The Shadow of Chernobyl

Hey reader. I hope you are well. Now come on, brace yourself for today’s story and allow me to take you into a deeper idea that sounds like it just popped out from a sci-fi movie.

I hope you are well aware of the Chernobyl city, the city of radiation, the land of the doomed where nothing survives. Even if you’re unaware, long story short, the city is in Ukraine and was the home to a large nuclear power reactor. Some technical mishaps, some miscalculations and all of it spun down to a catastrophic disaster that leaked out a huge amount of Uranium and many other radioactive materials directly into the atmosphere of the area. The accident caused the city to become uninhabitable for at least 20,000 years. Or at least that’s what the scientific calculation says.

But even in the midst of death, annihilation, complete destruction, there is this black fungus called Cladosporium sphaerospermum and some other of its kind. I know you probably skipped the name, but still, that’s as important as a fork while eating soup for now. These fungi use the radiation and convert it into energy providing nutrients just like regular plants use sunlight. Scientists have named this phenomenon as radio synthesis. Not only that, these fungi grow faster and healthier as the amounts of radiation increases. These fungi don’t survive in radiation but thrive in it. A literal biological anomaly in the system which breaks all the laws that we understand about life and survival.

Now, humour me for a second and let me paint a picture for you. Our sunlight based plants have given the rise to our whole ecosystem. Over the period, it has created such large, strong, deadly, intelligent and diverse set of species ranging from dinosaurs to whales to snakes to humans. You name it and it must have been there somewhere in the buried history. And that too being bound to the 10% Energy Law of Ecology that says only 10% of energy flows from one food chain level to the next. All of this happened using sunlight as an energy source which gives 0.5–3 eV of energy.

Now, imagine if a whole ecosystem develops around these radio synthesising black fungi which use gamma radiation from radioactive material which have a minimum of 1000 eV of energy. If the source of energy is this powerful, just imagine the nutrients and energy that can be derived and stored with this wide pool of energy. And more so, imagine the raw physical strength, intelligence capacity, size and diversity of the species this new ecosystem can create. Though their lifespans would be very short due to radiation in the beginning, they will soon adapt to it just like the earlier species did, slowly and steadily due to evolution, because as Ian Malcolm said and I quote, “Life always finds a way.” Yes, that was a Jurassic Park reference in case it felt familiar. And then, boom, Earth would have a new set of species roaming around like they have always been there. But don’t worry. You, me, all of the human kind and many of the co-species we live with would cease to exist given the amount of radiation such a system would require to exist and flourish. Of course, our photosynthesis plants took 4 billion years to create the environment for humans to exist. Now there is a possibility that the amount of energy transfer this ecosystem would allow might accelerate it much faster but still, the constraint of radiation on the Earth would still serve as the barrier between this ecosystem and ours.

Doesn’t it sound eerily similar to what our Vedas have said, “Earth and universe are bound in one endless cycle of creation and destruction. Destruction is the basis and starting of all creation.”

Pralaya hi srijan aur shrishti ka adhaar hai.

Isn’t that the beauty of Mahadev’s Ardhanarishwar energy form where first our Mahadev acts as the cosmic destroyer wiping away everything to clear out the space and then Mahadevi, the Goddess of creation, the ruler and creator of the universe, enables the life and universe to flourish once again. When our ecosystem would collapse, probably, it would be this ecosystem that would take over. And when this ecosystem would absorb all the radiation that it can, maybe another ecosystem like ours would take over. But that’s at least 10 billion years away for now.

Now, put your own lifespan next to this. Isn’t it funny? How we spend months, sometimes years behind a few sad moments, behind our pains, behind our grief. And on the massive scale of Earth, it is less than a drop out of the ocean. But even all of our pain and grief are the Chernobyls of our life, the destruction that prepares us for the next adventure and sprint of growth. And when we rise above our grief and pain, not despite it but because of it, we become that black fungi which doesn’t survive it but thrives and evolves in it. Slowly. Very slowly. But consistently.