Submitted 1 day ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/69ba3763-46f7-4b17-978e-0c156382e51b.jpeg
If I’m to believe that second person didn’t misspeak, they had “mental breakdowns” with an “s”, so multiple breakdowns, over the thought that their eating lettuce could cause a nuclear apocalypse.
They must really like lettuce. If I had a mental breakdown over the fear that my eating a specific food would cause untold human death and suffering, including my own, I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe.
(While chewing lettuce) “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”
Would you mind doing that more over towards Washington DC, please? TIA.
How dare you add common sense to our imaginary and greatly embellished struggles!
The audacity of this guy, I almost died of Asperger!
Maybe after the first few mental breakdowns, they could have maybe just gone on the internet may be kind of like, I don’t know, learned more. So they were saying they were just so sure that they could accidentally split atoms and they didn’t question why there weren’t nuclear explosions going off at every restaurant hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Ah yes, name calling. What a mature way to handle the situation.
You understand that there are a lot of people alive before the internet existed, right? And if this person is relating a story from their childhood, and they’re anywhere over like 35 years old, us old people couldn’t just “go on the internet”.
I would likely not eat that food again until I could convince myself it was safe
I guess you did not grow up with parents that forced you to clean up your plate before leaving the dinner table
I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth’s crust, mantle and core.
Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.
Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades.
I loved this story, thank you for sharing.
I think the people who sleep well at night are the ones that don’t care how anything works. Sometimes it’s ignorance, but often it’s just burnout, and worse sometimes it’s a complete lack of empathy for anything that isn’t themselves.
Sometimes all kids need is a scientifically literate adult to explain precisely why their fear isn’t possible.
Yea, just tell them they and the surrounding half mile would be instantly vaporized and wouldn’t even know they were dead.
“It hasn’t happened yet and you damn sure aren’t special enough to be the one to do it”
It happens all the time. That’s how the multiverse branches are kept under a manageable number for the simulation.
When I learned about germs, how they’re everywhere and too small to see, I thought I must be squishing them every time I touch anything. So I went around the entire house touching every surfaces, especially the windows, because nobody ever touched those.
Learned about Vacuum Decay when I was 10…it gave me another complex layered on top of my other complex layer cake…
yeah my poor dyson /s
Seriously though, the best part about vacuum decay is you’d never see it coming and barely have time to notice if it did happen.
When I was in kindergarten they showed us a cartoon with anthropomorphic teeth to try to encourage dental hygiene and those teeth scared me so much that I refused to brush my teeth for years and I ended up getting gingivitis because of it.
Reminds me of a profoundly stupid movie I saw as a child called Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious and no that’s not aphasia talking. He takes an atom out to the shed and splits it with a chisel. An explosion ensues, complete with charred face and smoking hair standing on end.
profoundly stupid
Hey, that was my favourite movie when it came out.
I don’t equate “profoundly stupid” to “bad”. I enjoy a good stupid movie. I adore Hudson Hawk. I watch Ready Player One all the time in the background.
A single atom wouldn’t even be worse than, like, a pop rock anyway.
If I accidentally bite an atom and the tiny shards shatters nearby atoms, wouldn’t that just make more? Like sort of… a chain reaction ?
I think your jaw would have to be made of tungsten or something for that to happen, but I’m not a physicist. 🤷♂️
When I was a kid, I was playing one day outside and then later I realized there is an ant nest nearby and I saw that I killed some ants by walking near it.
After that, I didn’t want to kill any more bugs etc, so whenever I was walking on grass, I would always check the grass before me to see if there are any bugs in it, and only then I would make a step.
Yeah, it was very slow and inefficient, but it wasn’t that bad because I was actively avoiding grass and this whole experiment didn’t last very long either, maybe a couple of months.
Then I went back to stepping on the bugs.
Just tell yourself they’d kill you if they had the chance, it’s a preemptive strike
New anxiety just dropped.
Its not possible to do by any metric. And besides, a chain reaction is needed. A single atom turned into pure kinetic energy wouldn’t be noticeable at all.
Yes, and if I cut a mango, how many billions of atoms is that? So I’d recommend to cut the mango in increments of one angstrom to minimise the chances of a chain reaction happening.
Atoms lettuce break the iceberg.
NOO BILLL
WHYYY
EVAPORATES INTO ASH
I remember being told “Atoms are always moving”, so I would cut reeeeaaaalllllyyyy fucking slow for a bit thinking that the atoms would “move out of the way.”
I also just read my husband this meme and he was like “Oh yeah. I remember thinking I was risking my area for arts and crafts.”
Just be glad no one showed you crunching life savers in the dark.
If you did manage to do this by random chance would you even notice? A single atom is pretty small. If you somehow split a random carbon atom in lettuce wouldn’t you get less than a Joule as long as it doesn’t somehow chain?
This is just what I’ve heard a long time ago so don’t quote me lol. But no, splitting a single atom shouldn’t do anything of note. I believe it’s the same general reason that a nuke doesn’t set the entire atmosphere on fire - you need a lot of energy to split atoms. That’s why nukes need enriched materials.
I also believe that even a nuclear explosion won’t be triggered by a single split atom in a bomb. For example, the Manhattan Project bomb was triggered by shaped explosives that surrounded the nuclear core. The blast of the charges “compressed” the nuclear material to the point it reached a critical mass that allowed a runaway fission reaction.
Yeah it would be small to the point of not being perceptible. A single atom has an insane amount of energy for its size, but its still not enough to move a grain of sand any amount that would be perceptible
Yep was super paranoid and anxious over misunderstandings now just super paranoid and anxious over worst case unlikely scenarios.
Reminds me of The Flintstones Split the Atom
What kid wants to eat salad?
A kid whose parents actually gave a shit about parenting?
Come on, man. I have my kids eating their veggies, but they don’t like it. The older one knows they are healthy and eats them reluctantly, the younger never chooses veggies unless we attach consequences for not eating (e.g., no dessert unless you eat your veggies).
But neither wants to eat them.
I mean… The chance of that happening is incredibly low, but… It’s not zero.
Have fun stressing out of cutting things. Any cut you make can be the one low chance cut when you accidentally split an atom. :)
It is zero. You split atoms all the time, thanks to the radioactive carbon-14 in our bodies, from nuclear testing.
A nuclear bomb goes off because a lot of atoms split all at once, which causes a whole lot more atoms to then split. But that requires a critical mass. It doesn’t just happen on its own.
sorry, but the chances are actually zero. it takes a lot more force and specialized conditions to split an atom than a knife
Agent641@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I guess there are two kinds of people because when I learned that splitting atoms causes a nuclear explosion, I got a craft knife and some sand from the garden and went to town on them.