Hey, fun story!

I live on a small island in Maine. Post-election, a writer-friend & I decided to start a little islander group to share emotional support, info & resources. She posted about the 1st meeting on NextDoor.

Easy peasy.

There was nothing in the ad beyond "hey, things might get tough, let's get through this together."

IMMEDIATELY, MAGAs sailed in to scream, mock, & threaten us. For a support group. I can't stress enough how this was just a potluck support group with an autumn bonfire & snacks, for islanders. To talk about our feelings & share some hope & logistical ideas for the future.

Yet all these conservatives, 98% of whom *don't even live on the island* started shrieking SUCK IT UP BUTTERCUP & WE WON DEAL WITH IT.

I mean...yeah, man. We're dealing with it. By starting a group you don't need to come to because you don't even live here?

So to recap, 1.7 billion years ago, when life was basically just Spicy Algae, there was an open bleeding wound spreading for miles in Gabon that ooze-ploded every three hours for several hundred thousand years, hurking out radiation, intense heat, & all kinds of xenon, iodine, caesium, & barium into the air, groundwater, soil, & early photosynthetic organisms. Now, I'm not remotely a scientist, but on reading about all this I immediately wondered if the Oklo reactors, and others, if they occurred elsewhere & we just haven't found them yet, could be a pretty significant factor in Spicy Algae mutating into Spicy Amoeba & so on all the way up to us, a Primeval Splash Park of radioctive slag interacting with a few Floaty Cell Bois, slouching toward sentience, their hour come, well, maybe, someday, if we're lucky.

So I googled it, & that was in fact the very next hypothesis made by actual smart scientists, & a very real theory about the origin of the vast biodiversity of our Mutation-Happy Planet.

OMG I want to tell you about the coolest thing I've learned about in a hot minute! (Maybe everyone already knows about this, but it's new to me AND I LIKE LEARNING STUFF LET'S GO ON A JOURNEY OF EXPLOSIVE DISCOVERY TOGETHER)

SO. Under the precise right (or very wrong) conditions, natural deposits of uranium can develop spontaneous nuclear fission chain reactions identical to the kind we make on purpose in modern nuclear reactors.

*This has already happened at least once.* About 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon. How do we know a spontaneous natural nuclear fission reactor formed in Africa 1.7 billion years ago?

Well, in 1972, a bunch of French chemists were quality-testing reactor-bound ore from Gabon, and it turned out a LOT of the local uranium was already markedly depleted.

This being the Cold War, people were pretty uptight about accounting for all fissionable isotopes in any given civilian facility because big boom bad, so they needed to figure out how this could possibly have happened in a fairly new mine.