- We all know what happened to Peter Parker
but what would really happen to you
if you were bitten by a radioactive spider.
Let's get technical.
(suspenseful instrumental music)
The origin of Spider-Man starts all
the way back in 1962 in the panels of Amazing Fantasy 15
and in those panels scientists are demonstrating
to Peter Parker and his class their amazing control
over so called radioactive rays.
The scientists throw the switch on their machine
but at the exact same time, an unfortunate spider
dangles down from the ceiling
and absorbs a fantastic amount of radiation.
The spider then totally stressed out
and in its death throes, then Peter who then
more or less immediately gains superpowers.
The origin story of spider man has changed over the years
but what would happen to you if you
were in this same original situation?
First, those 50 year old panels got something exactly right.
Spiders do not want to bite us.
Whether it's our evolution or our culture,
we have a habit of blaming spiders,
we think that they bite us all the time.
Any unexplained bump or rash has to be a spider's fault.
We just assume.
But from spider statistics and behavior,
we can say definitively, it's almost never a spider bite
no matter what you think it is.
For example, it's always fun to joke
that everything including spiders in Australia
want to kill you right?
Oh g'day, got bit by a spider.
But just guess how many people have died from spider bites
like that from the very venomous funnel web spider
in the last, let's make it interesting, 40 years,
just guess for a second, I can tell you.
It's one.
Contrast this tiny number with the number
of people in the US alone each year that are bitten by dogs,
and suddenly spiders don't seem quite as nasty.
Come here, come here you little spider.
Come here, eh, get over here.
Come here little spider.
This isn't to say that spiders don't bite people,
they definitely do.
It's just that we seem to think because of our spider bias
that spider bites are much more common
and much more dangerous than they actually are.
For example, most people are afraid of
the brown recluse and Black Widow.
No the more alive Black Widow.
There we go.
However, mostly thanks to the development of antivenom,
there have been almost zero deaths combined
between these two spiders in the last few decades.
In the United States, there hasn't been a death
by Black Widow since 1983 if you don't include endgame.
Not only are potentially dangerous spiders rarely deadly,
we are terrible and identifying spider bites
in the first place.
For example, in a resent study in Southern California
which does have black widow spiders,
out of 200 people who came in saying
they definitely got bit by a spider,
less than 4% of them actually got bit by a spider.
And this is consistent across the literature.
The vast majority of the time we mistakenly blame spiders,
it's hard to even get statistics like this
because of misreporting and misremembering.
Our inherent spider bias, it's fine.
It's really fine.
They're they're mostly fine.
There you go.
Adding to all of this, yes, most spiders are venomous,
but almost none of them can physically bite into us,
even if they wanted to.
We have identified around 40,000
species of spider worldwide.
Out of all these species how many of them
do you think can both bite us,
and have venom that is dangerous to us?
Well, maybe you can sense a theme here,
but it's literally like 12.
12!
Spider biters.
The fact is most spiders on Earth
do not have venom that is dangerous to us.
And most spiders on Earth do not have the chelicerae
or pointing fangy mouth bits
that are capable to deliver that venom into our bodies.
The Daddy Long Legs is probably the biggest victim
of this kind of misconception.
They aren't venomous in the way they would harm us.
They do not have fangs that are big enough to make it
into our skin and they're not even spiders,
and yet we treat them like they're secretly super deadly.
We need to get over our spider bias.
Now go!
Go hang on the bedroom ceilings and wait to jump
on their faces when they're sleeping.
It's fine, they're not even spiders.
Spider-Man's comic origins got it right.
Spiders really do only bite us in extreme situations.
So let's just say that against all odds
a radioactive spider does bite you.
What happens next?
In the original comic panels the infamous spider
becomes radioactive when it accidentally
finds itself in the firing line of radioactive rays.
Studies do show that insects and arachnids can
handle a lot more radiation than
you or I could before dying.
Somewhere between 30 and 1500 grays
which is an increase of 10 to 500 times
over what we can handle.
So maybe a spider could absorb
a fantastic amount of radiation.
The question no one ever asked of this scenario, though,
is how does this spider actually become radioactive?
Now I know the scientist in the original comic
said radioactive rays.
But what if I was just fancy 60s comic speak
for a beam of neutrons and
I suggest this because neutron bombardment
is the only common way for otherwise normal stuff
to become radioactive stuff.
It's called neutron activation.
Very basically, neutron activation
is the act of shoving neutrons into an
otherwise stable atomic nucleus.
This makes the nucleus bigger and unstable.
It wants to return to stability.
So in order to do so it throws off particles
and radiation to get back down to its unexcited state.
It's kind of like the guy that you drive behind
on the highway who tried to stuff too much stuff
in his trunk didn't secure all of it properly
instead of just taking like two seconds to secure all of it.
Now he's putting your life in danger cause parts
of it are falling down onto the highway
and maybe breaking your windshield,
and you don't wanna stop and pull over and call AAA,
and you're late to the dentist already.
Sorry, all normal material
can be neutron activated, even spider material.
You can in theory make a spider radioactive
through neutron activation.
However, it's not exposure to the spider itself
that changes Peter's nerd bod.
It is exposure to the spiders venom.
And so the maximum dose of radiation you could receive,
or Peter, depends on exactly how much venom
a spider can inject into you.
Take the Black Widow again, it has dangerous venom,
but not very much.
The average bite from a Black Widow
only imparts two hundreds of a single milligram
worth venom into its victim.
Just a few sand grains worth of mass.
So now let's get technical.
Let's say our spider has a black widow's amount of venom
and after it is irradiated, that venom is somehow
through maybe neutron activation,
as radioactive is something like plutonium,
this is ridiculous as an assumption,
but let's say it happens anyway
because this amount is so small,
it has to be really radioactive
or else nothing's going to happen.
Now the spider bites you and you have 20 micrograms
of radioactive venom coursing through your bloodstream
emitting alpha particles that is smashing
into cellular structures inside of your cells
and punching holes in your DNA.
If the venom stayed in your bloodstream after a week
you would have absorbed the same full body dose
that you'd want to absorb over 20 years in just one week.
And after a month, you start to notice some changes
in your blood cell count because now you have
non-fatal but still totally really bad
radiation sickness, yay.
The reality is if a truly radioactive spider bit you
it either wouldn't be radioactive enough
to do anything to your body
or it would be so radioactive that just a tiny amount
of its venom would start taking a bone saw to your DNA.
Oh yeah.
And broken DNA doesn't give you superpowers.
It gives you cancer.
This is why later interpretations of Spider-Man's
origin story leaned into a genetically engineered spider
with genetically engineering venom.
And I know I may have just not your hopes and dreams
of being Spider-Man off of a tall bridge
and you tried to save it with a web but you couldn't
so maybe let's take this question in a different direction.
What if you were bitten by the most
radioactive spider in the world.
If a radioactive spider had the most radioactive venom
it would become literally the most toxic animal on Earth.
When we say something is radioactive,
like this ominous hunk of metal here,
what do we actually mean?
Well, you've probably heard of half life, right?
It's the amount of time it takes for half of
a radioactive material to decay away.
And if we know this amount of time
and how many atoms are in this hunk of metal,
we can calculate how many of those nuclear decay
events happen every second,
and the more that happened per second
the more radioactive something is, makes sense.
For example, let's say that this hunk of metal
is actually radium-226, an isotope radium.
It would make this metal one of the most
radioactive substances on Earth.
If we had a kilogram of radium-226 right here
it would be throwing out 36 trillion particles
every single second,
and because these particles carry ionizing energy,
it is very dangerous to stand right next to it.
but it's not the most dangerous.
This is just a few milligrams of polonium-210.
It was discovered in named after Poland in 1898
by Marie and Pierre Curie.
It was the first element to be discovered
by its extreme radioactivity alone.
Here I have just a few milligrams of it,
just a snowflake's worth of mass and it
still literally glows blue in air
because the particles it's throwing off as a decays
are ionizing the air around it.
Polonium-210 isn't the most radioactive substance
that we know of, but it might be one of the scariest
because the particles it's throwing off
carry very high energies.
Those particles don't travel very far in air though,
so you can stand about this far away from it
and you'd be fine.
But if this got into your body,
you'd now be in contact with one of the most
toxic substances on Earth.
So let's put it in our spider's venom.
The most radioactive spider on Earth
is about to bite us during our field trip
and inject us with a Black Widow's worth
of polonium-210 in liquid form.
Wait for, math first, you know that.
Spider-Man.
We know the radioactivity of polonium-210.
We know how much mass is going to be in your bloodstream
from the bite, and we know how much energy
each one of those decaying particles
will have and impart to your body.
We are going to consider what this does to you
over the course of a day if you have spider man's mass.
If you were bit by the most radioactive spider
after just a day you would absorb
an entire body dose of three grays.
You would feel nauseous, confused,
you would start throwing up and,
and then you, you lose all your hair.
God.
A week after being bitten by the spider
you would have absorbed a total of 23 grays,
you're going into shock, you're in and out of consciousness,
your organs are failing.
For context, the 100% lethal dose
even with medical treatment starts at eight grays.
You are not waking up with nerd abs after this.
If our spider's venom was as radioactive as polonium-210,
the amount of venom he would need to inject into you
to do something to your body in the form
of definitely killing you would be just a single microgram,
less than a third the mass of a single grain of sand.
Polonium-210 is so radioactive that it doesn't
really have any uses outside of just being radioactive
as a source of radiation for heating up space probes
in space with radioactivity and being used as a,
as a very potent poison.
I guess though, it wouldn't put the venom in venom.
So what would really happen to you
if you were bitten by a radioactive spider?
Well, the comics got a lot right.
You can in theory making spider radioactive.
Spiders only bite people in extreme situations.
And if a radioactive spider bit you,
it could in theory do something to your body,
however, that something could either be almost nothing,
or so much that instead of wall climbing powers
and shooting webs out and stuff,
you have the powers of nausea and organ failure.
Honestly, the most unbelievable part
of Spider-Man's origin story isn't that
radioactivity did something to Peter Parker,
it's that a spider jumped to his hand
and bit him in the first place.
Because Science.
To me, my spiders, all of you, yes.
To their basements we go to lie and wait in the dark.
(upbeat electronic music)
Neutron activation can be a serious concern,
especially if you're working around things
that emit radiation and emit neutrons,
it can make things like your workspace radioactive,
I actually got this sticker which says
caution radioactive material potentially activated.
I got this at a national laser lab,
because what they do there can actually emit
neutrons into the surrounding environment
and activate material so they build most of the lab
out of concrete and not steel,
because steel can become activated by these neutrons
and then it can become radioactive
and therefore workplace hazard
and I have it on this mug
because it's probably not radioactive.
Thank you so much for watching Dakota.
If you want more of me and Because Science,
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and check those out too.
(upbeat jingle)