The day mother nature flexed on 20th century nuclear physics

It’s fun and games now, but at the time naturally-depleted Uranium was discovered, the first thought was “holy shit, did someone just siphon off a whole bunch enriched Uranium?”

Yeah! So uranium-235 has a half-life of 700 million years, and all of it on Earth was formed by a supernova before the solar system formed, so it’s been decaying ever since. The Earth, being 4.6 billion years old, has gone through 6-7 half lives of U-235, meaning natural uranium was close to 50% enriched when the Earth was formed.

Learning this inspired one of my favorite ideas for a semi-fantasy world, where, with this much more enriched natural uranium, there is a holy forge built around an outcropping of a divine metal that heats when you pour water on it. The cult around the forge believes that gnomes are the chosen of the god because they suffer the Lost-Ark-like curse of working the forge the least. Rather than being associated with the symptoms of lead poisoning, their forge god is associated with the symptoms of radiation poisoning, holy stigmata, blindness and tumors as the emanations of divine favor.

Mother Nature doing a better job than the Soviet Union

Modern Nuclear Reactors be like: “Welcome BACK to another Nuclear Reaction Video! Remember to comment like and subscribe! Let’s get to it!”

For the record, this is still my number one alien conspiracy theory. It takes modern nations billions to enrich uranium enough to react. You’re telling me it just happened, in multiple (16) separate concentrations in places that look a damn a lot like where life would store spent uranium. The consensus that its natural was too quick I’m sorry this is the hill I die on I don’t believe this one aliens