It’s fun sometimes to look in and see someone’s commented again on a post from the distant past.  Say, a few months.

Back then I playfully assumed that one atom of Chernobyl Iodine-131 was still around, based on a badly-worded study.  Thanks to mountainbear, I’ll always remember that one as the “Wall of Zeroes” post. 

Well, a reader actually created a nifty .gif animation to show this.  Suppose you assembled an Earth-sized ball of I-131 and stepped back?  Poor thing; it’s not long for this universe.

Of course, it’s still a few hundred orders of magnitude smaller than what would be needed to have Chernobyl I-131 around today.  I could break out the math books and calculate the statistical likelihood of a sole survivor…but it would spark no more of a mental image than 10^300 atoms does.  Watching a planet totally evaporate over a year and a half does.

So thanks, Andrew!