#nuclear bomb core

[pastel-soft-grunge-kitty]

∆PØC∆LYPSE ∆ESTHETIC ☢️🌋❄️🌊

[slightlyspooky]

Bad idea:

A hammer that contains a subcritical nuclear mass. The mass briefly goes critical via some mechanism when the hammer strikes something.

You and your victim both die of accute radiation sickness a few days later.

[toffee32]

a doodle I forgot to poast, from when I read Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix and I was extremely amused when they mention that Ferrus taught Fulgrim about nuclear bombs back in Terra. So I drew them with a demon core lol

[asha-mage]

Because I am coping with current world events in a completely normal manner I've been thinking a lot about how one of the tensions that underpins the whole of Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan as 'person who likes history' vs Robert Jordan as 'person who had to live through the Cold War.'

Something that can be really hard for people born after the Cold War (like myself) to grasp is that for a long time history was the ultimate reassurance against existential dread. Civilizations could rise and fall, empires could crumble, disasters could wipe out a hell of a lot of people, but human beings as a species, where never in any real danger of dying out. New countries would eventually rise out of the ashes of old ones, societies would change to be unrecognizable but they would still be there, religions, cultures ideologies etc might all die out but the people would still be around. History provided the ultimate comfort: whatever happened in our brief finite lives human beings as an group would eventually be fine.

But that changed after World War 2 and the invention of a little something called the atomic bomb. Suddenly human beings had the potential to destroy not just ourselves but all life on earth if things went wrong enough. For the first time in history their was no real guarantee that human beings as a species would make it, and in fact their was a whole lot of reason to believe based on the patterns of history that eventually that power would get used and human kind would destroy itself. That was the Cold War- two nuclear states who really really wanted to start blasting each other to pieces but couldn't without risking the end of life as we know it.

The tension between these two realities- the assurance of history that life will go on and the reality that human beings could in theory actually end the fucking world, is built into the core of Wheel of Time. The first lines assure us: time is cyclical. It's all happened before. It's all going to happen again. Human being will live out the same stories in endless variation, the same patterns will always reemerge. And the world has already survived one apocalyptic event: the Breaking, and come out the other side not doing fantastically, but still around. The world has been reshaped forever and whole eras of progress have been undone, but humanity remains.

But at the same time doomsday weapons with the potential to wipe out the species are everywhere. The Choden Kal can crack the planet open like an egg. Balefire burns apart time itself. A plague of madness is waiting for any old schmo to wander into it's den and carry it back outside so it can infect and destroy everyone. Their are all kinds of different big glowing red 'destroy humanity' buttons laying around in WoT just begging to get pressed. And in a way the Dark One is the ultimate version of that because that button has already been pressed. The Bore has been opened. Left alone humanity is fucked and everyone knows it. It can be delayed and pushed back, but never truly stopped, except by the intervention of destiny- the intervention of the Dragon. That's the core conflict of the series. Rand is struggling to stop a missile that's already been launched, prevent an end everyone can see coming. It's not just 'I need to defeat the big bad evil overlord or everything will be bad forever', it's 'I need to stop the Dark One or that's the end of human beings as an idea'.

What's especially interesting is that Jordan isn't even framing the Wheel/Pattern as uniformly good, because it's history and history is messy and complicated and full of contradictions and no easy answers. The Wheel, the Pattern, is not some force for righteousness. It's a neutral fact of existence. Not what's best or what's ideal- those are subjective and grounded in human understanding of the world- but what's necessary and what's true. To want to break free from history, to break the Wheel, is to want to break free of being human. That's what the Forsaken all truly want (as I have talked about before): to leave behind their humanity, and their willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to do it. What that looks like and what motivates that desire is different for each of them but their united in that common goal, and they all either disregard the consequences of what it will mean or don't understand them.

The story of history is one of incredible suffering and amazing triumph: it's full of heartache and joy in equal measure. It's not fair or just or simple to understand, but it is a reflection of who we all are collectively. The fight to preserve the Wheel isn't a fight to preserve what is good or ideal, it is a fight to preserve what is human. Because as long as the story can keep going, we can have hope for tomorrow.

And Jordan promises right from the offing that their will always be a tomorrow. No beginnings. No endings. Just whatever comes next.

As we enter a period of history that is the most uncertain it's ever been in my lifetime, I can't help but I think of the incredible courage and strength it must have taken be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon and stubbornly insist that there would be a tomorrow. The man wrote eleven of the best books ever made exploring this exact struggle- about never giving in to despair or pain, never buying into the belief that things are hopeless, that humanity sucks and we're all doomed.

And remembering that...I don't know. It makes a little easier to breath and keep walking towards tomorrow myself.

[foone]

I'm going to program a nuclear bomb and then kill someone by dropping it on them.

Not from a plane or anything, it's not gonna detonate*, It's just heavy and I'm going to push it off the roof and it'll land on them.

* I have encountered at least one person who argued that nuclear weapons do not, in fact, "detonate", they instead "activate". The weird "detonation" describes an explosion: while nuclear weapons do use explosives, they're just used to implode the core until it reaches prompt criticality. That said, I still wrote "detonate".

[sprintingowl]

After The Bomb

There's an official Fallout ttrpg. I've read it. It's okay!

There's also, completely fanmade, After The Bomb.

And I want to put After The Bomb on your radar, because it's very, very good.

ATB uses a simple d20 + stat system, with bonuses from gear and perks factored in. You have a HP track, which burns at both ends from radiation and damage, and also a survival track that breaks pieces of your equipment whenever it depletes. Rolls are player-made, and the system spends a lot of time in that osr headspace where it cares more about the choices the players make than how they built their character. The game's currency is Junk, and you spend it repairing your gear and crafting consumables.

Levelling up is surprisingly rich with choice, and fights and obstacles are tense and deadly. Again, the core mechanics are simple, but they use this simplicity to push complex choices towards the players. You see a piece of valuable Junk floating in a bog. Do you go in and take a point of radiation? Risk coming back later? Waste your own Junk fashioning a contraption to try and get it out?

After The Bomb comes with its own sandbox campaign set in Minnesota, plus a *lot* of GM support for stuff like factions, monsters, and basebuilding.

It's a gem in our current pre-apocalypse, and I strongly recommend giving it a look.

[wlwanakin]

i think a lot about how anidala really are jesus4jesus...tfw we were both children destined to save our people when we couldn't even save ourselves. what if our closest friends stopped seeing us as people and started seeing us as saviors . and what if we kissed about it (ofc sabe & obi-wan loved them, but there's something so dehumanizing about being the chosen one that i think gl nails really well)

jesus4jesus is the funniest possible way to put it ajdhhfhjf but yeah this is one of my favorite aspects of their relationship!! it's such a core they give each other room to just be people when they don't have that space anywhere else really (aside from padmé with her family who at this point she hardly sees), even with people who love them, because obi-wan as a member of the jedi order and sabé as padmé's handmaiden are still parts of these larger bodies that position them as saviors. and i also find it really interesting how different their respective savior roles are. it is funny to call padmé jesus but ultimately she’s a secular political figure whose idolization is more akin to celebrity and is more based on tangible achievement meanwhile anakin is like. maybe his religion’s messiah but maybe also the antichrist but maybe also neither and just a nuclear bomb in human form depending on who you ask. and that’s interesting! it’s a super interesting contrast that still exists on the common ground of idolization as dehumanization. and i think it rules that we got two very different takes on the same concept within the same story and that they wind up smooching

[eiyriny]

Ppl claiming that Wei Wuxian was completely "unaffected" by the loss of his golden core or that he's doing okay and is just fine and dandy w being coreless are so funny to me because neither of these is true. There’s literally an entire passage where Wei Wuxian reflects on the loss, where he reminisces about his incredible swordsmanship and feels regret that he would no longer be able to showcase it, where he struggles to convince and deceive himself that the loss doesn't matter when it obviously does.

As for the idea that he's doing okay and is just fine and dandy with being coreless, well, may I remind u that this is the same man who insisted on keeping and walking around with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on his person just to feel safe and secure. If that doesn’t scream “I’m not doing okay” to you, I don’t know what does. Like, it's so obv to me that Wei Wuxian's insistence on keeping the tally is tied to his deep-seated insecurities bc of the loss of his golden core. This man is absolutely NOT doing okay lmao.

[hrrtshape]

I feel like your a history nerd (cause your cool like that)

If sooooo, what are your history hyper fixations??

the vestal virgins. don’t even start with me. those girlies were literal flame influencers. imagine being so spiritually integral that your entire civilisation’s cosmic insurance policy hinges on your eternal virginity and how well you vibe with a sacred bonfire. like. yeah. sure. let’s casually tie state security to whether a teen in a linen dress looked at a boy too long. it’s giving girlhood as high-stakes diplomacy. they were twelve when they started. twelve. by fourteen i was collecting sylvia plath quotes and lying about my zodiac chart. they were holding rome in their bare hands. and the punishment for messing up was being buried alive??????! hello???? that’s not just history, that’s theatre. that’s artaud-core.

anyway. obviously marie antoinette and the entire rococo breakdown of cause-effect relationships. the aesthetics were louder than the economy. she blinked in satin and the peasants started drafting war manifestos. i don’t even care if she said “let them eat cake.” she lived like she did and that’s more iconic. it’s the performance of obliviousness. the blueprint of the nepo baby. the original tumblr girl but with better fabric and state-sanctioned nihilism. “i want a farm where i pretend to be a peasant” is so lana del rey coded. like that girl was not born, she was curated. she was camp. and then she got guillotined. which, okay....rude. i went to versailles and visited her little farm......GET ME MY GOWN AND CAKE

don't care enough about him but have to yap. napoleon’s entire arc is giving short king with delusions. i care about it in the way i care about greek tragedies. his whole thing was being so allergic to irrelevance that he crowned himself and then ruined everything. and then ruined it again. like a human molotov cocktail in epaulettes.

i’m sweating. i’m so right about this. please let me explain before i get hit by lightning or something.

also history isn’t real unless it involves at least one of the following:

a girl disguising herself as a boy to join a war. somebody writing a diary that outlives their body by four centuries. a rumour so good it destabilised a dynasty. fashion as both weapon and witness. a woman so compelling she was either labelled a witch or married off to stop a war.

also omfg i've been waiting for someone to bring up the judas/jesus twin flame evil little god complex of hitler and stalin but alas no one is here to validate my roman catholic shame spiral fascination with totalitarianism. like. i’m not defending anyone i’m just saying if i see a historical figure who had that much control over an entire continent’s existential dread i’m gonna want to know what their birth chart looks like. sue me

anyway, world war two. the moment. the theatre kid production of armageddon. it’s literally greek tragedy if everyone was chain-smoking and doing war crimes. like i look at the molotov-ribbentrop pact and it feels like two exes fake-dating to make poland jealous (and then killing it). and stalin, girl was camp (im allowed to say this, i live in fuckass LITHUANIA). moustache like a villain in a looney tunes short. sent people to gulags like he was playing monopoly. and hitler, ok sorry but hitler is the worst person ever and also the most literally on-the-nose character ever written. failed artist. mommy issues. vegetarian. thought he was the main character in a wagner opera but he was just a reddit incel with state funding

also like you cannot give me fascist architecture, military uniforms tailored by hugo boss, the rise of mass propaganda, and the literal invention of the nuclear bomb and expect me not to get a little bit girl-in-her-morbid-era about it. it’s not glamorisation it’s just. historically-induced psychosis. also the way world war 2 bled into literally every cultural product of the 20th century. film noir, came from it. existentialism, born. the EU, her. anime, somehow. the CIA, oops. barbie, yes

we’re not even gonna get into the psychological chaos of operation paperclip because i will start foaming. like imagine you’re truman and you just decided to drop the sun on a civilian population twice and now you’re hiring nazi scientists with a fake name and a smile. and meanwhile stalin’s doing trust falls with mao and inventing the cold war like it’s a competitive sport

the delusions of grandeur. the parades. the betrayal. the theatre of it all. like julius caesar but everyone has a gun and a god complex. and the girlies will say it’s insensitive to find it fascinating but honestly i think it’s more disrespectful to pretend it wasn’t the most deranged geopolitical fanfic ever written

so yeah. i watch ww2 documentaries like they’re telenovelas. i read about it like i’m trying to solve a murder that already happened. hitler and stalin as jesus and judas? absolutely. but reverse. both evil. both gay for power. one had a bunker meltdown, the other died mid-sentence like he was being smited by karma herself. it’s literally mythology. it’s literally a bible written in telegrams and blood

and that’s why i have 18 tabs open about the yalta conference and insomnia. thanks for coming to my bunker. please leave now

[prideprejudce]

the more i think about Oppenheimer the more disappointed i get because at its core it’s such an interesting story to tell. like the whole manhattan project catapulted the entire world into a new atomic era that we could never go back from whether we were ready for it or not. and the fallout from the project not only changed and devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people (including of course the victims in hiroshima and nagasaki + the people living in new mexico where they tested the bomb) and the continued generational trauma of the bombs. also just the general mass panic and fear that the Cold War instilled into every citizen in the states who were literally waiting to one day be just annihilated by a nuclear attack. the whole creation of the atomic bomb had so much impact on the world. so doing a deep character study of both oppenheimer and his colleagues on the moral ambiguity of their work in the project and the outcome of it is such a great movie concept. but the film didn’t feel like that at all. instead Nolan gave us the watered down story that he’s best at and spent almost three hours forcing us to watch whether oppenheimer had to lose his disneyland government fast-pass due to his communist ties or not (spoiler: he does) and how strauss doesn’t like him because he got his feewlings hurt once. all the other scientists and physicists were given one or two minutes of screen time and were really just names to a face. the actual bombs creation was given a sidelong glance and trivial explanation at best. and of course to tie it all off the main female side characters were either naked/having sex for 80% of their screen time or was given the character depth of a piece of tissue paper

[sillysoliloquyshits]

I wanted to sleep early last night, but God and Saint Valentine had other plans and made me stay up till 1am plus to write this ineffable husbands contrapuntal poem that's also Ocean-Vuong-core, an idea I've already been having for some time >:))

Artist: Roberto Ferri

Enjoy this nuclear bomb dropped on your sanity guys 😇😈

[gladiatorcunt]

it's about possible death during labor so don't im sorry if that's a trigger warning for you!

what do you think modern!coryo would do if the labor is dangerous? they didn't know beforehand but after she gave birth, her bleeding didn't stop or something like that? what would he do during the time and how would he treat the baby if reader had died or lived?

(tw pregnany & labor troubles)

Well in my case I have health issues that I imagine will most likely give me a difficult experience with pregnancy/birth (I want kids in the future, so I've thought about this a lot)

For starters, he's obviously getting you the best team of personal doctors money can buy. He's strict about your appointments/health overall so if anything occurs during the pregnancy itself, he is able to immediately have you properly treated.

But if you've had a good pregnancy, all things considered, it will definitely come as a shock to him when something goes seriously wrong. Giving birth is an extremely serious matter and you could even have a stroke or postpartum hemorrhage (which is where you experience heavy bleeding after birth), problems like that are rare however, so it would honestly be one of the only times in his life that Coryo would be truly shaken to his core.

He's casting his image aside and shrieking at the hospital staff, saying that he'll raise their pay if they can just make you better. Thank God they do, and after hours of surgery he's bringing your newborn son to finally meet the one who worked so hard to bring them into the world. You've been to hell and back, he just wants the baby to be grateful even if all they do is squint their eyes and slowly wiggle around. You smile at them when you wake up, cooing at your child when Coryo places them on your chest for skin-to-skin contact. He even takes his shirt off when you need to take a break to eat the expensive sushi, he had delivered to have his own skin to skin contact with your child.

It's hard to stay mad at a baby that's the spitting image of himself.

If you died, the whole hospital would be eviscerated nuclear bomb style /j

[thoughtsafterdark]

The Sun's Lover

Sometimes I gaze at myself in the mirror and my mind bends and buckles against warring thoughts and I wonder if I was meant for more.

Sometimes I feel a breeze in the back of my mind

Sparks of errant electricity

A brief glimpse into something other, something hidden

Something on the tip of my tongue and the edge of my olfactory bulb

Colours I can smell, feelings I can hear, thoughts that have no shape or form. Older than my life, than language, than war. Certainties that tease and caress and seduce but leave me dry and gasping like incubi in my sleep.

That leave my tongue sloppy and lazy like tar black molasses squelching between teeth

Thoughts that taste of longer tongues and darker mouths and sharper teeth on a planet circling twin red dwarves, of methane marshes and hexagonal prism eyes that sparkle like blood red rubies

Words slurring together and thoughts hazy as they come back down to a body that feels paper thin and husky like maple seeds in the wind

I think of the wrath that dances just beneath my skin

The bile that churns and rushes to my face, eyes like daggers, lips fixed in a snarl at the slightest insult

I think of my pride, that squirming bag of worms that lights fires in my blood and how it wars with my desperate craving to belong

I watch them from the safety of my window like a xenoanthropologist. How they love and laugh and touch eachother. How they slide against one another like well oiled gears in a way I have never been able to. I think of the eldritch way in which I care, with a gaping maw and drooling lips, with twirling rings of eyes and 6 pairs of wings, with claws that burrow deeper and squeeze tighter the harder they try to leave me.

And I think to myself, girlhood is not so much different to godhood. A self-satisfres ied sadistic existence hiding a crushing singularity of loneliness, topped with pettiness and boredom.

I wish you would come to me in my waking hours and take me away from this place

Steal and hide me away in palaces of sand and moonstone

I can put up a good fight. I’ll run and scream and beg you to stop, make sure to drag out the thrill of the chase. Isn’t that what pretty nymphs are for?

I see my bitterness reflected in the ozone blue of your eyes, the hardness and cruelty shot through with marble strands of gold

Your skin is a thrumming pool of pure power, an atomic bomb bound in sinew and nucleic acids, ready to turn me to a pillar of salt

Your fingers coax the most bittersweet of melodies, leaping and thrumming from string to string like acrobats. They say the best musicians make the instruments sing, but I’ve seen you make lyres moan and weep

I remember the old stories, of girls turned to laurel trees, of wounded pride and donkeys ears. I remember the blood of the Myrmidon spilled outside the walks of Illium. I know you are a wrathful, self-righteous whore, with greedy fingers that leave bruises  in the dips of hips and a silver tongue to match. Your fathers essence is strong in you, stronger even than it is in him. Nuclear fusion and supernovae to his ion and electron arcs. What is a thunderbolt in the face of the sun’s core?

That is how I know you would understand, I know you would thumb at that gaping festering wound inside my heart and bring me corpses instead of flowers. A plague in just the right place, so they can die slowly, in agony. Nuclear wastelands instead of jewellery. And then afterwards you’d smile that chesire cat smile at me, all satisfaction and faux-inoccence, and we’d wear our best skins and most beautiful masks and dance amongst the stars next to the hunter ripped to ribbons by hounds at your sisters command compose ballads, and study the healing arts and crafts but not so well the grey eyed bitch curses me with eight legs and congratulate ourselves on our own brilliance. Spin lies out of ambrosia and nectar and pretend we are good and just, exactly what the mortals deserve

 Fuck me with your fingers with a fierceness you wouldn’t dare use on your precious lyres, piston into me the way the women in my grandmothers village gut fish (rhythmically, ruthlessly, with the sun beating down on leathery skin and the weight of 6 mouths to feed and the memory of your husbands knuckles shattering teeth), reach up into me and wring the neck of my womb like a newly ripe peach, yank it out of me until it lies pulsing and glittering and full of seed, uterine arteries spewing blood. I want to feel you burrowing upwards until I am impaled on your divinity, until you push upwards into my heart and lungs and your hands are peaking up out of my throat. Turn me inside out and wash me clean until my mortality burns away like a chrysalis and I am reborn in your image.

My ascension is a spectacle that leaves many breathless and many more blinded. “I am the goddess of lost potential” I whisper into the crook of your neck “of promises unkept and grudges nursed. Of doorways and bridges and the space between atoms. Of longing and regret and moments lost.” And then you’d smile that ridiculous smile of yours, like you’d seen me like this always, glowing and thrumming with possibility – and this confirmation is somewhat amusing.

“Pithanotita” you’ll declare against the shell of my neck and the rightness of it reverberates deep deep down, beyond the skeletons of cells that no longer exist and multi corded DNA strands, as if you have struck my very resonant frequency and my de Broglie wavelength sings with the joy of being seen. Not a name but a constant, a universal truth. Phoebus I’ll counter, and I won’t bother using a mouth, though the smirk will be implied. Possibility and Poetry need no lips to speak to one another, we are two sides of the same coin. You’ll laugh out loud then, delighted at my audacity. Only your mother calls you by her mothers name. And I can pretend just for a moment that we might last. The first of our kind to have eternity.  That we won’t end up tearing each other to pieces. The sun and his unlikely lover, regret.

[lunchboxe]

Oh shit, just realized

New addition to the "MC of story-driven game doubles as nuclear bomb" group

LADS with the aether core

Obey Me MC needs the ring, otherwise she blows up like everything

Stelle/Caelus in HSR with the Stellaron (?) (been a while since I played that one)

Possibly TWST cuz Grim is kinda an extension of Yuu and he's sorta a ticking time bomb for overblot

And now, TDBK MC! She's basically a bioweapon with a countdown clock. When her time is up, she goes Kyklos, and might attack a ton of DA students and make THEM Kyklos, and over and over, basically Armageddon

[bitimdrake]

Thoughts on Jack Drake's death in Identity Crisis? I personally dislike it because it's a fridging (and somehow only the third worst death in that book behind "why did she have a FLAMETHROWER tho" and "that's not how Firestorm works you're confusing him with Human Bomb"), and it took away what made Tim stand out in making him an orphan like the other Robins. I'm not a Batfam expert so I haven't read a ton of the surrounding stories but it feels like there was more they could have done with Jack.

I would not personally call it fridging because I think we've gotten waaaay too liberal with that term, particularly when removed from the original context of misogyny (*unless perhaps we are applying it to other bigotry, which I do think is worthwhile), and because "side character dies to push forward a main character's story" is...not a bad thing. That's a perfectly valid story telling trope that can be used well or poorly.

THAT SAID. I do think there was more to do with Jack that could have been really interesting!

He'd just found out Tim was Robin, and imo there was sooo much that could have be mined from that. It could have been a really interesting and major shakeup in Tim's story, without entirely changing the fundamentals of his character. I'm so interested in the theoretical arc of Tim and his long time hot-and-cold distant dad trying to figure this relationship out now that Jack finally, for the first time, is both (a) interested in actively pursuing a relationship with his son (he's been on and off since shortly after Tim became Robin) and (b) actually able to get to know his son (which has been impossible from Tim's side since he became Robin and starting keeping so much of his life secret). Jack decided to be supportive, but their relationship is messy! Their history is complicated! And he still has understandably mixed feelings about his son fighting crime! How do they figure this out??

(Unrelated, I still think about this one fic where Jack comes back to life circa Brucequest and realizes his archeological skills can help. The future story it implied. The gentle question of can Tim and Jack repair their relationship. It compels me.)

I'm of two minds about Jack dying at all. On the hand, I do agree it took away a lot that made Tim unique as a Robin and lumped him more in with the others. On the other hand, there has been some nice stuff as a result of him being adopted into Bruce's family. And, e.g., I don't think stuff like his relationship with Damian would be remotely the same if Tim still had his own father.

Also like. the theoretical fandom shift from this would be fascinating. The best known batfam characters who are not Wayne family are largely women at this point, which means fandom is extra inclined to ignore them. But if one of the core bat boys was not part of the literal family, would that actually shift the whole fandom focus away from Force This Into A Nuclear Family Mold? Would we see an entire thematic shift? Or would people just be trying to contrive reasons why Tim's very much living father didn't count....

[spacenutspod]

Water is the most common chemical molecule found throughout the entire universe. What water has going for it is that its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen, are also ridiculously common, and those two elements really enjoying bonding with each other. Oxygen has two open slots in its outmost electron orbital shell, making it very eager to find new friends, and each hydrogen comes with one spare electron, so the triple-bonding is a cinch. Hydrogen comes to us from the big bang itself, making it by both mass and number the #1 element in the cosmos. Seriously, the stuff is everywhere. About 75% of every star, every interstellar gas cloud, and every wandering bit of intergalactic space debris never to know the warmth of stellar fusion in 13.8 billion years of cosmic history is made of hydrogen. That hydrogen got its start when our universe was only about ten minutes old, and all the hydrogen that has ever existed (except for random radioactive decays and fission reactions, but that would come later) formed before our universe turned 20 minutes. A dozen minutes, 13.8 billion years ago. When you quench your thirst with a healthy glass, that’s what you’re consuming. We can understand this epoch of cosmic history, known as the nucleosynthesis era, because over the past century we’ve become rather skilled at dealing with nuclear reactions, and in one of the hallmarks of our species we have unleashed this radical understanding into the physical nature of reality and deployed it for both peacetime energy generation and wartime bombs. Our understanding of nuclear physics tells us that earlier than the ten-minute mark, our universe was too hot and too dense for protons and neutrons to form. Instead their subatomic parts, known as quarks, were unglued in a heaving maelstrom of nuclear forces, constantly binding and unbinding in a seething rage-filled sea of gluons, the force carriers of the strong nuclear force. Once the universe expanded and cooled enough, condensates of protons and neutrons formed like droplets on the windowpane, low-energy pockets capable of keeping themselves together despite the temperatures. Eventually, however, as soon as the party got going it fizzled out: when the universe became too large and too cool, a mere dozen minutes later, there wasn’t sufficient density to bring the quarks close enough together to perform their nuclear binding trick. Some protons and neutrons would find each other in those storm-filled days, though, forming heavier versions of hydrogen, some helium, and a small amount of lithium. And since then those hydrogen atoms have wandered about the cosmos; most lost in the intergalactic wastes, some participating in the glorious construction of stars and planets, and a lucky few finding themselves locked in a chemical dance with oxygen. The oxygen has another tale to tell, also a story of fusion, on its way to becoming water. But not the fusion of the first few heady minutes of the big bang, but in the dance within the hearts of stars. There, crushing pressures and violent temperatures slam hydrogen atoms together, forcing them to fuse into helium, in the process releasing an almost vanishingly small amount of energy. But that forced marriage happens millions of times every second, in every one of the trillions upon untold trillions of stars strewn about the cosmos, enough to light up the universe for all conscious observers to enjoy. Near the end of a star’s life, it turns to fusing the built-up ash of helium piled in its core, The fusion of helium produces two products: carbon and oxygen. Now this oxygen would end up forever closed off from the cosmos, locked behind a million-kilometer thick wall of plasma, if it were not for a trick of physics that happens when the star meets its final days. Our Sun will someday experience this fate, about four and a half billion years now. When it grows old and weary, it will swell and turn red, violently spasming as it draws its last fatal breaths. Those gargantuan shudders release material from the star, launching it into the surrounding system, billowed by gusty winds of fundamental particles streaming away at nearly the speed of light. Fit by ragged fit, the Sun will lose its own self, driving away over half its mass into a spreading nebula, the only sign that distant eyes can perceive of yet another noble star laying down its struggle against the all-consuming night. But in that gruesome death, a miracle. The cycle born anew: the hydrogen and helium, the primordial elements of the star, now mixed with carbon and oxygen drift off into the interstellar void, someday to take part in the formation of a new star, a new solar system, a new world wet with water, and, if the chances are perfect, a new life. The post Thirsty? Water is More Common than you Think appeared first on Universe Today.