Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: today we are going to be shattering some ninja's. I
Speaker 1: am very excited. So recently we released an episode about
Speaker 1: the science and history of a substance called pike crete,
Speaker 1: which is a type of composite ice that was researched
Speaker 1: in Great Britain and a little bit in Canada during
Speaker 1: World War Two as a potential material for building aircraft carriers. Now,
Speaker 1: the so called berg ship that that they wanted to
Speaker 1: build was made obsolete by changes in other war conditions
Speaker 1: before it was ever built, so we don't know if
Speaker 1: it would have worked. But the research on pike crete
Speaker 1: as a material itself remains very interesting. And so if
Speaker 1: you haven't listened to that episode, I would recommend you
Speaker 1: go back and check it out now. I think it
Speaker 1: was a lot of fun. Yeah, and we also talked
Speaker 1: a bit about of Thrones in there, if you need
Speaker 1: a little fantasy to encourage you to check that episode
Speaker 1: out right. So, the short version is pikerete is a
Speaker 1: suspension of wood pulp in water ice, and the ideal
Speaker 1: mixture arrived at by Allied Research with something like eighty
Speaker 1: six percent watered fourteen percent would pulp, and it had
Speaker 1: a number of material advantages as a as a building
Speaker 1: material or structural material. Uh This included that the structural
Speaker 1: properties of pi crete were less variable and thus more
Speaker 1: predictable than regular ice, So if you wanted to make
Speaker 1: a structure out of ice, you could understand what you
Speaker 1: were working with a lot more predictably with pikerete. But
Speaker 1: also pikerete melts more slowly than regular ice. It seems
Speaker 1: like the wood pulp content helps insulate it. So you
Speaker 1: take the same amount of material of ice versus pikerete,
Speaker 1: the pikerete melts a lot slower. Also, pike crete is
Speaker 1: much stronger than regular ice. It can withstand heavier loads
Speaker 1: and more powerful impacts with less fracture and less plastic deformation.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons it's supposed that pike crete
Speaker 1: is stronger than regular ice is that if a crack
Speaker 1: forms under pressure or impact, the would pulp fibers prevent
Speaker 1: the crack from spreading along the full width of the material,
Speaker 1: so it's just far less susceptible to fracture based failures,
Speaker 1: It would maybe kind of deform and sag in a
Speaker 1: plastic way over time, but it's also less susceptible to
Speaker 1: that than regular ices. But anyway, when we were reading
Speaker 1: about all this, I immediately thought of a parallel type
Speaker 1: of material to pike crete, where various fibrous substances are
Speaker 1: enmeshed in a suspension that is by mass mostly water,
Speaker 1: and that composite material is our bodies. And I started
Speaker 1: to wonder, is the principle that makes pike create resistant
Speaker 1: to fracture the same reason that if you drop a
Speaker 1: mass of frozen meat on the ground, it doesn't shatter
Speaker 1: the way a block of ice would. Now we can
Speaker 1: come back to that, but this immediately got my brain
Speaker 1: spinning on another question which takes us into some outworld territory. UH. Specifically,
Speaker 1: this question is if you froze a human body the
Speaker 1: way sub zero does in Mortal Kombat, or like many
Speaker 1: other examples we can talk about from from movies and
Speaker 1: games and stuff in a bit, could you shatter that
Speaker 1: human body with a slick roundhouse kick or would a
Speaker 1: frozen human body be resistant to fracture and shattering? And
Speaker 1: if so, how far would that resistance go. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: actually chatted about this a bit when we recorded the
Speaker 1: pi crete episode, but then we ended up cutting it
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. First of all, for length um,
Speaker 1: but then also you wanted to look into it a
Speaker 1: little bit more as our call. Well. Yeah, one reason
Speaker 1: I think is that the discussion we actually had about
Speaker 1: it when we originally recorded the episode was kind of incomplete.
Speaker 1: Like we talked about how the wood fibers within the
Speaker 1: pi crete and make it resistant to shattering. How this
Speaker 1: was probably a reasonable analogy for the frozen flesh of
Speaker 1: an animal, which is a composite sort of alloy of
Speaker 1: a different kind with lots of materials in meshed in between. Mean,
Speaker 1: you know, muscle, fibers, fat, protein, bone, and bone has
Speaker 1: its own different components. It's got a collagen protein component
Speaker 1: and a mineral hydroxy appetite component. And anyway, for these reasons,
Speaker 1: a frozen body might be somewhat similar in its resistance
Speaker 1: to shattering. And of course I mentioned this a second ago,
Speaker 1: but there's an experience probably a lot of people can
Speaker 1: relate to. If you've ever dropped a heavy piece of
Speaker 1: ice on the ground, you you know it shatters. It's
Speaker 1: just very brittle. It shatters into a million pieces. But
Speaker 1: if you drop a similar weight piece of frozen meat
Speaker 1: from say six feet in the air, I think you're
Speaker 1: very unlikely to see anything that looks like shattering. It's
Speaker 1: more likely to kind of bounce a little bit and
Speaker 1: might get bruised as it does so, but it's not
Speaker 1: going to shatter like glass. Yeah, And it's it's similar
Speaker 1: to how the various frozen foods we bring home from
Speaker 1: the grocery store. Have you ever opened the box and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, man, I dropped that frozen pizza and
Speaker 1: now it's shattered into a million pieces. No, we just
Speaker 1: don't see that, right. So something about the contents, the
Speaker 1: material makeup of of meat, of animal flesh, of body
Speaker 1: parts seems to make it more resistant to fracture than
Speaker 1: other you know, suspensions in water would be so our
Speaker 1: initial discussion in that episode we we sort of said,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think it's very plausible that you
Speaker 1: could shatter a body. But after we recorded it, I
Speaker 1: sort of thought some more and I was like, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, this really should depend on some more conditions
Speaker 1: that we didn't actually get into, Like, so could you
Speaker 1: shatter a human body at regular freezer temperatures around zero
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit or negative eight teen celsius. I think on
Speaker 1: a normal circumstances, the answer to that is just no,
Speaker 1: probably not so. Initially our answer to this question was
Speaker 1: that the sub zero scenario where sub zero freezes you
Speaker 1: with a blast device and then kicks you and you
Speaker 1: shatter all over the place, that's fairly far fetched. But
Speaker 1: what we didn't really get into in our original conversation
Speaker 1: was how far this shatter resistance extends. What if you
Speaker 1: get the body really really cold, deep into the sub
Speaker 1: zero wild, then I think the question becomes more interesting. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and and also if we're going to talk about sub zero,
Speaker 1: I mean sub zero is is not just a guy
Speaker 1: throwing around some liquid nitrogen. He is supposed to be
Speaker 1: a a Linn cou grand Master. You know. He's a magician,
Speaker 1: a sorcerer who's using frost magic and martial arts to
Speaker 1: battle various gods and cyborgs and other worldly monsters. So
Speaker 1: before we we we get back into the science, I
Speaker 1: want to talk just a little bit about this obsession
Speaker 1: that emerges um. I think largely uh post nine uh
Speaker 1: that this idea of bad guys and sometimes good guys
Speaker 1: being frozen, partially frozen, and then partially or entirely shattered,
Speaker 1: as if they were a piece of porcelain. Now, why
Speaker 1: would you trace it to n Well, here's the thing,
Speaker 1: and and I'm not entirely it's entirely possible that there's
Speaker 1: some of some work prior tonight that features both the
Speaker 1: freezing and shattering of an adversary. Certainly you have examples
Speaker 1: of things being frozen, enemies being frozen. The classic uh
Speaker 1: the Blob comes to mind, right where they the creatures
Speaker 1: defeated with the cold. But in terms of of something
Speaker 1: being frozen and shattering is key because that's when James
Speaker 1: Cameron's Terminator two came out. Yes, and I always forget
Speaker 1: how early in the nineties it actually came out. It
Speaker 1: always catches me off guard that it was ninety one,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, basically the eighties. Oh No, one
Speaker 1: was still the eighties. As we've discussed Cannon on this show,
Speaker 1: is that the nineteen eighties ended in ninet. In fact,
Speaker 1: that the most eighties year there ever was the like
Speaker 1: most iconic when we think of everything that is the
Speaker 1: eighties was the year nineteen nine. Yeah, I mean is
Speaker 1: the culmination of it. Right. So Terminator two, of course
Speaker 1: iconic sci fi action blockbuster, famous for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: but it also featured some incredible effects, incredible digital effects
Speaker 1: that just you know, changed what we expected in films.
Speaker 1: And there were, you know, so many copycats that that
Speaker 1: came along afterwards. Uh, some better than others. But there's
Speaker 1: this one sequence in particular where Arnold Schwarzenegger's T eight
Speaker 1: hundred Terminator freezes or incident accidentally freezes um the liquid
Speaker 1: metal T one thousand terminator played by Robert Patrick with
Speaker 1: liquid nitrogen. It's like a factory setting for their fight
Speaker 1: and an environmental um um you know, hazard of that
Speaker 1: fight is a frozen T one thousand. Uh. So Arnold
Speaker 1: lifts up his shotgun I believe, uh, fires a one
Speaker 1: line a w liner at him as well as a
Speaker 1: shotgun shell or a slug or something, and it just explodes,
Speaker 1: just just causes the the T one thousand, the frozen
Speaker 1: T one thousand, to explode into hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: shards of of this froze now frozen liquid metal, which
Speaker 1: of course then begins to slowly melt and then reform
Speaker 1: into the T one thousand once more. As I remember it,
Speaker 1: he shoots him with a pistol. But I could be
Speaker 1: a pistol. Okay, that's my memory. I could be wrong.
Speaker 1: But also this is definitely when he he uses the
Speaker 1: phrase he's learned as still a Vista baby, showing that
Speaker 1: he has learned humanity from Edward Furlong. That's right, by
Speaker 1: the way, I was reading about this film um Again,
Speaker 1: It's been a very long tent since I've seen it,
Speaker 1: but there's this weird deleted scene that lines up with
Speaker 1: the whole topic of demonic duck feet on succuby that
Speaker 1: we've discussed in the past on the show. This idea
Speaker 1: in medieval and post medieval um Catholic and Protestant culture,
Speaker 1: the idea that you would have these demons that would
Speaker 1: disguise themselves as attractive members of the say, the opposite sex,
Speaker 1: that would then try and seduce you into sin. But God,
Speaker 1: taking pity on the pious uh man or woman, would
Speaker 1: and would make sure that the disguise was imperfect. While
Speaker 1: this demon might take the form of a beautiful woman,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be able to get the feet right. The
Speaker 1: feet would be duck feet, like demonic duck feet. Um,
Speaker 1: so there's a way out for the for the pious, right,
Speaker 1: So if you're very observant, if you keep your wits
Speaker 1: about you, then you would never fall for one of
Speaker 1: these like a succubus, because you notice us you've got
Speaker 1: bird feet. So yeah, according to the Internet Movie Database,
Speaker 1: there's a there is a sequence in the Steel Mill
Speaker 1: where the T one thousand um is it's been previously
Speaker 1: frozen and then of course exploded, and then it's come
Speaker 1: back together and not everything's working properly. It's having difficulty
Speaker 1: maintaining its shape and color, like when it touches other materials.
Speaker 1: And there's a scene where it's trying to pretend to
Speaker 1: be Sarah Connor um and and then John Connor looks
Speaker 1: down and sees, oh, it's not Sarah Connor because it
Speaker 1: has grotesque liquid metal feet instead of instead of human feet,
Speaker 1: right the feet, its feet are becoming the same texture
Speaker 1: as the floor that it's walking on, which is a
Speaker 1: cool detail. It is, Yeah, but it but it made
Speaker 1: me think back to that the idea that the the
Speaker 1: the otherworldly alien pretender, uh can't quite get the feet
Speaker 1: right on its disguise. Okay, so you think that it's
Speaker 1: probably the scene in Terminator to where the T one
Speaker 1: thousand gets shattered that spawns these many copycats that come
Speaker 1: afterwards and video games movies where everybody is getting frozen
Speaker 1: and shattered into a million pieces. Right, like to take
Speaker 1: take sub Zero for instance. Okay, a character in the
Speaker 1: Mortal Kombat video game. Now, Mortal Kombat, the original arcade
Speaker 1: game came out in nine two, which is really too
Speaker 1: close to ninety one for it to reflect that Terminator
Speaker 1: to death or explosion scene to any significant degree. And
Speaker 1: perhaps due to that overlap, you don't see any shattering
Speaker 1: action uh in the game really? Uh? Sub Zero can
Speaker 1: freeze people and then he can, you know, uppercut the
Speaker 1: frozen person in some ice goes flying, some blood goes flying,
Speaker 1: but nobody has shattered. Sub Zero's original fatality in that
Speaker 1: game is a blatant predator homage rather in which he
Speaker 1: rips the opponent's spine out of their body. Okay, so
Speaker 1: it was a movie rip off, even an Arnold movie
Speaker 1: rip off, but a different one, right. But then uh,
Speaker 1: three the following year, we see the ports of this
Speaker 1: game make it out to the different home systems, and
Speaker 1: this was too violent for Nintendo. Famously, Supernintendo changed the
Speaker 1: blood into sweat and and they toned down some of
Speaker 1: the fatalities. But they did one really cool thing is
Speaker 1: they completely replaced sub Zero's fatality with one in which
Speaker 1: first he freezes the opponent and then he like backhands
Speaker 1: them and shatters them into a million pieces. Well, that
Speaker 1: sounds like one of the few upgrades for the Supernintendo version,
Speaker 1: which I had as a child, and like, it was
Speaker 1: very odd seeing the the quote blood coming off people.
Speaker 1: That was not blood. It was just some weird kind
Speaker 1: of gray tan colored liquid flying on every time you
Speaker 1: punch somebody. Yeah, I had the I had the Genesis
Speaker 1: version of the game. Uh so I had had the blood,
Speaker 1: but I remember being a little jealous of that frozen
Speaker 1: fatality that sub Zero had. Now it's definitely in the
Speaker 1: Mortal Kombat movie, which, dude, if you have not gone
Speaker 1: back and watched that masterpiece recently, I recommended it. It
Speaker 1: uh really really holds up in the worst possible way.
Speaker 1: It's one of those movies with early c g I
Speaker 1: where all of the marketing for it bragged about the
Speaker 1: c g I, except like I remember the VHS box
Speaker 1: said strap yourself in for these amazing morphin sequences. But
Speaker 1: then if you look at it now and it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, everything has about four corners and it's just
Speaker 1: assaulting your eyes with poison. Oh yeah, well this is yeah,
Speaker 1: this is so plenty of time to to to really
Speaker 1: go after that terminator to uh style and try and
Speaker 1: use some of that technology. Paul ws Anderson was the director,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, as weird as some of the
Speaker 1: c g I is compared to today, I have to
Speaker 1: say the Goro puppet was really cool. They had some
Speaker 1: nice practical effects mixed up in there as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll give him that, but that's we're not talking about
Speaker 1: Goro today. Goro when we will come back to another time.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about sub Zero and that scene does
Speaker 1: feature some great free shatter action. I think the moment
Speaker 1: that actually made it into the trailer as sub Zero
Speaker 1: is fighting some red shirt like he's he's literally fighting
Speaker 1: a ninja that's wearing red um and it's not Irmac
Speaker 1: or anything, it's just straight up red red shirt ninja.
Speaker 1: He's wearing a sign that says I am here to die. Yeah. Basically,
Speaker 1: you know what he's there for he's a demo Ninja.
Speaker 1: He's here to demonstrate this fatality. So he does a
Speaker 1: big leaping kick at sub Zero right as sub Zero
Speaker 1: unleashes all this crazy Um you know I have to say,
Speaker 1: and this will come into play later. I feel like
Speaker 1: there's some really cool like atmospheric stuff going on with
Speaker 1: the effects that sub Zero uses here to to create
Speaker 1: his ice magic, like he's doing something to the air
Speaker 1: and perhaps the moisture in the air there and then
Speaker 1: is that Ninja comes flying across the room. Bam, sub
Speaker 1: Zero freezes him. Ninja smashes into the wall and just
Speaker 1: shatters into a million pieces perfection. Yes, um, so we'll
Speaker 1: we'll keep coming back to sub Zero. But that was
Speaker 1: was not, by any means the only um copy cat
Speaker 1: or um or let's say, it wasn't the only film
Speaker 1: inspired by this kind of freeze and shattered death sequence.
Speaker 1: You of course had time cop into. Directed by Peter Hyams,
Speaker 1: who also directed two thousand ten and Outland, which is
Speaker 1: a kind of a a sleazy, not really sleazy, maybe
Speaker 1: kind of intentionally seedy sci fi film starring Sean Connery.
Speaker 1: Is that the one that's supposed to be high noon
Speaker 1: in space. Yeah, it's straight it's a straight up Western
Speaker 1: really with Peter Boyle. I think it's the bad guy.
Speaker 1: It's ah. I remember digging it when I was younger.
Speaker 1: But that's another one I haven't seen in Forever. Time Cop, however,
Speaker 1: features a time traveling time cop as you would expect,
Speaker 1: played by Jean Claude that damn and a great villain roll,
Speaker 1: really a dual villain role, because he plays himself as
Speaker 1: like is the present version of himself and a path
Speaker 1: version of himself played by the late Ron Silver. And
Speaker 1: there's one scene in particular where a hinchman gets his
Speaker 1: arm frozen again by liquid nitrogen that just happens to
Speaker 1: be there in the space where people are fighting, and
Speaker 1: then Jean Klon van Damme kicks that frozen arm and
Speaker 1: shatters it. There's actually, uh just involving an arm. I
Speaker 1: remember there's a scene in the older version the movie
Speaker 1: adaptation of Snow Piercer where a character is punished by
Speaker 1: having their arms stuck outside into the cold, and then
Speaker 1: it gets pulled back in and it's frozen solid and
Speaker 1: they smash it. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good.
Speaker 1: More more recent example of the frozen shatter death or
Speaker 1: torment sequence. Another big one from ninety three is Demolition Man.
Speaker 1: It's Stallone versus Wesley Snipes, and Stallone eventually freezes Snipes
Speaker 1: and kicks his head off, which then chatters, Am I
Speaker 1: the only person who saw the fur staff of this
Speaker 1: movie about five times and never saw the end? Oh no,
Speaker 1: I don't think I even saw that much. Is one
Speaker 1: that they were showing on like Sci Fi Channel or something,
Speaker 1: A lot of it. I guess it must have been.
Speaker 1: I just remember like seeing over and over again the
Speaker 1: scenes about like introducing the premise that the problem with
Speaker 1: the future is that the cops are not violent enough.
Speaker 1: Maybe from my from my part anyway, I think maybe
Speaker 1: it was prominently featured in the trailer. And since I
Speaker 1: never saw the film and only the trailer, that's all
Speaker 1: I know about it. I know like the basic premise
Speaker 1: and have sort of a general idea about the look
Speaker 1: of this future. Yeah. Well, I think it posits that
Speaker 1: the whole future is the galleria. It's just the whole
Speaker 1: future is like a shopping mall from the nineties. All right,
Speaker 1: let's see a few other quick examples. UM saw both
Speaker 1: of the film Cube utilize a freezing trap in there
Speaker 1: um film Alien Resurrection. Uh, there's a sequence where this
Speaker 1: happens to a xenomorph that like escapes and there's a
Speaker 1: freezing trap and it matters itself. And then there's one
Speaker 1: from two thousand four that I don't think i'd ever
Speaker 1: heard of, titled mind Hunters, not to be confused with
Speaker 1: a recent television series that's that's actually, you know, quite
Speaker 1: quite good. Uh No, this is a different beast entirely.
Speaker 1: And there's a crazy sequence that you can find on
Speaker 1: YouTube in which a trap, again some sort of liquid
Speaker 1: nitrogen powered trap, freezes Christian Slater's characters ankles and then
Speaker 1: causes him to snap off of the ankles fall over backwards.
Speaker 1: And then I guess he's still freezing as he falls over,
Speaker 1: because then he like grotesquely shatters when he hits the ground.
Speaker 1: That's rough, man. Now, the one that I I can't
Speaker 1: get out of my head is Jason X, which I
Speaker 1: know is one of your favorites. Oh yes, Uh, this
Speaker 1: is probably my favorite Friday thirteenth movie because of course
Speaker 1: Jason X takes place in outer space and there's a
Speaker 1: scene there multiple that has a lot of great kills
Speaker 1: in it um let of creative kills, Uh, including one
Speaker 1: scene in which uh cyber Jason at the point I
Speaker 1: think he's Cyberjason. At this point, Um dunks a person's
Speaker 1: face into like a tray or a uh that of
Speaker 1: liquid nitrogen and then shatters their face by smacking it
Speaker 1: into a tabletop. So clearly in the nineties everybody got
Speaker 1: the bug. The filmmakers saw it, saw something. They were like, oh,
Speaker 1: shattering people, and they were just on the train. They
Speaker 1: were ready. Yeah, I think you know, it's it's new.
Speaker 1: It's an early death scene to include in your your
Speaker 1: violent nineties picture. But then also I have this feeling
Speaker 1: that this, this this trope is popular because it also
Speaker 1: drives home this this idea about the exaggerated fragility of
Speaker 1: the human body. You know, we we see this in
Speaker 1: various Turn to Stone tropes. We see it, you know,
Speaker 1: quite um, you know, quite tragically. I think we've discussed
Speaker 1: in the past on the show of Um delusions in
Speaker 1: which one believes their body to be essentially be made
Speaker 1: of glass and be so fragile that they don't dare
Speaker 1: touch anything. And then you see like the opposite of
Speaker 1: it in some action films especially. I think the the
Speaker 1: ultimate ex dream of this is the Hong Kong action
Speaker 1: film Ricky Oh, The Story of Ricky, in which our hero,
Speaker 1: like a lot of heroes in these films, it's pretty
Speaker 1: much indestructible. But to just an alarming degree, nothing seems
Speaker 1: to hurt him, and when he hurts anyone else, when
Speaker 1: he fights back against bad guys, it seems like that
Speaker 1: the slightest touch just makes them explode like a bag
Speaker 1: of blood. They're just everyone else is just so fragile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody else is just vegetable soup. I mean, I seem
Speaker 1: to recall a scene where two characters punch at each
Speaker 1: other and their fists hit and Ricky splits the other
Speaker 1: guy's arm down the middle lengthwise like a Mattock splitting
Speaker 1: a log. Yeah. Yeah, basically the human body is just
Speaker 1: made out of balsa wood in according to that film. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a break and then when we
Speaker 1: come back we can talk about the the actual relationship
Speaker 1: between temperature and brittleness. Than all right, we're back now
Speaker 1: today again, we're a looking at this question of could
Speaker 1: you could you freeze somebody and shatter them like sub zero?
Speaker 1: There are some complications to this question. Obviously, this is
Speaker 1: not an experiment you could perform ethically on a real person, right,
Speaker 1: but you know, you can seek out some analogies. There's
Speaker 1: another reason that this question is a little bit hard
Speaker 1: to answer if you're just trying to reason from general
Speaker 1: knowledge on materials and mechanics and heat. And that's of
Speaker 1: course that the body is a complex matrix of different
Speaker 1: kinds of materials all stuck together. So you can look up, say,
Speaker 1: existing published knowledge on the temperatures where brittle fracture is
Speaker 1: more likely to happen in materials like common industrial plastics
Speaker 1: or types of steel. But I have not found a
Speaker 1: similar chart for animal bodies, and I doubt that there
Speaker 1: would be such a thing, because who would do that research.
Speaker 1: Maybe you do that research. If you do, let us know.
Speaker 1: But in general, there is actually a documented relationship between
Speaker 1: temperature and brittleness in many material reals. And this relationship
Speaker 1: does extend well beyond the simple transition of water from
Speaker 1: its liquid to frozen states. So it's not just the
Speaker 1: freezing of liquids into solids. Even once you have you know,
Speaker 1: already frozen things as they get colder, or things without
Speaker 1: water content as they get colder very often, in fact,
Speaker 1: almost always, they tend to get more and more brittle.
Speaker 1: So just one example of this, I was looking at
Speaker 1: a short, well presented article on on m T. S
Speaker 1: website m I T. S ask An Engineer where they
Speaker 1: were addressing the question of why plastics get brittle when
Speaker 1: they get cold. It was by Peter Dunn and it
Speaker 1: was interviewing Greg Rutledge from m T. S Department of
Speaker 1: Chemical Engineering, and so they were looking at the concepts
Speaker 1: of ductility and brittleness. Now, ductility is the ability of
Speaker 1: a material to absorb stress by changing shape without breaking.
Speaker 1: Brittle materials react to stress put on them by fracturing
Speaker 1: and shattering, and plastics are mostly considered to be ductal
Speaker 1: because of the behavior of molecules down at the molecular level.
Speaker 1: Often these molecules themselves can stretch, absorbing energy in the process.
Speaker 1: But when you add all this together, these molecules can
Speaker 1: each absorb energy by stretching, and they can dissipate stress
Speaker 1: from loads or impacts, and this ability to dissipate stress
Speaker 1: helps prevent fracture. But this depends on the somewhat free
Speaker 1: motion of individual molecules. So if you were able to
Speaker 1: zoom all the way down to the molecular level of
Speaker 1: the material. For a material to be ductal, what you
Speaker 1: would want to see is the ability of molecules to
Speaker 1: slide past or through one another. Uh. And the analogy
Speaker 1: that Rutledge uses here is like spaghetti coated with olive oil. Right,
Speaker 1: you cook a bunch of spaghetti and it does not
Speaker 1: have any oil on it. Obviously, what's it gonna do.
Speaker 1: It's kind of stick together in a big clump. You
Speaker 1: try to stir it up and it does not stir easily.
Speaker 1: But if you put olive oil on it, suddenly all
Speaker 1: the new goals. They can kind of slide around. So
Speaker 1: in a material, especially like a plastic, if the molecules
Speaker 1: in the material behave this way where they all kind
Speaker 1: of stick together in a rigid structure and they can't stretch,
Speaker 1: and they can't slip easily pasted or through one another.
Speaker 1: When stress is applied at a particular place, the energy
Speaker 1: from that stress can't be dissipated by spreading all across
Speaker 1: the material. So if the stress is too great and
Speaker 1: the energy can't be dissipated, it'll start to create a
Speaker 1: crack and then a full fracture. Now, where does temperature
Speaker 1: come in here, Well, there's something that is known as
Speaker 1: the glass transition temperature, which they point out is the
Speaker 1: point where you have an amorphous solid. And this could
Speaker 1: be like a glass or it could be rubber. They
Speaker 1: also give the example of cotton candy. It's at the
Speaker 1: point where that goes from being ductal, like we were
Speaker 1: just talking about two, being brittle, where it's susceptible to cracks,
Speaker 1: and so each material has its own temperature where that
Speaker 1: transition happens. Usually, the temperature for most materials that we
Speaker 1: deal with on the day to day is either very
Speaker 1: high or very low. So you're not going to really
Speaker 1: observe things going through this transition temperature if you're just
Speaker 1: doing every day you know, uh, stuff like you're dealing
Speaker 1: with a piece of rubber. Normally the stuff you would
Speaker 1: do with it does not take it to its glass
Speaker 1: transition temperature. So, for example, in the case of tire rubber,
Speaker 1: they say that the glass transition temperature is negative seventy
Speaker 1: two degrees celsius. You're not usually getting down that far,
Speaker 1: so you're not getting to the point where you observe
Speaker 1: vulcanized rubber becoming brittle, So we're not used to it,
Speaker 1: but it is a totally real part of physics, and
Speaker 1: it all depends on the materials. Some amorphous solids can
Speaker 1: become brittle at much more manageable temperatures. The article gives
Speaker 1: the example of polypropylene, which they say as a glass
Speaker 1: transition temperature of somewhere between negative twenty and zero degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: And so that's within you know, temperatures you might encounter
Speaker 1: out on a cold winter day or even in your
Speaker 1: own freezer. And I have noticed this person only when
Speaker 1: taking plastic food containers out of the freezer. If sometimes
Speaker 1: if you drop them or knock them against something, they
Speaker 1: seem much more prone to cracking or shattering than they
Speaker 1: than they aren't room temperature. And I have not noticed
Speaker 1: a similar difference for glass. But I was looking around
Speaker 1: at some other articles, and yeah, it just seems that
Speaker 1: for all kinds of materials. Maybe there are a few exceptions,
Speaker 1: but for almost anything, if you cool it down really
Speaker 1: really cold, it starts getting into territory where it becomes
Speaker 1: more brittle. Like there's this term that's often talked about
Speaker 1: with reference to metals, which is the ductile to brittle transition.
Speaker 1: Uh so, so steel is an example here that undergoes
Speaker 1: a ductile to brittle transition. Some compositions of steel, unfortunately
Speaker 1: have ductile to brittle transition temperatures that are within the
Speaker 1: range of natural fluctuation. So some steel structures can actually
Speaker 1: become brittle enough to fail by cracking instead of absorbing
Speaker 1: stress by deforming and reforming under like real world conditions
Speaker 1: like winter conditions. Yeah, there's there's this case of the
Speaker 1: Liberty class cargo ships during the Second World War. This
Speaker 1: was a British concept kind of concept constructed by the
Speaker 1: US at a low cost for you know, basically a
Speaker 1: mass produced cargo option for the war. So they ended
Speaker 1: up building thousands of these things. But unfortunately, the metal
Speaker 1: of their their holes was observed to fail after exposure
Speaker 1: to frigid North Atlantic waters, frigid enough to make the
Speaker 1: steel itself brittle. And this was this is due to
Speaker 1: some of the issues were discussing already, but also part
Speaker 1: of it apparently had to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: the holes were welded as opposed to riveted together from
Speaker 1: separate plates. And this was also compounded by just frequent
Speaker 1: overloading of the vessels themselves. Uh so so Yeah, another
Speaker 1: example of what can happen when you take UM UH
Speaker 1: to take a ship that is not specifically designed to
Speaker 1: maybe throw even like really frigid waters and put them there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And essentially every source I looked at UH seemed in
Speaker 1: agreement that this this holds true for almost any material
Speaker 1: that what we've been mainly talking about, because most of
Speaker 1: the research seems to be in UH in plastics and metals,
Speaker 1: you know, things that stuff like glass, things that you
Speaker 1: would expect to be researched because they are industrial materials.
Speaker 1: But it would also hold true to some extent for
Speaker 1: other types of composite materials, things that have mineral content,
Speaker 1: things that have proteins in them, and this would probably
Speaker 1: include bodies. So at lower and lower temperatures, the ability
Speaker 1: of material to shift and reform at the molecular level
Speaker 1: continually decreases. The links between molecules become more and more
Speaker 1: prone to tiny initial defects spreading into full scale fractures
Speaker 1: in their crystal in structure. And if you add a
Speaker 1: lot of these fractures at the same time, basically you
Speaker 1: get shattering. So I'm increasingly convinced now that Actually, I
Speaker 1: think if you've got a body or or a piece
Speaker 1: of a human body cold enough, you very well could
Speaker 1: shatter it. So the question at this point would be
Speaker 1: what is the level? How cold would it have to get?
Speaker 1: You know, what is the level? Because is it coldness
Speaker 1: that could actually be achieved in reality? And again I think,
Speaker 1: just based on what I've been reading, the answer there
Speaker 1: is probably yes, and you could. It's at temperatures that
Speaker 1: you could actually achieve given something like liquid nitrogen. You know,
Speaker 1: the more we talk about this, I would love to
Speaker 1: see a scene in like a kung fu action film
Speaker 1: where the villain and the hero are about to square
Speaker 1: off and then they both notice that there's a tank
Speaker 1: of liquid nitrogen behind them, and they're like, whoa, let's
Speaker 1: let's go outside. Let's move into a different part of
Speaker 1: the factory, because this is just I don't like where
Speaker 1: this is headed. It's like the Pucci episode where they
Speaker 1: never actually get to the fireworks factory, except this they
Speaker 1: just they never get to the liquid nitrogen. Oh man,
Speaker 1: there has to be a liquid nitrogen sequence in Itchy
Speaker 1: and Scratchy. Oh sure there is, but because they always
Speaker 1: flip it around on you, it wouldn't be a straightforward
Speaker 1: chattering what would it be. It would be something more interesting. Oh,
Speaker 1: probably made into ice and then ground up into ice
Speaker 1: cubes that are somehow still alive in the cocktail that
Speaker 1: the mouse is drinking. You're joking, but they literally did that.
Speaker 1: That's why I did that. Okay, that's what That's why
Speaker 1: it comes to me because it's stuck in my mind somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the eyeball ice cubes become ice cubes in a drink.
Speaker 1: There you go. So, liquid nitrogen is a convenient place
Speaker 1: to investigate this or I guess it's not a place
Speaker 1: a convenient substance with which to investigate this question, because
Speaker 1: it's something you can actually get huge tubs of and
Speaker 1: in its liquid state, liquid nitrogen is somewhere between sixty
Speaker 1: three and seventy seven kelvin or so, which is like
Speaker 1: negative two and ten celsius two d ninety six celsius
Speaker 1: or negative three forty six fahrenheight to three twenty fahrenheits
Speaker 1: sorry for all the numbers, but just wanted to give
Speaker 1: you an idea. It's very very cold. It tends you know,
Speaker 1: it's boiling at room temperature. If you have a bucket
Speaker 1: of liquid nitrogen at room temperature. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: if you put you know, a pan of water and
Speaker 1: like a six hundred degree oven or something, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be it's gonna be bubbling. It's it's it's aggressive stuff
Speaker 1: because it wants to convert back into the gas. That's
Speaker 1: the same gas that's in the air we breathe. It
Speaker 1: is more than the air we breathe. So so this
Speaker 1: is very very cold. If you could submerge a person
Speaker 1: in liquid nitrogen long enough to actually freeze them all
Speaker 1: the way through, I'm starting to get the feeling that
Speaker 1: some kind of shattering, maybe not you know, a billion
Speaker 1: pieces glass type shattering, but some significant, you know, chunking
Speaker 1: off of of brittle shards would actually happen. But anyway,
Speaker 1: this is all just theoretical reasoning based on other things
Speaker 1: we know about materials. Uh So, so maybe talk is cheap,
Speaker 1: Maybe we should look for physical evidence that this has
Speaker 1: actually happened in the real world. Yeah, and luckily there
Speaker 1: have been people that have experimented with this that have said,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm going to get I think of
Speaker 1: of with nitrogen, and I'm going to get something that
Speaker 1: could stand in for a human head, and we're going
Speaker 1: to see what what happens. Yeah. So, but before we
Speaker 1: get to direct empirical research, At first I wanted to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: is there anything documented in nature? Right? I combed through
Speaker 1: a big newspaper database, trying a bunch of different combinations
Speaker 1: of search terms to find any evidence I could of
Speaker 1: a documented case of a frozen body being shattered. I
Speaker 1: found nothing. I found tons of stuff, but nothing like
Speaker 1: what we were actually looking for. I found lots of
Speaker 1: reviews of movies and TV shows like that one with Christians.
Speaker 1: Later you mentioned a bunch of articles about that. I
Speaker 1: found a lot of old crime reports involving frozen bodies
Speaker 1: and people named shafter. I found a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: about frozen seafood and a kind of packaging called a
Speaker 1: shatter pack, which I think is terrible name for a
Speaker 1: type of packaging. But so, if there is any natural,
Speaker 1: documented case of a human body being frozen and then shattering,
Speaker 1: I could not find it. Now, the closest thing I
Speaker 1: came across was I did find an old Straight Dope
Speaker 1: column where the author is trying to answer the exact
Speaker 1: same question, can you shatter a body? And finds a
Speaker 1: bunch of cases of people being frozen sort of or
Speaker 1: exposed to liquid nitrogen in various ways and not shattering,
Speaker 1: And the column concludes from this that you probably would
Speaker 1: not shatter if you were frozen. But I don't think
Speaker 1: any of the cases that the column looks at really
Speaker 1: count because it's stuff like somebody gets uh, somebody gets
Speaker 1: liquid nitrogen spilled on them, which you know. In fact,
Speaker 1: one thing that's it seems to be true is that
Speaker 1: you can probably say that, I mean, don't try this
Speaker 1: at home, but you can probably safely get a little
Speaker 1: bit of liquid nitrogen uh splashed against your skin and
Speaker 1: you'd be okay because the light and frost effect immediately
Speaker 1: turns it into two gas that insulates your skin from
Speaker 1: the freezing cold liquid itself. Now, if you were like
Speaker 1: to dip your hand in it or can have continued exposure,
Speaker 1: obviously that would be extremely bad. There was one case
Speaker 1: documented in the Straight Dope column of a person who
Speaker 1: apparently dipped their foot in a container of liquid nitrogen
Speaker 1: and kept it there. It's not not quite clear why
Speaker 1: this happened, but there was no documentation of that person's
Speaker 1: foot shattering, though obviously it was massively traumatic to the body, like,
Speaker 1: so don't do that at all, So that column concludes. Quote,
Speaker 1: judging from the above, I'm guessing fibrous tissue would prevent
Speaker 1: a body from simply shattering no matter what happened. But
Speaker 1: then again, okay, so so you could take that and say, okay,
Speaker 1: that sort of holds up with you know, if you
Speaker 1: drop a piece of frozen meat from the freezer, it
Speaker 1: doesn't shatter, So maybe it just wouldn't happen to a body.
Speaker 1: But I want to come back with a few empirical,
Speaker 1: controlled examples that we can talk about now. I have
Speaker 1: not found any controlled studies published in actual scientific journals
Speaker 1: about shattering frozen animals or animal parts. Maybe there's something
Speaker 1: I haven't dug up yet, but I don't think it's
Speaker 1: out there. But I've come up with a number of
Speaker 1: informal tests that have been published just some other people's articles,
Speaker 1: podcast videos, YouTube and stuff. For example, the Naked Scientists
Speaker 1: one time they explored this on their podcast in an
Speaker 1: episode from Actually it was an episode that featured recent
Speaker 1: show guest Cat Arnie. They didn't freezer, I hope, no. No. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Cat was not involved in this particular experiment. It was
Speaker 1: a couple of the other hosts, but but a couple
Speaker 1: of the other hosts didn't an empirical experiment. They explained
Speaker 1: as follows. You get some chicken pieces turkey drumstick, you
Speaker 1: freeze them with liquid nitrogen and then attempt to smash
Speaker 1: them with a hammer. So they pour liquid nitrogen all
Speaker 1: over meat inside a bucket, and after being submerged in
Speaker 1: the liquid nitrogen for a while, the experimenters believes they've
Speaker 1: gotten the flesh down to almost negative two hundred degrees
Speaker 1: celsius around negative three forty fahrenheit. And at this temperature, uh, First,
Speaker 1: they experiment with just kind of like hanging the frozen
Speaker 1: meat against a wood block with the hand or dropping it,
Speaker 1: and this doesn't seem to do much of anything interesting.
Speaker 1: But then what happens if more forces applied? But if
Speaker 1: you you know, hit it harder. This appears to be
Speaker 1: the key. When they hit the nitrogen frozen meat with
Speaker 1: a hammer, it does, in fact shatter. It splits off
Speaker 1: into many small brittle shards like ice or glass. They
Speaker 1: say it's a thousand bits of chicken. Oh man, well,
Speaker 1: that that sounds like the super a s sub zero
Speaker 1: fatality right there. Yeah, and so the host concludes, quote,
Speaker 1: it does work, but it's an awful lot tougher than
Speaker 1: you might expect. So if you just fell over, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't shatter into a thousand pieces. You might crack a bit.
Speaker 1: And I think that they are based on everything I've read,
Speaker 1: I think they're basically on the money. That brittle shattering
Speaker 1: of flesh is quite possible, but it requires a very
Speaker 1: very cold piece of meat down to like liquid nitrogen
Speaker 1: level temperatures, and it requires a very very heavy impact act. Well,
Speaker 1: everything's coming up set zero in this one, because he
Speaker 1: has otherworldly ice magic okay, surely capable of reaching those
Speaker 1: low temperatures, and is a skilled martial artists who knows
Speaker 1: just just where to hit you and how hard to
Speaker 1: create this death art that he calls the fatality. So
Speaker 1: uh so. And also, if you want to investigate this
Speaker 1: for yourself, fortunately, in this age of widely distributed video content,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of video too. You can see it
Speaker 1: for yourself, assuming there's no video trickery involved. I think
Speaker 1: given the amount of content I've seen like this, that's
Speaker 1: you know, it's probably not all explained by video trickery.
Speaker 1: So there are tons of videos of people deep freezing
Speaker 1: various meats, animal bones, model bodies, and other fleshy objects
Speaker 1: with liquid nitrogen and then shattering them. You know, the
Speaker 1: internet will provide um. So just mentioning a couple of
Speaker 1: examples I found. One of these was a video from
Speaker 1: a cooking channel called chefs Steps that was attempting to
Speaker 1: cut through a cow femur with a heavy cleaver and
Speaker 1: with the femur unfrozen. It takes a bunch of heavy
Speaker 1: strokes and like swinging it like an axe. I think
Speaker 1: it took at least a half dozen strokes. But when
Speaker 1: a cow feemur is frozen and liquid nitrogen, it seems
Speaker 1: to kind of explode in a shower of brittle pieces
Speaker 1: after one hit with the same clever, and you might think, wow,
Speaker 1: even even a cow femur. I mean, that's a really,
Speaker 1: really thick bone. But to comment on this, you know,
Speaker 1: you might sometimes think of bones as something that is
Speaker 1: naturally brittle to begin with, right, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a rock, But bones are actually excellent naturally designed shock
Speaker 1: absorbers when a normal temperatures. I mean, think about all
Speaker 1: of the stuff you do with your body. That just
Speaker 1: doesn't seem quite right. If your bones were actually composed
Speaker 1: of say, you know, like rock material of the same
Speaker 1: size and shape as your bones, yeah, they they really
Speaker 1: are quite quite durable. I guess part of it is
Speaker 1: we tend to we tend to only notice them, uh
Speaker 1: you know, when they're hurting or broken or bruised. Right,
Speaker 1: that's when we we we began to realize, oh my bones, right, yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, a good bone. It's it's like a great
Speaker 1: film director is the director. You don't notice great bones
Speaker 1: or bones you don't think about because they just do
Speaker 1: the job. They're just there for you. And so bones
Speaker 1: are not like rocks. They're they're not composed entirely of
Speaker 1: brittle mineral content. Instead, they're kind of like a natural
Speaker 1: mesh of one part structural mineral but then softer, more
Speaker 1: ductile material that can stretch and flex and dissipate mechanical stress.
Speaker 1: And I think of the things that that help absorb
Speaker 1: and dissipate impact stress on bones. One of them, of course,
Speaker 1: is collagen, which is a protein content in the bones.
Speaker 1: Is found throughout the hydroxy appetite crystal structure of your bones,
Speaker 1: but on a deeper chemical level. I also came across
Speaker 1: an interesting, relatively recent finding that's about exactly what's going
Speaker 1: on with bones that helps them flex like this. So
Speaker 1: it was paper published in the Proceedings of the National
Speaker 1: Academy of the Sciences inteen by Davies at all I
Speaker 1: think it was a team based primarily out of Cambridge University.
Speaker 1: But the short version is that they discovered that a
Speaker 1: major factor helping bones absorb shock without shattering is what
Speaker 1: they call a goog that is trapped in between the
Speaker 1: mineral crystals and our bones. And this goo is actually
Speaker 1: made of a viscous solution of water containing citrate, which
Speaker 1: is interesting. So citrate is a derivative of citric acid.
Speaker 1: It's a natural byproduct of sell metabolism. But various forms
Speaker 1: of citrates have tons of uses in chemistry, Like one
Speaker 1: that I think about in in food uses is a
Speaker 1: trisodium citrate. It's one of the sodium salts of citric acid,
Speaker 1: and it has a bunch of uses in foods, for example,
Speaker 1: emulsified cheese sauces. You know, you ever wonder like what
Speaker 1: makes something like Velveta style cheese melts so smoothly instead
Speaker 1: of breaking and getting all greasy. It's because it has
Speaker 1: a citrate based emulsifier in its sodium citrate. Actually, I
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure if Velvita in particular uses
Speaker 1: that one, but I know some like processed melting cheeses do.
Speaker 1: A good amount of American cheese is going to have
Speaker 1: some kind of emulsifier like that. But anyway, so back
Speaker 1: to bones, Like within our bones, they've they've got this
Speaker 1: fluid citrate that allows molecules to slip and slide past
Speaker 1: each other like we were talking about earlier, and this
Speaker 1: makes the bones more ductal and less brittle and able
Speaker 1: to absorb loads and impacts without breaking nearly as easily
Speaker 1: as they would if they were purely rigid mineral structures
Speaker 1: like rocks. And there are other interesting videos you can
Speaker 1: find too. I found one kind of strange video of
Speaker 1: a pig heart submerged in liquid nitrogen, and and it
Speaker 1: was left in there until it was deep frozen, and
Speaker 1: then it was shattered by being thrown against the floor.
Speaker 1: Assuming that's real, that seems like pretty good at it.
Speaker 1: And I've seen another one where some people deep froze
Speaker 1: a sort of simulated model of a frozen human head
Speaker 1: and then they had a boxer smash it with a
Speaker 1: heavy punch. It kind of shattered. The damage was reasonably shattery.
Speaker 1: So I think I've been convinced. I think the answer
Speaker 1: is clearly that while animal flesh, including a human body,
Speaker 1: is not very likely to shatter at regular freezer temperatures
Speaker 1: like zero degrees fahrenheit or or a negative eight teen celsius,
Speaker 1: if you get it really really cold in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of liquid nitrogen temperatures and then you hit it with
Speaker 1: a very very heavy impact, shattering becomes a much more
Speaker 1: realistic reaction. So anyway, consider me a convert converted to
Speaker 1: the ways of sub zero. All right, on that note,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take one more break. But when we come back, UM,
Speaker 1: I have some additional stuff to throw in about this
Speaker 1: idea of shattering ice magic, and uh what else we
Speaker 1: could possibly pull out of the natural world to back
Speaker 1: this up? I can't thank Alright, we're back, So Robert
Speaker 1: hit me with some shattering ice magic. All right, I
Speaker 1: have kind of a shattering ice magic. Um, uh, buffet
Speaker 1: here a few different offerings here. Uh so, first of all,
Speaker 1: there's frost shattering. This is something we mentioned briefly in
Speaker 1: the pie crete episode. But one way that we we
Speaker 1: naturally see stone shattered via freezing water occurs via frost shattering.
Speaker 1: It's a gradual process by which the freezing of water
Speaker 1: in poor spaces and joints in rock leads to fragmentation. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is actually caused by the freezing process itself, right,
Speaker 1: and the of course the expansion of water in little
Speaker 1: cracks and all. Um. You know this this gets down
Speaker 1: to like why do we have potholes, right, um, because
Speaker 1: you end up with water. And one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that you end up with water getting into little cracks
Speaker 1: in the road, it freezes, it expands, it shatters the
Speaker 1: the stone work there, and then it has to be repaired.
Speaker 1: So I don't know how that really helps out sub zero,
Speaker 1: but it's worth mentioning. Well, I mean, I think it
Speaker 1: is worth mentioning that things with water content in them
Speaker 1: undergoes some natural trauma in the freezing process. Like yes,
Speaker 1: some some foods that you freeze, um, don't do so
Speaker 1: well when freezing, like you saw them out and eat
Speaker 1: them later. And maybe something about the texture is kind
Speaker 1: of wrong. I mean, like freezing can form crystals that
Speaker 1: just harm the cells in the food. Yeah. Now another
Speaker 1: idea that comes to mind. This is more of, I
Speaker 1: guess a munitions based thing to think about. But you
Speaker 1: have dry ice bombs, which you absolutely should not try
Speaker 1: and make. They're illegal in places and dangerous. But a
Speaker 1: simple but dangerous explosive device can be made using dry ice,
Speaker 1: which again dry ice is solid carbon dioxide. Uh and
Speaker 1: and and and basically all this really does is just
Speaker 1: shows that, you know, there's a lot of power bound
Speaker 1: up in the manipulation of the phases of matter, especially
Speaker 1: when it comes to the expansion, concract contraction of the
Speaker 1: substances in question. Okay, and that's gonna play more into
Speaker 1: like my main idea here, and that is Okay, sub
Speaker 1: zero he has this ice magic. He's he's a master
Speaker 1: of ice. He can make it into weapons, he can
Speaker 1: freeze people as they fly through the air. He can
Speaker 1: do these complex fatalities. But is he only a master
Speaker 1: of ice phase one? Or might he have magical access
Speaker 1: to all seventeen types of crystalline ice and three types
Speaker 1: of amorphosis that we touched on in our previous episode. Okay,
Speaker 1: see the Master of many worlds? Yeah, I mean and
Speaker 1: that's just known ice. I think they're in total somewhere
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood of three hundred or so theoretical phases
Speaker 1: of water ice that could be possible. So the question
Speaker 1: that one might raise this might there be varieties of
Speaker 1: ice that would prove more advantageous to magical martial arts
Speaker 1: than even typical every day ice, which of course is
Speaker 1: pretty powerful. We've already discussed how it can. It seems
Speaker 1: like it is you can. You can certainly like shatter
Speaker 1: a human head, or given enough time, shatter of the
Speaker 1: stone face of a mountain with its power. But I
Speaker 1: started looking around about about this, my you know, what
Speaker 1: other varieties of ice are out there? For example, UM
Speaker 1: One that came to mind was what if sub zero
Speaker 1: instead of using or just instead of only depending on
Speaker 1: phase one UM ice water, what if Heke was also
Speaker 1: a master of what is referred to as super ionic
Speaker 1: ice or ice eighteen. Now, this is one of the
Speaker 1: high pressure ices that can exist in places like the
Speaker 1: depths of Urineus and Neptune, and it has been created
Speaker 1: in the lab on Earth as well. For instance, in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, UNI University of Rochester scientist at the Lawrence
Speaker 1: Livermore National Laboratory in California used six giant laser beams
Speaker 1: to compress water into this exotic ice form. So this
Speaker 1: is this is really weird stuff. And I have to say,
Speaker 1: when you read about this, it really bucks you know,
Speaker 1: the everyday idea of what ice even is. And it
Speaker 1: it also makes you realize like the slim pressure and
Speaker 1: temperature constraints that make up the human world and ultimately
Speaker 1: are sort of default understanding of reality. Right. So again this,
Speaker 1: this is this weird ice. This ice ay teen um
Speaker 1: is is is made via extreme pressure. We're talking um
Speaker 1: one to four million times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere
Speaker 1: and uh and it's it depends on extreme temperatures of
Speaker 1: three thousand to five thousand degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: sounds like ice. I know, it's it's really hot, but
Speaker 1: um and it's also it's four times as dense as
Speaker 1: as normal ice. Um and it's uh, it's hot and
Speaker 1: it's also black. And if you were to take this
Speaker 1: ice and suddenly expose it to Earth's surface to air pressure,
Speaker 1: it would rapidly decompress. Does that mean explode or do
Speaker 1: we not know? Well? I couldn't find a write up
Speaker 1: that that specifically mentioned explosion. But we know that rapid decompression,
Speaker 1: can you know, it's the sort of thing that can
Speaker 1: produce UH, something that could be described as an explosion.
Speaker 1: So the way I like to imagine it, UH, you
Speaker 1: could have sub zero. Feel free um video gamemakers to
Speaker 1: steal this for your next video game. But you can
Speaker 1: have sub zero manipulates the atmosphere around UH. An individual's body,
Speaker 1: then crushes them down to a mass of high pressure,
Speaker 1: high temperature black super ionic ice, and then he releases
Speaker 1: this magical pressure that he's built up around it, and
Speaker 1: then you're crumpled black and frozen. High temperature body would
Speaker 1: then rapidly decompress and just explode all over the screen.
Speaker 1: I'd like it put it in Mortal Kombat seventeen or
Speaker 1: whatever they're on, whichever one's next. Now, a lot of
Speaker 1: other ice phases are are are certain a higher density
Speaker 1: as well, not necessarily as high density as these, but
Speaker 1: you also have some that are lower density. Ice is
Speaker 1: as well, both known and theorized, including I think ice
Speaker 1: sixteen as an example of that. But I sixteen wouldn't
Speaker 1: really do sub zero much good unless based on the
Speaker 1: some of the articles I was looking at, unless he
Speaker 1: was looking to harvest gas from the sea floor and
Speaker 1: transport it in pipes. That's that's one of the main
Speaker 1: areas where they see uh I sixteen research as having
Speaker 1: a real world benefit. But our universe is home to
Speaker 1: forms of ice far colder, such as ice fourteen, which
Speaker 1: at around which is roughly I think a negative one
Speaker 1: and sixty degrees celsius or negative two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: six degrees fahrenheit. And this is apparently the cod coldest
Speaker 1: ice we've yet found in the natural world. And this
Speaker 1: too is found on the icy moonsh icy moons, and
Speaker 1: outer planets. So I like the idea of sub zero
Speaker 1: potentially using that as well. The idea of an ice
Speaker 1: sorcerer used ing uh plutonic ice against the occasional literal
Speaker 1: thunder god that he does battle with. That is good, Okay.
Speaker 1: So here's what I'm thinking, ice warlock and the external
Speaker 1: power that the warlock context to get his to get
Speaker 1: his power as a being that lives on Pluto. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some sort of ice god from the outer reaches of
Speaker 1: the Solar system. I mean, where else would an ice
Speaker 1: god live. I know, we've been saying we're given out
Speaker 1: these ideas for free. Maybe we should just t M
Speaker 1: stamp everything. We're saying, no, you can't have it. We're
Speaker 1: making this game, all right. Well, I have one more
Speaker 1: example to discuss here on on the topic of frozen
Speaker 1: things and explosions, because there's the matter of the mysterious
Speaker 1: Siberian perma frost craters. To consider craters that, at least
Speaker 1: in some photos especially, I was looking at one from
Speaker 1: Seen that I included for you to hear for you
Speaker 1: to see as well, Joe. It's the crater of what
Speaker 1: has been dubbed Yamal Crater from the Yamal Peninsula peninsula
Speaker 1: in northern Siberia, and it looks hauntingly like a scene
Speaker 1: from John Carpenters the thing. Oh yeah, the ice pit
Speaker 1: where the space ship was. Yeah, it's forty Why, that's
Speaker 1: a hundred and thirty one feet So it's it's pretty big,
Speaker 1: and if you're looking at it, you get the impression
Speaker 1: that there's either been some sort of an impact or
Speaker 1: there's been an escape, something has been freed from its
Speaker 1: icy prison. And this seems to be exactly the case,
Speaker 1: only instead of an ancient alien visitor shape shifting its way,
Speaker 1: you know, out of the ice and then ultimately out
Speaker 1: of the the frigid waste land. Instead, it is methane
Speaker 1: exploding out of the permafrost buried natural bombs. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: basically think to the frozen wooly mammoth. So the frozen
Speaker 1: permafrost is an ice box storing these exceptional cases of
Speaker 1: preserved organic matter. But they're also there's plenty of less
Speaker 1: exciting stuff frozen in there as well. Since it's frozen,
Speaker 1: none of it truly rots, at least not until the
Speaker 1: permafrost heats up due to climate change, and as that happens,
Speaker 1: the rot finally finds these ancient morsels, releasing carbon dioxide, methane,
Speaker 1: and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases. By the way, now
Speaker 1: methane explosions are they're not known to be the cause
Speaker 1: of the craters, right, It's just a hypothesized possible explanation.
Speaker 1: That's my understanding of it. I was looking around at
Speaker 1: different articles about it, um because there's other stuff too
Speaker 1: that they've looked at. There's something similar seems to have
Speaker 1: happened thousands of years ago on the floor of the
Speaker 1: Arctic Ocean in places where it seems like methane venting
Speaker 1: or even explosions may have occurred, resulting in large craters
Speaker 1: some three thousand feet wide apparently. Um. But and then
Speaker 1: also we're talking about rare occurrences in remote tundra regions.
Speaker 1: So the way this would supposedly work as the frost
Speaker 1: would heave up over the course of a year or so. UM.
Speaker 1: But then that's ultimately hard to observe. And I also
Speaker 1: don't think there have been any actual explosions witnessed. What
Speaker 1: you have. Instead, you'll have some you know, some of
Speaker 1: the people will find this big crater. There'll be some
Speaker 1: accounts from locals about some loud noise they heard in
Speaker 1: some cases reports of smoke or flame. But um. But
Speaker 1: other than that, like, again, there's no footage of this
Speaker 1: occurring as far as I know. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: these craters then tend to turn into lakes within a
Speaker 1: couple of years and are hard to distinguish from other lakes. Uh.
Speaker 1: This according to Vigne Clavillain of the Skull Tech Center
Speaker 1: for Hydrocarbon Recovery Man, this is one of those things
Speaker 1: where there's so much that's potentially amazing in the world
Speaker 1: that just nobody's around to see. Yeah, it's uh so,
Speaker 1: as far as I understand, the research is still ongoing
Speaker 1: and the scientists are still looking into this. For instance,
Speaker 1: researchers are still debating whether permafrost melting is going to
Speaker 1: release mostly methane or mostly carbon dioxide of still figuring
Speaker 1: all of that out. Well either way, I mean, we
Speaker 1: don't want more methane or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: right right. The melting of the perma frost is um
Speaker 1: is alarming. Uh, certainly, no matter what the exact ramifications are. Well,
Speaker 1: but what does it mean for sub zero um? I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe nothing, But it could also provide a
Speaker 1: mechanism by which a frozen warrior might explode given enough time.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It depends how you look at it.
Speaker 1: He he generally doesn't let you stand there and rot.
Speaker 1: But they do have a fighter now that is a
Speaker 1: master of time, So they could like they could they
Speaker 1: could like double team um a a corpse and make it,
Speaker 1: you know, freeze it and then let it rot and
Speaker 1: then it explodes and the time master speeds it up
Speaker 1: there so that it does that. That seems like cheating
Speaker 1: if you're a master of time. You're just unbeatable, right
Speaker 1: even if you if you're about to lose, you always
Speaker 1: go back to start over again, I guess. But that's
Speaker 1: how video games work, right, So maybe he's perfect. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he's the living example of safe scrubbing. Yes, yes, well
Speaker 1: this one's been fun, Robert, Yes, yeah it has. Obviously.
Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from everyone out there about your
Speaker 1: frozen food exploits, about your viewing experience with UM with
Speaker 1: nineties cinema and the various things that get frozen and
Speaker 1: exploded UM or if you have some feedback about our
Speaker 1: thoughts on the Moral Kombat franchise, we'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from you on that as well. Or do you have
Speaker 1: any uh, do you a direct experience of these permafrost
Speaker 1: regions we've been discussing here. Perhaps you have some some
Speaker 1: feedback there. In the meantime, if you would like to
Speaker 1: listen to other episodes stuff to blow your mind, you
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Speaker 1: and subscribe huge things as always to our excellent audio
Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in
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