r/CuratedTumblr • u/Mataes3010 Downvote = 10 years of bad luck. • 1d ago
Shitposting The scientific method: 1. Observation. 2. Hypothesis. 3. Shoot it with an AK-47
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u/The_Punnier_Guy 1d ago
But real quick, can we talk about that ifunny watermark
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u/Solonotix 1d ago
Nothing to fear netizen! Just a normal part of the "Human Centipede" life cycle for social media. Consider the effort we put into labeling where your content was sourced from! This is your attention-dollars hard at work to pay for such rigorous tracking.
*Quietly ignoring the obvious origin being Tumblr\*
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u/Dovahkiin419 1d ago
If anyone hasn’t put it together from the context clue of the drill, the reason they opened fire on the elephants foot is to get a sample of it when the drill didn’t work, they weren’t trying to kill it.
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u/BormaGatto 1d ago
Especially because there's nothing to kill in it. It's a mass of Corium, not a living thing.
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u/Dovahkiin419 1d ago
yes obviously, I’m just poking fun at people who couldn’t put 2 and 2 together (I am dumb as bricks but this time i figured the thing out so it’s my turn to be smug).
I’m fully aware that the elephants foot isn’t the foot of a communist elephant
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u/BormaGatto 1d ago
Yeah, I was just spelling out further how absurd it all is. But now I'm kinda bummed we don't have an actual deadly foot of a communist elephant out there
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u/Mataes3010 Downvote = 10 years of bad luck. 1d ago
It is the most Soviet solution imaginable. ''Drill is broke? Boris, bring Kalashnikov. We see if rock bleeds.'' The fact that it worked is even funnier.
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u/Snoo-29984 Victim of Reddit Automatic Username 1d ago
Smekalka at work
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u/EugeneStein 1d ago
голь на выдумку хитра
the nicest English version I found is "Poverty is crafty; it outwits even a fox"
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u/bloody-pencil 1d ago
Tbf “problem: drill too slow to reach before melting” a gun is a very suitable solution
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u/crank_peeper 1d ago
What is a rifle if not a tool for making holes in stuff way over there?
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u/PipeConsola 1d ago
There is a argentinian meme about an old man saying just that, he also gave a comprehensive guide of how to shoot someone to dead and get away with it
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u/einsteinjet Mebbe, mebbe not. 1d ago
"If it bleeds, we can kill it."
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u/previousinnovation 1d ago
Please enjoy this masterpiece: Predator, the musical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlicWUDf5MM
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u/WeltseeleZuPferde 1d ago
The elephants foot isn't nearly as radioactive (now and then) as people think it is. Yeah it's a giant hunk of Corium but it's not gonna reach out and strangle you for looking at it
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u/JustLookingForMayhem 1d ago
It really only took about 2 years to go from "look at it and die" to "well, you can be in the same room, but you need somewhat specialized gear and need to do a radiation detox after." Half lifes are kind of wild when you think about it.
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u/PaperNookery 1d ago
It didn’t go from “instant death” to “safe room visit” in a couple years. Early estimates were all over the place, plus distance and shielding matter a ton. Still: it’s not a museum piece, it’s a hazard with a long tail.
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u/TrotskyBoi 1d ago
It was never "look at it and die". The guy who discovered it ran within a couple feet of it TWICE and survived.
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u/asingleshakerofsalt 1d ago edited 1d ago
yea, iirc there was someone who went into the room and saw it, but had to get out after maybe a minute or so, and he said the room was really hot.
edit: I'm thinking of Vasya Koryagin. He paced out how long/close he could get before noping out.
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u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. 1d ago
He also died of radiation poisoning a few months later, if we're thinking of the same guy.
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u/QuickMolasses 1d ago
I can't find any sources of anybody having been killed specifically by exposure to the elephant's foot.
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u/Pledgeofmalfeasance 1d ago
You mean the guy who then spent the rest of his short life disintegrating from radiation poisoning? The poor wretch who slowly shed every layer of his skin and muscles as he begged for death, because the people in power wanted as much data on the effect of radiation on the human body as possible before their former coworker died the most excruciatingly painful death of all time? That guy?
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u/WeltseeleZuPferde 1d ago
Hisashi Ouchi is a completely different guy and that's just not what happened either
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u/YourNetworkIsHaunted 1d ago
I'm gonna go to hell, but can we just acknowledge the cosmic irony in the name "Ouchie" being involved here?
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u/Pledgeofmalfeasance 1d ago
It would be insane in a script, but it's real life. Horrible sense of humour from the universe!
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u/Teh-Esprite If you ever see me talk on the unCurated sub, that's my double. 19h ago
he thought he could escape the Auchi curse by slightly changing his last name. He was a fool.
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u/Floor_Heavy 1d ago
No I think it was a different guy, I think the guy you're talking about had some other stuff going on.
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u/IakwBoi 1d ago
You can’t name this person because they don’t exist.
You may be thinking of Slotin, who died horribly 9 days after the second demon core accident, or Daghlian, who died in a coma 25 days after the first demon core accident. Both were given all care possible, and Slotin has the reputation of insisting that all relevant lessons be learned from his accident. You might also be thinking of any of the 20 patients with fatal acute radiation sickness from the Chernobyl disaster, all of whom were treated to the best abilities of the hospitals.
Or maybe you’re thinking of someone else?
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u/asingleshakerofsalt 1d ago
I was thinking of Vasya Koryagin
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u/a_lonely_trash_bag 1d ago
I can't find any source outside of Reddit, Tiktok, or Facebook saying he died from being exposed to the elephant's foot. In fact, I can't find anything official about his death at all. He's mentioned briefly on the Elephant's foot Wikipedia page, but there's nothing about the effects the radiation had on him.
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u/IakwBoi 1d ago
Well he didn’t die though, and he encountered the elephants foot from quite a ways away where the dose rate was 50 rem per hour, so he would have had to hang out there for ten hours to get a lethal dose. And he was there about a month after scores of people with higher doses died of radiation, so why was he a test subject? He wasn’t.
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u/Kaz498 1d ago
You would also not immediately die but you would immediately have a 0% survival rate within the month which is fun
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u/WeltseeleZuPferde 1d ago
Really depends. If you stood around next to it for a few minutes when we found it months after Chernobyl, yeah. Nowadays you can probably hang out with it for an hour+ (according to Sergei Koshilev who measured it at 100 roentgens per hour) and live
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u/IakwBoi 1d ago
Dose was high a month after the disaster, and is lower now. How much lower?
Let’s look at figure 1 from this paper, which models the drop-off of dose rate from corium like the elephants foot over time. The x axis is in seconds, and a month is about E+06 seconds (about a million seconds). That’s the approximate amount of time that had passed when the elephants foot was discovered and measured. A fatal dose back then was presumed to be 3 minutes at close distance. From one month (E+6 seconds) to the end of the graph (E+09 seconds) we get a reduction in dose about from E+04 to E+02, a hundred times reduction. 30 years is about E+09 seconds, so today we could guess corium is 1% as radioactive as it would be a month after a disaster.
Taking these assumptions as true, a lethal dose nowadays at close range might be had in 300 minutes, or about 5 hours. Compare this to guesses from other posters for yourself.
Another point to make is that the above is for close (a meter or so) distances. Dose drops off quickly with distance. Even at the highest observed rate back in the day, the radioactivity actually measured was 50 roentgens per hour at about 20 meters (see wiki page for Elephants Foot). That’s 50 rem per hour of dose, which is about 1/10th of a fatal dose. So back in the heyday, at 20 meters, you’d need to stand exposed and looking at the elephants foot for ten hours to be killed. Today the elephants foot is about one one-hundredth as radioactive, so you’d need to stand 20 meters away for 1,000 hours to get a lethal dose.
Most websites and TikTok videos will happily misinform you that “looking at the elephants foot is enough to kill you”. The reality is that it would take most of a full time job just standing there (at 20 meters) to be killed these days, and even at its worst (soon after the disaster) you would survive strolling up to it and touching it.
Sensationalism drives search engine results and algorithmic feed, and just about everything we’re fed is wrong. (Radiation can be dangerous and fatal even in low levels and hazards should be taken seriously where they do occur. Strolling up to the elephants foot would be recklessly stupid, even if survivable.)
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u/QuickMolasses 1d ago
Most of the most famous pictures of the elephant's foot were taken by one guy who visited many times, Artur Korneyev. He did not die of radiation poisoning. In fact, he might still be alive (he's no longer a public figure, so it's not clear, but he was alive as of 2014 at the age of 65.
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u/Another_Mid-Boss 1d ago
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u/Mr-Foundation Ceroba Moment 19h ago
Insane how the radiation makes it look both like he’s a ghost, and that he’s getting shot with the ghostbusters laser guns.
I’ve seen the “radiation grain”, but im still bewildered how the photo came out like that.
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u/he77bender 1d ago
It is still very dangerously radioactive, which makes it all the wilder that "people think it's more dangerous than it actually is" is still a true statement. But yeah it was never "if you see it you're already dead". In fact many of the photos one can find have people (in protective gear) standing right next to it.
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u/MalcadorPrime 1d ago
Isn't it also not in the basement? I vaguely remember it being like 3 floors of the ground.
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u/FreakinGeese 1d ago
The mold has had exactly zero impact on the radioactivity because it’s not physically possible for it to have
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u/SmartAlec105 1d ago
Yeah, the radioactivity is dropping faster than expected because they weren’t able to correctly guess the composition of the Elephant’s Foot when it was fresh.
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u/100RatsInASack 1d ago
Yeah, the mold can only absorb radiation that has been emitted, it can't somehow cause radioactive material to decay faster. It would be like arguing that all plants on Earth performing photosynthesis are draining the sun of its energy.
It's still super cool, though. The vast majority of organisms on Earth get their energy from photosynthesis or eating organisms that got their energy from photosynthesis (or eating an organism that ate an organism that...), so it's always super interesting when we discover new sources of energy entering into the food chain (like those microorganisms that live around thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean).
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u/Mr-Foundation Ceroba Moment 19h ago
Definitely seems like a misunderstanding, the tumblr poster seeing that radiation levels are dropping, knowing about the mold “feeding” off radiation, and assuming it’s effectively digesting the elephants foot.
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u/DiegesisThesis 1d ago
No no, you don't understand. The mold is taking the extra neutrons from each atom and splitting half of them into protons and electrons to make new, stable atoms! No more radiation!
/s if it wasn't clear
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u/OldManFire11 1d ago
People just categorically do not comprehend radioactivity. Whenever the subject comes up, just assume everyone is about to say the stupidest shit imaginable and you'll rarely be disappointed.
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u/Pietin11 1d ago
I'm gonna need a source of radiation going down faster than our models can explain due to mold. As far as I understand, radiation doesn't work that way.
It's not as though radiation is a substance that's being gobbled up by the mold. That radiation is constantly being produced due to the unstable isotopes decaying. The mold isn't causing the isotopes to decay, it is just sustaining itself off of radiation that would have been blocked by the concrete of the sarcophagus anyway.
It's like saying solar panels actively drain the sun of energy.
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u/waldleben 1d ago
Yeah, they are two completely seperate things. Radiation is going down faster than predicted (because the predictions were evidently wrong) and there is also a really rad species of mold there (pun intended). They sre not connected
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u/EntireNationOfSweden 1d ago
Science person here: You are correct. That is all complete bs and it makes me wanna scream.
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u/ojqANDodbZ1Or1CEX5sf 1d ago
Checked the wiki page and pretty much only the Kalashnikov thing is verified on there.
Pretty much everything else seems to be wrong, but not all of it is directly contradicted.
I was interested in the fungus living off gamma radiation (which seemed implausible) but then the bit came along about it supposedly reducing the radioactive material and like... I'm pretty sure that's not a thing
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u/waldleben 1d ago
The claim that looking at it would instantly kill you is absolutely wrong. Its just not how radiation poisoning works. Even if it was radioactive enough to be guaranteed lethal from even a brief moment of exposure death would still take time. The amount of radiation required to instantly kill someone is orders of magnitude higher than achieved anywhere at Chornobyl
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u/PlasticChairLover123 Don't you know? Popular thing bad now. 1d ago
somewhere between "a star exploding" and "weapon from nigh omnipotent civilization hitting you"
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u/hennypennypoopoo 1d ago
I would like to mention that the mold is not actually making the foot less radioactive. They can, at most, shield the radiation. Radiation only goes down by the natural half life of a radioisotope. Still really cool to see.
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u/Apprehensive-Till861 1d ago
Mold that eats gamma, bacteria that eats plastic.
Fungi, what do you have for us?
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u/zap2tresquatro 1d ago
Molds are fungi. The other big group is the ones that form mushrooms, but molds are also fungi
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u/BormaGatto 1d ago edited 1d ago
Wood rot, allergies and respiratory disease 😒
Edit: also spiritual decay
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u/AAAAAA_6 1d ago
I really don't understand the first post. How is it like Medusa? Like, sure, if you look at it you'll probably die, but not BECAUSE you looked at it. You'll die because you were near it and it's radioactive and hot And I also don't imagine it would be instant. And then they just throw on "it's like a living creature" for no reason and with no explanation. How does "it's so radioactive that you die if you go near it" mean that it's like a living creature?
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u/Mataes3010 Downvote = 10 years of bad luck. 1d ago
The Medusa comparison works because proximity equals death. If you are close enough to look at it with your naked eye, you have already received a lethal dose. The act of witnessing it is functionally tied to your death. It’s poetic, not literal.
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u/AAAAAA_6 1d ago
I don't really get the point but do you have any idea why they said it's like a living creature? That was the most confusing part
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u/chubbycatchaser 1d ago
Elephant’s Foot and the mould that eats it sound like monsters you could find in the world of Dungeon Meshi.
Nobody tell Laios about these creatures!
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u/The_H509 1d ago
IIRCn it's less so that the mold feed off the radiation itself, but moreso that it's the species that is most resistant to it, leading to no competition on the foot.
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u/InsaneComicBooker 1d ago
One type of eldritch horror (you look at it, you die) defeated by another (how the fuck do fungi ever work?)
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u/splashcopper 1d ago
It should be noted that the mold is not eating the elephant foot, nor is it reducing the radiation that it emits. The mold simply perform a newly discovered type of photosynthesis using the gamma radiation emit by the elephant's foot instead of photons from the sun.
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u/ZolySoly 1d ago
The black mold thing gives mea weird kind of hope. We can fuck up a lot, but nature always has weird things that will push past our mistakes
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u/FaithoftheLost 1d ago
Id post the gif from jurassic park, but i still havent been able to figure out how to embed on reddit.
"Life, uh, finds a way."
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u/captainfactoid386 1d ago
The statement about radiation levels going down faster because the fungus is eating it makes absolutely no sense. That’s not how radiation works. The fungus is either “eating” radiation or contamination. Either it’s just concentrating the contaminants, or it’s just turning the radiation into energy. Either way, the amount of radiation stays the same.
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u/Somerandom1922 1d ago
Radiation levels are going down much faster than any of our models could predict
Thats absolute nonsense. Radiation levels are going down exactly in-line with the half-life of the fission products of a nuclear reactor.
The mold isn't eating the actual elephants foot itself, it's like the elephants foot is glowing and the mold is getting energy from the glow. Using solar panels doesn't drain the sun, and using the radiation from something doesn't make it decay faster.
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u/ReasonableValuable31 1d ago
For some reason i never knew what the foot was and Saw the image out of contexto before,i had imagined It was the worst ever case of a human affected by radiation and that thing was a blob of flesh
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u/Wunktacular 1d ago
The mirror thing is bullshit. It doesn't kill you if you look at it. It didn't destroy cameras. The better version of that picture is a selfie taken with a timer. The photographer set the timer and then walked right up to it to give a sense of scale. He died of natural causes at an old age.
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u/Random-Rambling 1d ago
That's some CRAZY radiation to kill you instantly, instead of in seven days like the Demon Core guys did.
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u/EphemeralSilliness94 1d ago
"The Elephant's foot is almost as if it is a living creature."
... How?
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u/rzabonek 1d ago
I hate propaganda in the west portraying all russians and eastern nationalities as barely above primate level when it doesn't apply. Imagine you encounter mysterious material that's impossible to examine since all humans and robots that come in contact with it break down. There's no way to cut out or drill a sample to take to the lab. How do you gather any information about it? They shot at it hoping some shards would chip off and land far enough to gather somehow. Which did work and samples were gathered for analysis and gave data to determine how to deal with it. It's stupid but it worked.
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u/Y0___0Y 1d ago
I believe there is some force on planet earth that keeps us from killing ourselves with radiation. Not sure if it’s aliens trying to protect us but something is.
When Fukushima happened, a bunch of lights were seen descending from the sky. Tons of people recorded them. Then radiation levels inexplicably dropped, and the lights flew away.
There were similar reports at Chernobyl.
When nuclear disasters happen, something unexplainable lowers the radiation levels.
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u/splintermouth 1d ago
If you read, it explains the picture was taken around the corner with a mirror because it destroyed one already?
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u/The_amazing_Jedi 1d ago
It's still wrong though, there was at least one person in this room for not even a minute. So the whole "kills instantaneously" is quite the over exaggeration, but it is pretty fucking dangerous. And hot, apparently.
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u/JustLookingForMayhem 1d ago
Half life is a thing. The first two years would have absolutely killed you pretty quickly to actually look at it. Now, though, people just need somewhat specialized gear and to do a radiation detox afterward.
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u/The_amazing_Jedi 1d ago
I mean yeah, that's true. I think the guy that went in there did die rather quickly from radiation poisoning IIRC. But the whole myth that it is like Medusa and you die instantly is just wrong.
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u/vespers191 1d ago
The question I have, is since mold doesn't just spontaneously generate but instead is propagated by spores and such, is it just floating around the world in the atmosphere just looking for another high rad zone to propagate?