of these men suffered horrific health consequences, aggressive cancers,
and early deaths in the years that followed.
Speaker 1: And what that sarcophagus was built to contain is genuinely
the stuff of nightmares. Deep in the flooded basement corridors
beneath the ruined reactor lies a mass known as the
Elephant's foot.
Speaker 2: The elephant's foot is a completely surreal, terrifying object.
Speaker 1: During the peak of the meltdown, the internal temperatures reach
such unimaginable extremes that the uranium nuclear fuel rods, the
metal control rods, the sand they dropped from the helicopters,
and the actual concrete of the containment building all melted together.
Speaker 2: It formed this glowing molten mass of radioactive lava scientifically
known as chorium.
Speaker 1: It literally burned its way right through the thick steel
and concrete floorboards of the reactor and pooled in the
dark basement, slowly cooling into this massive, wrinkled solid lump
that distinctly resembles the rough gray skin of an elephant's foot.
Speaker 2: At the time it formed, its radioactivity was practically incomprehensible.
It was emitting approximately ten thousand rogins per hour.
Speaker 1: What does that mean for a person to put.
Speaker 2: That in perspective, standing in the same room with the
elephant's foot for just three hundred seconds five minutes would
deliver a one hundred percent lethal dose of radiation.
Speaker 1: It's literally a modern day Medusa.
Speaker 2: It really is. When scientists first attempted to document it,
they couldn't even point a camera at it directly. Because
the intense gamma radiation instantly destroyed the photographic film.
Speaker 1: You physically cannot look at it directly without it killing you.
They had to mount a camera on a remote controlled
toy tank and bounce the image off strategically placed mirrors
around a concrete corner just to get a blurry photograph
of it.
Speaker 2: And while Chernobyl's the most famous example, we have these precarious,
highly toxic scattered everywhere. Going back to the Hanford site
in Washington State, there was a facility known as the
K East Basin oh Man.
Speaker 1: The K East Basin was a massive, twenty foot deep
indoor concrete pool originally designed to store spent highly radioactive
nuclear fuel cylinders from the nineteen fifties weapons program.
Speaker 2: The plan was just to leave them underwater to cool,
but over the decades, the protective cladding on the fuel
cylinders corroded and broke down.
Speaker 1: The highly radioactive uranium fuel essentially dissolved and mixed with
the water and dust, creating a thick layer of incredibly toxic,
highly radioactive sludge covering the entire bottom of this massive pool.
Speaker 2: The remediation of that specific basin was a logistical nightmare.
Speaker 1: They couldn't just drain the pool because the water was
acting as the only radiation shield, so the cleanup required
workers to be suspended on metal grates directly over this
twenty foot deep pool of legal water.
Speaker 2: Imagine slipping on that grate, No thank you.
Speaker 1: They had to use massive, heavy vacuum poles guided by
grainy underwater cameras to painstakingly blindly suck up fifty five
cubic yards of this radioactive ooze.
Speaker 2: And what do they do with the empty pool?
Speaker 1: Once they finally got the sludge out and transferred it
to massive underground tanks, they realized the concrete walls of
the pool itself were entirely saturated with radiation. Of course
they were, so their ultimate solution they just filled the
entire empty basin to the brim with specialized grout, effectively
entombing the radioactive concrete forever.
Speaker 2: It is a recurring theme when we cannot clean the poison,
we entombe it. But perhaps the most glaringly absurd example
of this containment strategy is found in Weldon Spring, Missouri.
Speaker 1: Weldon Spring is my absolute favorite, if you can use
the word favorite for an environmental disaster example of how
absurd our psychological response to radiation can be.
Speaker 2: It's truly mind bobbling.
Speaker 1: During World War Two, the site was a massive munitions
plant manufacturing TNT. During the Cold War, the government repurposed
it as a uranium in richment facility and then they
just left. Yeah. When they finally decommissioned and abandoned the
site in the late nineteen sixties, they basically just locked
the gates and walked away, leaving massive open air pits
filled with unrefined uranium, radium, TNT residue, and asbestos, a
giant exposed toxic stew sitting right near the Missouri River, and.
Speaker 2: Their eventual solution for this multi generational hazard.
Speaker 1: Their grand solution was to just pile all the toxic rubble,
the contaminated soil, and the radioactive sludge into one giant
heap and build a massive hill over it.
Speaker 2: Just a giant hill a dirt.
Speaker 1: Literally just cover the apocalypse with a multi layered mound
of clay, rocks and dirt forty five feet high and
covering forty one acres. But here is the absolute kicker.
Local officials eventually decided to build a staircase up the
side of this massive radioactive tomb and open it to
the public as an educational park.
Speaker 2: They literally nicknamed it the Nuclear Wasted Venture Trail.
Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance required to name a uranium disposal mound
in adventure trail is truly staggering.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: I look at photographs of families standing on top of
this mound, and I am just bewildered by human psychology.
Who packs a picnic basket, grabs their binoculars and says, hey, kids,
let's go bird watching on top of the Nuclear waste
Adventure Trail.
Speaker 2: It's our deeply flawed, subconscious way of conquering our fears.
We turn the physical sites of our greatest, most terrifying
technological failures into literal tourist traps just to prove to
ourselves that we are still in control of the earth.
Speaker 1: We literally pave over the terror and erect an observation deck.
We attempt to sanitize the trauma.
Speaker 2: But as we pivot from these environmental cover ups and
structural tombs, we have to confront a reality that cannot
be paved over, no matter how much concrete we pour. Yeah,
we've discussed mutated flora bioaccumulating animals, and the hubris of
cleanup crews. But to truly understand the atomic age, we
must look at the absolute darkest reality, the precise moment
this incomprehensible power was intentionally strategic turned against human.
Speaker 1: Beings Ground Zero, August nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: The raw facts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
are incredibly sobering, and they demand our complete, unflinching attention
to understand the true weight of the sources we are
discussing absolutely. On the morning of August sixth, nineteen forty five,
the uranium two thirty five atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy
was detonated approximately nineteen hundred feet above the city of Hiroshima.
It delivered a blast equivalent to fifteen thousand tons of TNT.
Speaker 1: Fifteen thousand tons.
Speaker 2: The sheer, kinetic and thermal force completely vaporized five square
miles of the urban center in an instant causing estimated
seventy thousand direct instantaneous deaths.
Speaker 1: And just three days later, on August ninth, the United
States dropped the second weapon, the plutonium implosion type bomb
known as Fat Man.
Speaker 2: Yes, a crucial historical detail often overlooked is that Nagasaki
was not the primary target for that second strike. The
bomber boxcar was ordered to target the city of Kukura,
which housed massive arsenals.
Speaker 1: So why Nagasaki.
Speaker 2: The obscuring cloud cover and smoke from a previous fire
bombing raid forced the crew to divert to their secondary target.
They dropped the ten thousand pound weapon over the Urakami
Valley in Nagasaki. The topography contained the blast somewhat, but
it still generated a twenty two kiloton explosion. Between sixty
thousand and eighty thousand people were killed.
Speaker 1: The eyewitness accounts and the physical evidence of the immediate
aftermath are almost too visceral for the human mind to process.
The temperatures at the hypocenter, the point directly below the detonation,
reached upward of three thousand degrees celsius or five four
hundred degrees.
Speaker 2: Fahrenheit, unimaginable heat.
Speaker 1: At that extreme thermal intensity. Solid everyday materials don't just melt,
They behave like fluid boiling lava. If you visit the
Peace Memorial Museums today, you see these artifacts where a
glass and metal fused together into these twisted, otherworldly grotesque shapes.
It's horrifying to see a delicate ceramic sake bottle warped
and melted directly into a thick metal fence, a cluster
of copper coins melted together into a single unrecognizable lump
of slag bicycles, which are symbols of everyday mundane life,
turned into these warped, twisted sculptures of absolute devastation.
Speaker 2: And then, perhaps the most haunting physical evidence of the
thermal flash, the nuclear shadows.
Speaker 1: The shadows are the images from your sources that I
simply cannot stop thinking about. When the bombs detonated, the
intense instantaneous flash of thermal radiation, pure blinding heat and
light was so profound that it permanently bleached the exposed stone, asphalt,
and concrete across the cities.
Speaker 2: But if a person or an object was standing between
the blasts and the wall, their body absorbed that intense
thermal radiation, acting as a shield for the surface behind them.
Speaker 1: So they cast a permanent shadow.
Speaker 2: The mechanism is a brutal form of photographic exposure. The
unshielded stone is bleached white by the heat, while the
shielded stone retains its original darker color, creating a permanent,
ghostly silhouette burned directly into the architecture.
Speaker 1: You can walk up to a set of stone steps
at the Sumi Tomo Bank in Hiroshima and see the
exact dark outline of a human being sitting down, forever
captured in the literal fraction of a microsecond before their
body was entirely vaporized by the heat wave.
Speaker 2: It provides an immediate, deeply unsettling connection to a human
life that was abruptly violently erased from existence, and.
Speaker 1: The personal artifacts recovered from the rubble heavily reinforced that intimacy.
They found numerous pocket watches and wristwatches, and the ruins
that were permanently frozen the internal gears warped by the blast,
with the hands locked exactly at eight fifteen am, the
precise moment the blast wave hit Heroshimada.
Speaker 2: Time literally stopped for them.
Speaker 1: They found intact, heavily charred metal lunch boxes beneath collapsed
schools that still contained the blackened, carbonized remains of the
rice and peas that mothers had carefully prepared for their
children that very morning. They found pairs of wire rimmed glasses,
completely twisted and fused by the heat.
Speaker 2: There are these tiny intimate glimpses into quiet everyday morning
routines that were shattered in a microscae of atomic fire.
Speaker 1: And for those who were far enough from the hypocenter
to survive the initial thermal flash and the crushing pressure wave,
the survivors known as the hybocutia, the horror was only
just beginning.
Speaker 2: The immediate destruction gave way to the insidious, invisible killers.
They faced acute radiation sickness, severe deep tissue burns, complete
hair loss, uncontrollable internal hemorrhaging, and the catastrophic failure of
their immune systems.
Speaker 1: And then the meteorological nightmare arrived, the Black Rain.
Speaker 2: The Black Rain. It sounds entirely biblical, like an ancient plague,
but it was just terrifyingly real brutal atmospheric physics.
Speaker 1: The unprecedented power of the atomic explosion created a massive updraft,
sending thousands of tons of radioactive soot, pulverized debris, vaporized
building materials, and highly radioactive fission products high into the stratosphere.
Speaker 2: As this massive toxic brew cooled and mixed with the
natural moisture in the atmosphere, It condensed into mass, massive,
heavy rain.
Speaker 1: Drops, and the survivors, many of whom were desperately thirsty
and suffering from severe burns, looked up and found themselves
drenched in this thick, sticky, black downpour. They were opening
their mouths to catch the rain, completely unknowingly ingesting and
inhaling hyper concentrated lethal radioactive particles.
Speaker 2: The black rain acted as a devastating vector, spreading severe
concentrated contamination miles beyond the original blast radius, affecting thousands
of people who thought they had escaped the worst of the.
Speaker 1: Weapon, and the legacy of that exposure didn't end when
the rain stopped. It lasted for decades. In the years
following the war, hospitals documented a massive shocking spike in
leukemia and other aggressive cancers among the survivor populations.
Speaker 2: The ionizing radiation aggressively attacked the human DNA, causing severe
genetic mutations that were tragically passed down to the next generations.
Children born with cleft palates, clubbed feet, fused fingers, and
severe microceeedfully, and.
Speaker 1: That is strictly the biological toll not to mention them
immense crushing psychological trauma and intergenerational PTSD of surviving the
end of the world, which.
Speaker 2: Brings up a very profound, almost uncomfortable paradox when we
look at the modern state of those cities today.
Speaker 1: I really want to hear your analysis on this today.
If you travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are these beautiful, vibrant,
thriving modern metropolises. Right the background radiation is completely back
to normal, entirely safe levels. Millions of tourists visit them
every single year. The rubble is gone. The physical ability
of human beings to completely rebuild a city from atomic
ash is incredible, But does that erasure of the physical
ruins somehow mask the prominence of the trauma.
Speaker 2: It creates a profound historical tension. The physical rebuilding of
the cities is a necessary testament to incredible human resilience
and the desire to endure. But the trauma, the genetic
damage recorded in the DNA of the Hibakusha. The silent
story is told by the frozen watches, the permanent shadows
burned into the surviving stone. There remains eternally frozen time.
Speaker 1: So the city heals, but the scars don't fade exactly.
Speaker 2: The city moves forward, but the scars are anchored to
nineteen forty five. And this concept of spaces being frozen
in time, violently detached from the normal flow of history
is recurring theme when we look at the geographic aftermath
of nuclear events.
Speaker 1: It truly is the trauma leaves behind this lingering eeriness.
You look at the massive exclusion zones and they feel
like museums of sudden panic. Let's shift our focus back
to the abandoned spaces.
Speaker 2: Of the Chernobyl Zone Rupiat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the city of Pripia, which housed the plant workers,
is a massive ghost town that is slowly being devoured
by the surrounding pine forests. But when you step inside
the decaying buildings, the human panic of the nineteen eighty
six evacuation is perfectly chillingly preserved.
Speaker 2: The medical facilities within Pripiat are particularly evocative of that
specific terror.
Speaker 1: The hospitals are deeply unsettling. You walk down these peeling
corridors and the floors are completely littered with hundreds of
discarded ringes, rusted scalpels, and scattered medical supplies. It's a
snapshot of the frantic, desperate rush as doctors realize the
sheer scale of the radiation poisoning walking through their doors.
Speaker 2: There are rusted hospital beds sitting in empty wards. But
the strangest, most unnerving detail from the photographic.
Speaker 1: Surveys oh the chair.
Speaker 2: Yes, someone at some point dragged a massive, incredibly heavy,
rusted gynecologists' examination chare out of the hospital and just
left it sitting entirely alone in the middle of the
surrounding overgrown woods.
Speaker 1: It creates a deeply jarring, almost surrealist tableaux. It makes
absolutely no logical sense. Why would someone do that?
Speaker 2: It would take significant effort for multiple people to carry
that heavy metal chair out into the trees in a
zone where lingering outside means absorbing radiation. It feels like
a piece of dark performance art borne out of pure trauma.
Speaker 1: And the schools are just as bad. You find classrooms
completely covered in hundreds of child sized rubber gas masks,
just scattered blindly across the floor, rotting dolls, open textbooks
and toys left behind by children who were told they
were only evacuating for a three day weekend.
Speaker 2: It's heart wrenching.
Speaker 1: There's the alley of memory, This incredibly sad quiet walkway
in the zone, lined with wooden signs bearing the names
of all the erased, bulldozed villages that people had to flee,
communities that literally no longer exist on any modern map.
Speaker 2: And within the decaying ruins of these abandoned structures, urban
explorers and researchers have stumbled upon some truly bizarre, unexplained
artifacts that defy immediate logic, like.
Speaker 1: The discovery made by the photographer Miriam Weaser back in
twenty sixteen. She was exploring an abandoned, highly irradiated laboratory
building deep in the Chernobyl Zone, and she stumbled upon
this massive, forgotten collection of old glass pickle jars.
Speaker 2: But they weren't filled with preserved vegetables.
Speaker 1: No, someone had used them to store these weird, unidentified,
grotesque animal and fish specimens, suspending them in murky formaldehyde,
just rows and rows of creepy mutated jarfish sitting in
the radioactive dark. To this day, no one knows exactly
who collected them, whether they were pre disaster biological samples,
or if some rogue scientists was secretly cataloging the mutated
wildlife after the blast.
Speaker 2: The environment of the exclusion zone has itself become a
hazard in totally unexpected, highly complex ways. The human interventions
often worsened the ecological.
Speaker 1: Reality, like with Copachi Village exactly.
Speaker 2: Take the fate of the Copachi Village. Located dangerously close
to the Chernobyl reactor. Like Pripiat, it was heavily contaminated
by the initial fallout, but the Soviet authorities decided to
handle it differently. Instead of leaving the wooden houses standing,
they brought in heavy machinery and completely bulldozed the entire
village into the earth, attempting to permanently bury.
Speaker 1: Their radiation, which turned out to be a massive catastrophic mistake.
Speaker 2: A profound hydrological miscalculation. By burying the highly contaminated wooden
structures and top soiled deep underground, they brought the radioactive
isotopes into direct sustained contact with the local shallow water table.
Oh no, no. This accelerated the spread of the radiation, poisoning
the underground aquifers far more severely and rapidly than if
they had simply left the contaminated buildings standing above ground
to slowly weather away.
Speaker 1: We just keep trying to bury the monster and it
keeps poisoning the well. And it's not just the water
that's broken, it's the actual cycle of decay. The zombie
leaves phenomenon in Prypia is terrifying.
Speaker 2: The lack of decomposition is a fascinating anomaly.
Speaker 1: Scientists conducting soil surveys notice that in the most heavily
I radiated parts of the Red Forest, the dead pine
needles and leaves that fall from the trees simply aren't decomposing.
They just lay there perfectly intact, year after year.
Speaker 2: We have to look at the microbiology to understand why
the ambient radiation levels in that specific soil are so
intensely high that they have essentially sterilized the ground. The
radiation has completely killed off the microscopic ecosystem microbes that
specialized fungui, the worms, and the insects that naturally feed
on a breakdown organic mass sous.
Speaker 1: You have decades of dry, highly radioactive leaves and deadwood
just piling up on the forest flour, perfectly preserved in
a state of suspended animation, which creates this massive terrifying
risk fire. Yes, if a lightning strike or a careless
spark ignites that deep layer of dry radioactive tender. It
could trigger a massive, uncontrollable forest fire that would pull
all that trap caesium and strontium back into the atmosphere,
sending a highly toxic cloud of radioactive ash right back
over the populations of Europe.
Speaker 2: The entire environment is just completely frozen, acting as a
ticking time bomb.
Speaker 1: It highlights the ultimate paradox of humanity's relationship with radiation.
We recognize it as an invisible, omnipresent death. And yet
and this is perhaps the most confounding element in the
sources were reviewed. While the vast majority of us rightly
fear and flee from these exclusion zones, there is a
subculture of people who actively intentionally seek out heavily irradiated.
Speaker 2: Environments the radon health minds.
Speaker 1: You are referring to the absolutely wild phenomenon of the
radon health mines. When I read this, I was stunned.
In places like Boulder, Montana and parts of Germany, there
are these old, abandoned deep shaft uranium mines because they
are surrounded by decaying uranium or the caves naturally fill
with concentrated radon gas. Now, just for context, radon is
a highly radioactive, colorless, odorless.
Speaker 2: Gas is extremely dangerous.
Speaker 1: The United States Environmental Protection Agency literally lists long term
radon exposure as the second leading cause of lung cancer
in the country, right behind smoking.
Speaker 2: It is a well documented, highly dangerous, scientifically prove in carcinogen.
Speaker 1: And yet despite all the medical warnings, people actively travel
to these mines. They pay a hefty admission fee to
the mine owners, They take a rickety elevator eighty five
feet deep underground, They sit in folding lawn chairs in
the damp dark for hours at a time, and they
just intentionally inhale deep breadths of this radioactive gas.
Speaker 2: They firmly believe in a fringe theory called radiation hormesis,
the idea that a low dose of toxic radiation actually
stimulates the immune system and cures their severe arthritis, their
chronic asthma, and their debilitating joint pain.
Speaker 1: It is a fascinating, deeply ingrained psychological paradox. How do
we possibly reconcile this? How do we justify a species
that flees in absolute justified terror from the invisible death
clouds in Ukraine and Japan, but then turns around and
willingly pays a premium admission fee to sit in a
folding chair and breathe in radioactive gas deep inside a
mountain in Montana.
Speaker 2: It speaks to a desperate, ancient human desire to harness
the uncontrollable, to believe that this awesome, universally destructive power
of the atom can somehow be tamed, inverted, and utilized
as a miracle cure for our own physical.
Speaker 1: Frailties, like trying to put a leash on a hurricane.
Speaker 2: We split the atom to prove our dominance, and the
people in those minds want to believe they are the
ultimate masters of the invisible world, capable of bending a
lethal carcinogen into a healing vapor.
Speaker 1: But as our deep dive today has thoroughly proven, nature
fundamentally rejects being mastered. And when we push the natural
order too far, when we scramble the basic building blocks
of reality, nature pushes back in unpredictable, horrifying ways, Which
brings me to the perfect way to cap off this exploration.
Speaker 2: I know where you're going with us.
Speaker 1: We've spent the hour talking about real documented mutations, the
giant twisted sunflowers, the fasciation of the Fukushima daisies, the
massive bores. I want to connect those real, terrifying botanical
facts back to humanity's oldest, darkest fears of avengeful Earth,
because long before we split the atom, we had the
folklore of carnivorous flora, the primal.
Speaker 2: Deeply rooted mythological concept that the plant kingdom could rise up,
abandon its passive state, and violently consume human life.
Speaker 1: Exactly before we were afraid of invisible radiation, we were
terrified of the deep jungle. Let's look at the historical
hoaxes and legends. In eighteen eighty seven, an author named J. W.
Buell wrote a terrifying account of the Yachtaveo tree, supposedly
hidden deep in the jungles of South America.
Speaker 2: The man Eating tree.
Speaker 1: He claimed to possess a thick, short trunk surrounded by
massive muscular tendrils resting on the ground. The legend stated
that if a traveler stepped near the trunk, the tendrils,
which were covered in vicious hooked barbes, would spring up
with the speed of striking snakes, wrap around the victim,
and slowly crush them to death to absorb their blood.
Speaker 2: A legend that echoes the architecture of the famous eighteen
seventy four journalistic hoax perpetrated by Edmund Spencer.
Speaker 1: The Madagascar Tree. Spencer published a highly detailed, entirely fabricated
letter in the New York World allegedly written by a
German explorer named Carl Leech.
Speaker 2: It was incredibly detailed.
Speaker 1: The letter claimed Leech had discovered a brutal, isolated tribe
in Madagascar called them Codos. He claimed he witnessed the
tribe violently sacrifice a woman by forcing her at spear
point to climb the trunk of a giant pineapple shaped tree.
According to the hoax, the tree's massive palmate leaves violently
snapped shut around her, crushing her to death, while the
trunk secreted a thick, intoxicating fluid that literally drank her blood.
And people believed it.
Speaker 2: And we see these botanical myths continuing into the modern era,
reflecting ongoing anxieties about the untamed wilderness.
Speaker 1: Totally, it wasn't just Victorian hoaxes. In eighteen ninety one,
a naturalist named Leroy Dunstan claimed he barely escaped the
vampire vines while exploring the remote swamps of Nicaragua. The
local guide supposedly called it the devil snare, like in
Harry Potter exactly Dunstan claimed his hunting dog got hopelessly
tangled in a dark, creeping vine, and when he tried
to hack the plant away with his knife, the severed
vine actively secreted a thick, black tar like sap that
instantly burned and blistered his flesh like a concentrated industrial acid.
Speaker 2: And there are modern examples too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Even as recently as two thousand and seven, villagers
in a remote region of South India panicked over a
tree they called the Killara or the tiger tree. A
local herder swore he saw the branches of this tree
actively reach down, yank one of his heavy cows entirely
off the ground, and begin physically consuming it. The entire
village allegedly had to run out with axis to furiously
chop the branches back to save the panicked animal.
Speaker 2: These stories from the Adveo to the Tiger Tree are
spectacular fictions, but they serve a crucial grounding purpose in
human psychology. We have always been deeply, primely terrified at
the natural world turning its immense power against us.
Speaker 1: We've always imagined the forest seeking active, violent vengeance for
our intrusions. But as we've seen today, when we look
at the actual legacy of the atomic age, the truth
is far more sobering.
Speaker 2: We didn't need cursed vampire vines or mythological blood drinking
pineapples exactly.
Speaker 1: We didn't need ancient witchcraft or unexplored jungles. We just
needed to split the atom to turn a simple, beautiful
field of sunflowers into a nightmare of twisted, mutated giants.
We just needed a specialized reaction to melt down, to
turn the life giving rain into a black, toxic poison
that alters the DNA of generations.
Speaker 2: Let's pull all these threads together to wrap up this
massive exploration.
Speaker 1: We've journeyed from massive crumbling concrete tombs attempting to cover
glowing multen nuclear lava to the tragedy of an eight
legged frog outside a decommissioned plant.
Speaker 2: We've looked at the deeply somber, permanent shadows burned into
the stone steps of Hiroshima, the catastrophic hubris of burying
plutonium and shallow dirt pits, and the wild radioactive bores
aggressively reclaiming the abandoned farmlands of Japan.
Speaker 1: We've seen funguy that literally eat gamma radiation for breakfast,
and people who pay a premium to sit in a
dark cave and breathe in carcinogenic gas.
Speaker 2: It leaves us with a profound, almost uncomfortable realization about
our place in the world. We split the atom to
master the universe, to prove our ultimate, unassailable dominance over
the physical laws of nature, but in doing so we
created massive silent exclusion zones on our own planet, where
humanity is now permanently physically exiled.
Speaker 1: We created zones where nature, freed from our presence but
poisoned by our technology, has been forced into entirely new,
chaotic and deeply unpredictable evolutionary paths.
Speaker 2: Before we sign off, consider this one final note from
the research. A concept that completely reframes everything we've discussed.
Speaker 1: Go ahead.
Speaker 2: Some prominent geologists and scientists now theorized that because our
modern world has unleast so much atomic energy, future archaeologists,
perhaps millions of years from now, won't track the existence
of our human civilization by our ruined concrete buildings or
our rusted bridges.
Speaker 1: What will they look for.
Speaker 2: They will track us by the distinct artificial layer of
radioactive isotopes, the caesium and the plutonium that we have
permanently compressed into the Earth's crust. We haven't just scarred
the surface with our bombs and our meltdowns. We've essentially
engineered our own geological epoch. The radioactive layer will be
our ultimate fossil.
Speaker 1: A permanent glowing signature in the stone. That is a
heavy thought to leave on. So, after diving through all
of this, here's my direct question for you, the listener.
Speaker 2: I'm curious to hear the answers to this.
Speaker 1: Knowing everything we just discussed about the chaotic, invisible, and
mutated reality of these spaces, if you were guaranteed absolute
one hundred percent safety from the radiation like magical suit
with no health risks, whatsoever, would you ever venture into
one of these deep exclusion zones to witness this bizarre
reclaimed reality firsthand? Or do you believe that some doors,
once we've locked them, are better left permanently respectfully closed.
Speaker 2: Tough call, it really is.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment down below to let me know what
you think. Thank you for providing these incredible sources and
thank you for joining us on this intense journey. Today
on Thrilling Threads, we promise more mind bending explorations next time.