The Quest for Hollywood Acid

blog post links out to our social media accounts. And if you want to support the show, a great way to do it is to simply rate and review us wherever you get the show. Yeah, so, Robert, I've got a question for you. All right, hit me, Joe. I'm gonna take you to a dark place. This might be a little traumatic, Okay, okay. Do you remember nineteen nineties the Batman movies of the nineteen nineties, Think back to

Batman Forever. Oh that was That was a Dark Time, directed by Joel Schumacher, starring Val Kilmer as Batman and Tommy Lee Jones in it as the as two face, a very manic to face if I recall, Yeah, he was he was kind of all over the place. That one was snarling a lot, kind of whipping his body around in a frenzy, and that, of course was the acid scarred and that telling of the Uh I believe

he was. Yeah, they So the story of two Face in that version is that he's a Harvey Dent is the lawyer who becomes two Face believe he's a district's attorney and he gets scarred on one part of his face and it drives him insane, and uh, yeah, I don't think they go deep into the backstory and Batman forever, but anyway, it's Tommy Lee Jones and he's he's going wild and he's really trying to get Batman in this one.

So there's a scene where Batman goes into a bank vault where there is a I believe a vault guard of some kind tied up, and when Batman goes in to rescue this guard, the door slams shut and acid starts pouring out of all of the I believe out of the safe deposit boxes. Okay, so a lot of

people may we were keeping their precious acid in this vault. Uh. And the the vault guard realizes what's happening as as Two Face taunts them that they're going to die in this bank vault, and the guard says, oh no, it's boiling acid. There's like a seven second YouTube clip of this that I watch at least once a week. It's one of my favorites. I I watched this for the first time, I think because I don't know that I've actually seen this. Uh, this Batman film. I was super

into the first two. Yeah, when I was a kid. Yeah, the Burton Batman's were great, and I wanted to get into the Schumacher ones, and you know, it didn't work. And I think part of the reason it's not worth it is that boiling acid. Uh. It tightly sums up everything about those funds well exactly. And one of the things that I find so funny about it is, well, if two faces trying to kill them, why couldn't it be Oh no, it's boiling water. I mean, if it's

boiling what what difference does it make? Or if it's acid, or hey, if it's just water, if you're flooding, if you're flating a sealed right, I mean, it can be that it's room temperature water. We're gonna drown. Yeah, And so this obviously brings in a favorite old trope of the superhero genre. But really it's all throughout the movies, and this is movie acid. Notice that the guard in the vault doesn't say what the chemical compound is. It's

not like he recognizes. Oh no, it's hydrofluoric acid. No, it's just acid. And this kind of acid plays a role in all of our favorite you know, our favorite cartoons, science fiction and superhero stuff. It's it's movie acid. It's Hollywood acid. So you're probably familiar with this. You remember lots of other scenes from Batman. I bet right, it's always in Batman, like the villain captures Batman, is the penguin, or somebody's got Batman tied up on a rope dangling

over a vat of acid. Yeah, I mean, it's such a like a vat of acid is one of those things. It's it's a it's a perfect u like human technological achievement, and then we can then utilize for menacing purposes. You know. It's like it's like having a whole bunch of molten steel on hand or a hydraulic press. Right. It represents all of the evils of human industry and sort of the cold killer nature of technology. But at the same time, it's it's a great just sort of like a vertical peril.

It's a like a thing to have below you. It's like a pit of piranhas or a pit of crocodiles or something, and a pit of molecules that want to, uh, want to play nice with all of your skin. So what are the properties of Hollywood acid or movie acid we might call it. I want to list a few and maybe you'll have some of your own. Okay, go for it. One of them is that it causes severe and immediate burns to the skin and soft tissues. That

sounds about right, yeah, just immediate scarification, meltification, um. And we can run through some examples of that in a minute, right. So. Another one is if you put organicterials such as a batman, into a vat of acid, it will kill and then rapidly dissolve that organism. So it has not only killing and burning powers, but also liquification powers. Okay, yes, you're with me so far. Another one is that the colors

can vary, but it's never clear like water. You notice that the acid in the movies it always is usually opaque, usually a shade of green, purple or orange I find. Yeah, green, I think is the big one. And and I'll mention a few examples that I have instilled that that idea to me. But like if I was to draw a picture, uh, you know, doodle something with acid on the side of

a piece of paper, it would be green. Yeah. A good example of the green acid is in that classic episode of The Simpsons where Millhouse becomes fallout Boy and there's there's radioactive man. They're filming a scene from the movie that's real ascid. I want to see goggles people, Yeah, exactly, goggles. They do nothing. It's great. But so another thing about the acid is that it displays am being bubbling, so you don't have to heat it up. It just naturally

boils like a like a pot on the boil. Well that's so you can look at it and know that it's acid, like it's it's bubbling, it's green. It could not be more acid. Yeah. And of course the final the final effector is often kept in a giant vat, though sometimes also kept in something that squirts it out. Do you want to keep it in an open vat, open open top with with some you know, room to have some sort of a chain system in place and some pulleys or whatever, however you want to position your

nemesis above it. Right now, Robert, tell me your movie Acid story. What what? What are your memories from childhood of beloved movie Acid. Oh? I have I have several, uh, but probably the most scarring was at a young age, like too young of an age, I saw a RoboCop. Who lets you watch RoboCop at a young age? I think it was like, um, like an uncle's house. Uh, and it was on. But then again, RoboCop is so violent it's hard to determine exactly what age during a

childhood is appropriate to watch RoboCop. A RoboCop an R rated ultra violent picture for which there were toys, and I think still our toys produced. Another thing I mean to say about RoboCop is that the level of violence and it isn't incidental. It's deliberately hyper violent, I would say, in a satirical uh, for satirical reasons. Yeah, I mean it's a great film. Um, but who I think back about to my seeing it as as a young person,

and I'm a little appalled at times. But yeah, there's a scene where and I'm sure anyone who has seen this has this et burned into their mind as well. One of the villain's Hinchman's gets gets just coated in acid. Leave his name is Emal Is that is that his name? So Emal gets coated in acid. I don't even remember how it happened, Like the RoboCop shoot a vata acid that was behind him and they're setting well, there are a lot of there's a lot of sort of ambient

industry in the movie. It takes place in a dystopian future Detroit, and they're like old factories with what we would presume are just vats of toxic waste and asked it hanging around, Yeah, and somehow this guy gets it splashed all over him during a car chase scene. Yeah, and then he comes just zombie like walking out shambling,

totally meltified, and and then a car runs over. Like there's a second there where you just horrified, like, oh, this poor guy, look at the Stadi's in and then like robocopper, one of the villa I think it's the main villain gets him with the car and he just like splatters like a like a water balloon full of blood, and yeah, it's the dad from that seventies show who gets in with the car And I never trusted that seventies show because of RoboCop. I knew what he was

capable of. Clarence Botocker, he's a great villain. Yeah, so he hits him with the car and he just turns to liquid. He's like a bag of soup and uh and I remember the villain he turns on the windshield wiper. Yeah, it's gross, but it's also there's tons of acid in video games, right. Video games love this, I guess because acids probably fun to animate. Yeah, and if and a lot of games. If you're doing a platform game, right, it's a it's a wonderful thing to have to fall

into and of bounce out off. But my favorite example is from Mortal Kombat two, which was like a major major game for me when I was younger, and in that you have two wonderful uses of acid. You have a stage uh called I think the deadpool where you're fighting on a platform and there's just just green acid, uh through fills the room or ambiently bubbling, I can't remember it's bubbling or not. But if you upper cut your opponent into the acid at the the end of

the match for the fatality. Then they just splash, they scream, they disappear under the acid, and then when they float up to the top, they're just a completely clean skeleton. Oh how long does that take? One second? Two seconds? Yeah, And then of course that game also introduced the character Reptile, who is a reptile, a lizard man ninja um, which I just you know, you just think that for granted now, but he also spits acid. So he takes his little mask off and goes and this, uh, this green glob

comes flying across the screen and burns you. One of the most horrible acid scenes I remember from a kid was from the movie The Fly. We shouldn't dwell on this kind of great movie, but yeah, the fly has digestive enzymes. I suppose that he sort of like spits out on people too, uh, to homogenize their flesh. Yeah. I think there's an early scene where Brundle fly be of course, you know, if you haven't seen it, first

of all, go see it. But mad scientist and a fly their DNA is spliced the teleportation accident, and there's a scene where he's recording himself feeding on something like so just a bunch of sugary junk food, right, and you don't actually see it, happy to just hear it and it's horrific. And then of course later he weaponized is this biological effect? And speaking of weaponized acid biology, we would have to mention I guess this will be

a final example of the xenomorph from the films. Uh So, in Ridley Scott's Alien you might remember this the old classic Alien, we first see the xenomorphous acid blood during the scene where if you remember, John Hurt's character gets a gets an alien parasite attached to his face called

a face hugger, like burns through his helmet. Yeah, yeah, it comes through his face mask and then it's attached to his face and and they're trying to decide if they should cut it off of him on the spaceship and Ian Holme eventually decides to cut one of its fingers off to see if they can remove it, and it squirts blood, and this blood hits the floor and it sizzles when it splashes on the floor, and then continues to eat right through the material of the spacecraft's

floor and then drops down through like two more floors I think through the levels until it eventually stops reacting a few levels down, finally neutralizes and goes through the entire hole. And then Tom Skret's character Captain Dallas. He says he's never seen anything like that before, except quote molecular acid, which is funny that that term doesn't really

make any sense since all acids are composed of molecules. Uh. And in the sequels they correct this by saying the aliens have concentrated acid for blood, which does make more sense in the sense that they're suggesting. It's not like vinegar or some of their friendly acid that's highly deluded to a safe concentration. It's a highly concentrated, strong acid.

But later in this episode, we should explore exactly what might be going on in terms of the aliens blood, how it could be that acidic, if there were something truly like that in nature. Yes, we will circle back around to the xenomorphes at the end. But anyway, so, why why this obsession with acid? We we love this stuff.

I mean, it keeps showing up in our media all the time, even though we were not really we can't be bothered to learn all the chemistry of exactly what chemicals are are out there that could do real harm to our body. So it's always just acid. You know, there's some acid. It's just basically like a magical corrosive substance. Yeah, exactly. So we we wanted to talk today about the real

science of strong acids. And I don't know to what extent you can find chemicals in the real world that match up to these the movie Acid and how close you can get, Yes, okay, So to give you the basics before we get into the strongest assets out there the movie Acid, we we should do a real simple overview of acids, bases and pH I'm not going to turn this into a chemistry class, but we do need to sort of explain how they work. So, first of all,

picture your periodic table and then go directly to square one. Hydrogen. It's the most basic atom in the universe. It's got one proton and one electron, and most of the hydrogen in the universe has no neutrons. But if you want to add one or two, you can get deuterium or tritium, but we're not really concerned with that right now. So your hydrogen atom one proton, one electron and it's electrically neutral because it's balanced like that. The electron has a

negative charge, the proton has a positive charge. If hydrogen loses its electron, it becomes a hydrogen ion, which is just a proton. It's one single, lonely proton with an unbalanced positive charge, and of course nature hates that unbalanced positive charge. It wants to get back together, so that lonely proton is going to be looking for a way to join up with something that has a negative charge and again become electrically neutral. So water is made of

the electrically neutral molecule H two oh. That's one oxygen atom bonded with two hydrogen atoms. And if one of the two hydrogen atoms in the water molecule breaks free, it just runs off, says I'm gonna do my own thing, free of a water molecule and leaves its electron. With that water molecule, you're left with a hydrogen ion, which is just that positively charged free proton proton, and then

a hydroxide molecule which is O H minus. It's a molecule with a negative charge with one oxygen atom one hydrogen atom. Now this can happen naturally in water. Sometimes this is called the the ionization of water. Do ionization of water. You can just have water sitting there in a glass and some subset of the molecules within it are going to undergo this reaction where a hydrogen proton leaves one of the molecules joins to another one, and

that creates this hydroxide molecule oh negative negatively charged. And then also and i uh a molecule called hydronium, which is H three OH. It's a positively charged water molecule that has three hydrogens on it. And so here's where we get into acids and basins bases. There are several different chemical definitions, but we're gonna go with the Bronze Stead Lowry definition because you know which other definition would

you go with? This is obviously the best. It's named after the Danish chemist Johannus Nicolaus Braunze said and the English chemist Thomas Martin Lowry. And so the way it goes is this, an acid is a hydrogen ion donor, in other words, a proton donor. It's a chemical that when you put it it into water, it wants to send free hydrogen ions. These protons out into the solution, and in turn that increases the concentration of hydronium or H three. Oh, that positively charged molecule is talking about

the opposite of this is a base. A base is a hydrogen ion recipient or a proton recipient. When you put it into water, it wants to increase the hydroxide concentration. It makes more molecules of O H minus the negatively charged variant of water. So what would be an example of this, Okay, So one would be, for example, hydrochloric acid.

So you put hydrochloric acid in water, and it wants to break apart and donate that positively charged hydrogen ion to the water, creating some negatively charged chloride and positively charged hydronium. And here hc L is the acid and water is the base by the bronzet Dead Lowry definition. But all this stuff about acids and base this is generally going to be concerning aqueous solutions, in other words,

putting stuff in water. Uh. And so this has a really awesome name, by the way, and it's known as protonation. So when you add a strong acid to a water, because you're giving away those positively charged UH hydrogen ions, you're proton aating the water. Uh. And on of course, on the other hand, you can use a base to d protonate a solution. One more piece of terminology. You've probably heard of the strength of acids and bases expressed in terms of pH. They say, you know an acid

as a pH of three or pH of six. What does that mean? pH is just the concentration of those hydrogen ions in a solution. So normal water, that's a neutral, and the neutral pH is usually said to be seven, So that would be one times ten to the negative seven moles per leader of hydrogen ions. And we're not going to stay on this math for a long time, but just to be clear, a mole is just the measure of how many molecules you got in something, and moles per leader would be the concentration of how many

molecules you've got per leader of water. Specifically, a mole is six point o two and then some more numbers, but basically six point o two times ten to the twenty three. There's a lot of molecules out there. Uh. And so this is this is expressed by saying it has a pH of seven. So if you have a compound with a lower pH that's gonna get more acidic. They donate protons harder. They say, take these protons, take them. To put that in um in perspective, what lemon juice

is a too I believe, yeah, that's about right. In fact, we can read a few a few examples of of phs INN. And then also on the other end of the scale, UH, compounds with higher pH values are stronger basis, they're more alkaline, they steal protons harder their recipients of protons uh. And so just to give a few examples on the pH scale, I just found an illustration online that gives some basic general ideas. Like we said, distilled

water is going to be a seven. It's neutral. That seawater is going to be a little more of a base, it's more like an eight. And then you get baking soda solution it's a little more. It's like eight points. Something. Bleach is going to be like thirteen. That's a strong base. But then going lower on the scale, acids are gonna be things like vinegar is going to be around a three or four. Orange juice is going to be around

a three or a four. Uh. It's interesting that vinegar is between orange juice and carbonated beverages, with carbonated beverages being higher acidic level than vinegar. Oh yeah, they usually say Coca cola is pretty dern acid, and then I think that was their original slogan, Taste the acid. And then once you get really low, closer to zero on the scale, you've got something like battery acid. Just really intense,

strong acid. Take all the protons, take them all, right, And that's that is often where we see the at least the idea of Hollywood acids in that area, the idea like this is battery acid, this is industrial acid. This is highly corrosive stuff that will pick your skeleton dry. Yeah, but I should point out that we're gonna be talking about how strongly acids can dissolve things like organic materials today, and so because the acid that reacts with you does

so through a chemical reaction, the chemicals involved matter. So some acids might actually have a lower pH than others but still be less harmful. For example, hydrofluoric acid, when we're gonna talk about today, is one of the most deadly acids out there, but it doesn't necessarily have the lowest pH. And then when we're talking about the deadly

aspects of acids. Another thing we'll touch on two is that sometimes it's not only the corrosive aspects of the acid, but what happens when it when it has when it undergoes the chemical reaction, what kind of gases can be admitted there some of these examples you end up with with toxic gases that are released when the acid comes into contact with the with the right substance exactly. And another thing tying into hydrofluoric acid, which we're going to

talk about a little more in a minute. Uh, the danger associated with it isn't just from say topical burns. It doesn't just burn you from the outside in and and kill you that way. By getting into your skin and then getting into your blood, it can cause systemic problems that can kill you, for example by causing a heart attack and prolonged exposure to some of these that have also been linked to cancer. So there are a number of ways that these that these dangerous substances can

can harm you. Yeah, okay, so let's say, based on everything we've just looked at, you're going to try to dissolve some organic materials such as a batman So you have a very strong acid, so you've got a vat of it, and you put that acid into an aqueous solution, meaning water. So you've got your acid dissolved into water,

and then you put your batman in. What's going to happen to your batman, Well, depending on the may cup of the solution, what's probably gonna happen is that the acidic solution will begin breaking the chemical bonds of molecules on the outer surface of the batman, so that you know, the excess of protons and charged molecules can form bonds with other molecules in that batman material and assuming it can eat through the batman's suit, is going to start

hacking up the lipids and the protein molecules in the batman's skin, forming new chemical bonds and slowly turning this imbalanced acid water batman solution into a more homogeneous gloupat. Yes, however, there are probably some materials in the batman and the batman's suit that will not react with the acid, meaning you're not likely to end up with a perfectly homogeneous mixture.

You might get some gloup with some lumps in it. Essentially, the villain's acid just wants to bring Batman into equilibrium. Isn't that a nice way of thinking about it? Yeah, he is definitely a character out of balance with the world, right, And so unless somebody perps comes along with a dump truck through full of a week base like baking soda to pour in and neutralize the solution, that's what's gonna happen.

Though I'm not sure exactly how that would work out for the Batman if he's still in the vat while they're neutralizing it. Yeah, would it? Would there be an explosion, an eruption? I don't know that. I think the classic Batman TVs series, of course, with its rigorous approach to science, you would probably see rob and show up dump the base in. Everything would turn to a big foam and uh everything, it would It would be like a foam slippery dance five party. Yeah, yeah, everybody does the twist.

All right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to look at a rogues gallery of dangerous acids. All right, we're back. Well, let's yeah, let's let's roll through a few examples of some powerful, potent real world acids. And again, not we're gonna try not to just really chemistry class you too much on these, but we're gonna, you know, roll through the some of the basic health ratings and uh and and attributes of

these substances. Well, we talked about early on the idea of these these acids that occur in biology, and one acid that definitely occurs in biology is hydrochloric acid HCl. So there's going to be a bond between hydrogen and chlorine and it gets the job done. And I want to note that, uh, these properties are coming off of

the m s d s S Material Safety Data Sheet. Yeah, if you if you're interested in pretty much any substance, any chemical substance, you can generally find um an MSDS on on the internet for this and uh it's it can be a little bit interesting, a little bit technical,

depending on how much that you read. Uh So the appearance of hydrochloric acid, Uh, it would not work in a Mortal Kombat game because it's it's colorless, though it is a fuming liquid, has a pungent odor of hydrogen chloride, which means you're you're doing the bank vault with Batman might be able to sniff it out and when it comes to its solubility, infinite solubility, and water with slight evolution of heat, not necessarily boiling, but slight evolution defeat. Right,

And so the the MSDS comes with these ratings. It's a great rating system. It's kind of like the the m P A A for acids. Know what you're getting ahead of time, Yeah, exactly. Um, the most of the ones we looked at use the JT. Baker s A f T data scores essentially given it. Like you know, it's kind of like character classes in Dungeons and Dragons. Right, it's health rating, it's flammability rating, reactivity rating, contact rating, etcetera. Um,

I'm not gonna deal with all these. But but as far as hydrochloric acid goes, it's health rating is a three, which is severe like a poison level zero, and flammability reactivity rating is a two. Contact rating is three that means it's severe. It's corrosive. Do not touch it, So you need to if you're handling this stuff in the lab,

you need some protective measures in place. Yeah, it's highly corrosive, so it's dangerous for us to inhale if we we we should not come into contact with it on our eyes, on our skin, do not ingest it. Uh, you don't want to undergo chronic light exposure to it either. Um. And then oh yeah, when it's heated to decomposition, it emits toxic hydrogen chloride fumes, and we'll react with water or steam to produce heat and toxic and corrosive fumes. Yeah.

But of course, as I mentioned earlier, despite all this, you've got hydrochloric acid in your body. That's right, I mean, this is the stomach acid. This is uh, this is part of you. And really it's important thing to keep in mind with acids in general. Like, acids are part of our chemical world. Acids are part of the chemistry of life. They're part of our biochemistry, uh, in varying degrees. So yeah, the even though we liked to position acid in that vat of of man made peril, Uh, it's

really just a part of our world. So parietal cells produce hydrochloric acid in our body. It's a strong acid, helps you break down your food. The acid in your stomach is so concentrated that if you were to place a drop on a piece of wood, it would eat

right through it. Really. Yeah, wow. And the G cells produce gastron, a hormone that facilitates the production of hydrochloric acid by the parietal cells, So the stomach, because of course, one of the big questions is, well, why doesn't the acid in our stomach consumers Right, Well, the stomach is producted by the epithelial cells, which produce and secrete a bicarbonate rich solution that coats the mucosa. Okay, so that's taking the method of saving the batman by dumping a

bunch of baking soda into the vat. Yeah. Yeah, the putting in a base exactly. The bicarbonate is an alkaline. A base neutralizes the acid that's secreted by those parietal cells, producing water in the process. And this continuous supply lie of bicarbonate is the main way that your stomach protects itself from autodigestion um and the overall acidic environment if

you're if you're tummy. So uh So, it sounds like this process of creating the base to neutralize it is not something you want going wrong in your body, right, Yeah, that's one you generally what a good a good balance in your stomach chemistry. Yeah, Okay, so hydrochloric acid, that's nothing to be toyed around with. But there are stronger and more dangerous acids out there, and I think maybe

we should move on. So if if hydrochloric acid was sort of the I don't know, the riddler of the acid rogues gallery, I think it's time to move on to the joker. Yes, the joker would definitely be sulfuric acid, right, yeah, And this is one I would say, of all the acids they're technical names, sulfuric acid is the one that is that is most commonly used in fiction. Granted not

without a real deep understanding of what it is. But like the name itself sounds a little scary, soulf for it's it's hellish, right, sulfuric the the name itself sounds a little bit evil. Well, chemically, it's H two S O four, So that's hydrogen with sulfur and oxygen and it forms this molecule that is very very keen to protonate. Oh yes, so it's it's a clear, oily liquid. It's odorless, so sorry bank vault dude. Yeah, both of these so

far clear? Right? Yeah? Yeah? Nothing green? Why why not green? Or or it's also mistable with water, which means that it forms a homogeneous mixture when added to water, liberates a fair amount of heat. Um. And it's highly corrosive and dangerous to humans just across the board, much like hydrochloric acid. So how does it compare in terms of

the ratings? So hydrochloric acid, for for the health rating, we had a three, and for the contact corrosivity rating we had a three, right right three on both yeah, and had a had a two for reactivity and a zero for flammability. This time around we have another zero for flammability. Um. However, reactivity went up from a two to the to a three, so we have severe water reactivity here. Uh. And then as far as health rating goes, we have another three, so it's just a severe poisonous.

But contact rating goes up from three to four from severe to extreme, so it's extremely corrosive. How do they decide what word goes with that? I might say severe is worse than extreme? Well, I don't know. It's it's gonna be specific to the JT. Baker s a f

T data score. I guess because I need a good poet to go through and annotate this data sheet instead of like a single word like a nice description exactly everyone is encountered with it, or an example from a movie, right like this is a you know, this is a

Mortal Kombat two level ascid. Yeah, so if you're going for this movie kind of asset, I think we're we're getting more into the territory here of assets that are really gonna maybe not be of exactly like the movie acid you're used to, but get closer to that than than many other things would. Now, some other bad stuff about sulphuric acid. When heated to decomposition, it produces toxic fumes of oxides of sulfur uh. It will react with

water or steam to produce toxic and corrosive fumes. It reacts with the carbonates to generate carbon dioxide gas, and with cyanides and sulfides to form poisonous hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide, respectively. It all sounds lovely. Yeah, So again that's something though that is often I don't feel like that that's utilized the the the the resulting toxic gas of acid interactions in films, like they were so concerned with what happens when the xenomorph blood gets on you

or your armor or the floor. But how about any resulting fumes. Well, yeah, we're we're always so much more concerned with liquids than with gases. And what one example is volcanoes in movies. You know, volcanoes in real life. I think they're way more likely to suffocate and kill you with gases emitted or or by covering you in ash and and ejecta and stuff like that. But what you see in the movies is the lava. People are running away from liquid lava rolling down the hill toward them.

Your volcano is very likely to kill you, but it's very not likely to kill you that way. Another thing that this is going off topic a little bit, but flamethrowers in a confined space, it's a staple of our entertainment, and yet it is such a bad idea to just rapidly consume. I mean, a flamethrower in general is a bad idea. A real flamethrower way to suffocate yourself. That's a great way to sufcate yourself, and it's rarely, rarely

is that explored. The only example I can think of off hand is that there is a wonderful Nazi zombie film from the seventies or eighties titled shock Waves, and there's a scene where they don't have a flamethrower, but they light some flares, I think to ward off the creatures, and they're in a confined space and it just eats up all the oxygen and everybody's like gasping for breath. And I remember the time thinking, Ah, thank you movie for for for thinking a little bit. That's smart. Okay,

But back to sulfuric acid. So sulfuric acid, based on how dangerous it sounds, You're you're probably never going to have this in your home, right, well, not necessarily. Now you might be able to get sulfuric acid in the home and some deluded uh concentrations. So a nine study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery that I came across was called cutaneous burns caused by sulfuric

acid drain cleaner. Yeah, pretty horrible. So a lot of the commercial drain cleaner you're gonna be getting is actually going to be based on a strong base rather than a strong acid, So it might have something kind of like lie in it to dissolve uh to dissolve materials and the drain to do some some alkaline hydrolysis and clear it out, get all that hair and gunk out

of there. But also there are some preparations made with strong acids, such as highly concentrated solutions of sulf furic acid, and and some people will sell these and you can buy them. And this has caused accidental and sometimes intentional burns in the home. So this study looked at a period of thirteen years ending in May nine six, looking at children and adults who sustained sulfuric acid burns in the home through products like these, And it looked at

twenty one patients. There were thirteen kids and eight adults. And I just want to read the results. They say in eight instances the sulfuric acid burn was accidental, whereas in thirteen cases sulfuric acid was used as a weapon media and total body surface area burned was five percent or a range of one. Approximately fifty percent of burns involved the face and the neck. Skin grafting was required

in fourteen patients or sixty six percent. And it's estimated that nationwide, approximately three thousand injuries per year are related to drain cleaners and that one third of these involved cutaneous burns. So this is, uh, this is one kind of scary fact about what sulfuric acid can do outside of the lab. And this does remind me that in um, you know a lot of films and TV, and and certainly in horror literature, uh, drain cleaner is is often

used that kind of household horror. This thing that is uh, you know, when you used correctly, is certainly just a part of our lives and we don't think about it, but if you turn it around, it becomes this horrible in human thing. And uh, and I should also point out of view some people might have might have missed this in this episode because it's kind of maybe we're

bearing the lead a little bit. But the most recent Creepy Posta episode that Christian and I did gets into the into the issue of acid attacks and the restoration of surgical restoration of individuals who have experienced fact, so it mentions the like the grafting that was eaching in

this study. Uh and so yeah, I mean that's a horrible thing to think about it in real life being used as a weapon probably doesn't behave exactly the same way we do see the movie acid behaving are certainly not as rapidly, but at the same time can cause it very severe burns and damage to the body. So

it's not something to mess around with indeed. But next, let's look at one more rogue in our in our rogues gallery of dangerous acids, and I think this one is going to be one of the most interesting, and this is hydrofluoric acid or h F made of a bond of hydrogen and fluorine. Let's look at the MSDS scores here on this one. So health rating. Our previous two examples were both three, which were severe. This one is a four. This one is extremely poisonous. Uh. This

one also has a zero on flammability. Uh. It's reactivity rating is a mere two, so that's down from three that we had on sulphuric acid. And then its contact rating is a four. Extremely corrosive, just like sulfuric acid. Yeah. So it's a colorless, fuming liquid. Uh. It has a very very acrid odor. Do not breathe the fumes and it is infinitely soluble. Now, this this stuff, because of the nature of it, the hydrogen fluorian bond or the hydrogen fluoride. It has a very unique sort of reactive

profile that's right on contact with metals. It liberates hydrogen gas on heating to decomposition. It can yield toxic fumes of fluorides, and it attacks glass and other silicon containing compounds. It reacts with silica to produce silicon tetrafluoride, which is also a hazardous colorless gas. Yeah, now we should linger on that last fact for a moment, because what do we say here? Hydrogen fluoride can dissolve glass. Yeah. Most of the time. Glass is great for storing chemicals because

it is very nonreactive. You can put stuff in a glass container and it will sit there. It doesn't it doesn't react with what's inside it. Glass is made of mostly silicon dioxide silica, same stuff is you know, a lot of rocks and sand. But hydrogen fluoride smashes up those silicon dioxide bonds in order to replace them with silicon fluorine bonds. And so for this reason you can't store it in glass. You have to store it in a special container, often one made out of something that

won't react with it, like polyethylene plastic. But a few other materials will work. And I wanted to talk about a couple of videos that I found on the Internet that are very interesting dealing with hydrogen fluoride. And if you want to watch these, if you're in a physician, to watch these as you listen to the podcast episode. We will include links to these on the landing page

for this episode Stuffable your Mind dot com. Yeah, so these were done by a group that puts out chemistry videos on the Internet called periodic videos or periodic table videos. It's out of believe, the Chemistry Department of University of Nottingham, and there are a lot of fun They do some experiments with some very unsettling chemicals. One of them was hydrogen fluoride, where they they decided to put a light

bulb in the hydrogen fluoride. So it's a live light bulb with power running to it, lighting up half submerged in a container of hydrogen fluoride. And what do you know, after a little while sitting in the solution, the glass part of the light bulb breaks off, and it breaks off in a very strange way, cleanly, with a circle around where the surface of the acid is is lining the outside of the glass bulb. It just kind of shears it off as if it had been scored and

then removed. And that, of course is pretty freakingly freaky because then the filament immediately comes off and it starts kind of sparking. But then they did another video which I thought was really interesting, and this one's really worth a watch. So this is comparing the flesh dissolving properties of three different acids, actually the three we've just talked about. This is the one I watched, and uh, yeah, this

is a lot of it's fantastic. So in all three cases, what they did is they got a raw chicken leg and they suspended it from a string partially submerged in the acid. Uh. And then the states of the three chicken legs are monitored. And the three acids they did, like we said, are the ones we've just talked about. Hydrogen chloride or HCl, sulfuric acid or H two s

O four, and then hydrofluoric acid or HF. Now, the the sort of the profile we saw affecting the chicken leg was very similar for the hydrogen chloride and the sulfuric acid. Wouldn't you say, yes? Uh, yeah, they seem to do the same thing, which is that after about five minutes, not really any noticeable changes. I'm sure if that chicken leg could feel it probably wouldn't feel good, But you don't really notice any burning on the outside.

After thirty minutes, still nothing really noticeable. So this already is not exactly lining up with what we know about movie acid right right, And these are best in our brightest athletes, yeah, exactly. But overnight some really interesting stuff started to happen with these two. So the previously clear solution takes on a dark pigment and the part of the chicken that has been submerged has turned into this dark, viscous jelly that drips off of the bone when you

lifted up. Uh. And then after that they went a whole hog where they cut the string and just dunked the whole chicken leg in and it's gross. It just continues to darken the acid solution, turn it into this gloopy, dark and jelly, and it it sort of begins to liquify the outer layers of the chicken leg. Don't know what what would have happened if they just kept it going for weeks. After after a day, it was not looking good. It was thoroughly unappetizing, that is for sure. Yeah.

I don't know. People just don't for some reason, you want to eat a piece of chicken. You don't want to eat some chicken jelly, but yet you like grape jelly. Yeah. Well, um, well there you know. There are different jellifications of flesh that are consumed arthur In, like French busine. Oh I suppose, so, yeah, that's right. What's it called aspect? Yeah, okay, moving on

now now, So that's hydrogen chloride and sulfuric acid. But the real strange one contributing here is the hydrofluoric acid, this being the one that we just covered, the one that dissolves glass. Yeah, and so similar profile at the beginning. After five to thirty minutes, really not any significant observed changes. Like we said, probably if you could be that chicken leg it would not be pleasant. But just looking at it, nothing strange seems to have occurred. But again, overnight, some

really crazy stuff starts to happen. Unlike the other two acid solutions, which darkened and took on the red red pigment, uh, this acid solution remains clear and the part of the chicken legs submerged in the acid has sort of partially disappeared and has a white discoloration along the sheared away surface. It looked to me, I don't know what you thought about this, It looked to me like frost or freezer burn. Yeah. Yeah,

I did have that kind of appearance. Yeah. And then also the entire rest of the leg has become discolored, so all of the red pigment in the soul it looks like it's just been drained away. And even the part way up out of the acid has become pale

white with greenish spots. It's lost its pink pigment. Uh. And then after they dropped the whole thing, and when they cut the string, it looks almost like extremely overcooked boiled chicken, pale white all over except for a little part sticking out which looks green and disease like they just the worst example of steamer tray lunch room chicken

legs you could possibly imagine. Yeah, And so I do recommend the the video because the chemist who they talked to in the video has a theory about why this happens. And I'm not going to repeat his theory, but it's worth checking out. It's pretty interesting. He also has wonderful like frizzy white hair. He's just a fabulous example of of a British scientist. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we will get into the realm of super acids and then we

will reconverge with the Xeno morph. Hey, everybody, trips to the post office are never convenient, so why not get postage right from your desk with stamps dot Com. Stamps dot Com gives you special postage discounts you can't get in a post office, including first class, Priority mail, Express, International, and more. You'll never pay full price for postage again. Yeah. So here's how stamps dot Com works. It's pretty simple. You use your own computer and printer to buy and

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become a super acid? We've talked about superheroes at the beginning of Batman is a Is he a hero or superhero? Well, he doesn't really have superpowers, but I guess he counts as a superhero. Oh yeah, he's got the costume, he's got the technology. So yeah, maybe if these other acids we just discussed, dissolving chicken legs won't dissolve a Batman fast enough. You need a super acid to dissolve a superhero. It seems like the kind of thing is super villain.

Would need to look into it exactly. So what is a super acid? Well, super acid is an acid that is as strong as or stronger than, one hundred percent pure sulfuric acid. Uh, And why would you ever have anything like this? What's the point of it? Well, acids are an incredibly important catalyst in the chemical industry, which is maybe why they're in, you know, the industrial settings, some big open vets. Yeah, but they have. They have a number of applications and potential applications in fuel cell

technology and the chemical and petroleum industry. So, for instance, acids don't usually react with hydrocarbons, oil, petroleum, but super acids do. Yeah, And so we figured it's worth looking up what's the strongest acid known to humankind? There is an answer to this question, right, It is fluoro antimonic acid or h s b F six. Then this is, as far as we know, the strongest super acid on earth. So what's the deal with it? So this is made

by combining hydrofluoric acid with antimony pentafluoride. And this is gonna sound crazy, but it the resulting acid is billions of times stronger than sulfuric acid. Yeah, it's billions and billions of times or just many orders of magnitude stronger than sulfuric acid. That is crazy obviously something we don't exactly know. Like I couldn't find any videos that were clearly real of people dealing with this stuff. I couldn't find a lot of first person accounts of people dealing

with it. There there's some some research materials about it, but they don't really get into, uh, into what exactly would happen by combining this with stuff. I imagine if you dipped a batman in it, some some stuff would go down. Yeah, I mean, we found numbers that were kind of all over the place, and there's no MSDS score for this. There's no s A f T data on this, so we can't we can't even like look at numbers that put it, uh, you know, to make

a comparison between it and acid. Right, But just based on on what we do know about it, I think it's safe to assume that this stuff is incredibly dangerous and dipping a batman and it would have some some consequences. But but you might be wondering, you know, with with an acid that strong, something that that reactive, how would you even store it? Right? Because just the hydrogen, uh, just with the Jeff, you've got this problem where you you you're dissolving glass containers. Uh so what do you

use to story? This wasn't an interesting piece of information I found cited in several sources. You can actually store it with something you keep around the house. It's something with a solid bond that really doesn't want to let go and bond with other stuff. It's teflon ptf E, so polytetrafluora ethylene. It's a ptf E and that's just a a fluorine carbon bond molecule. That's it's It's very monogamous.

It just doesn't want to go bond with other stuff. Interesting. Alright, So if you are battling a lizard ninja that may or may not have um super acid in its body, where your teflon ninja costut to battle it? Exactly? Okay, that's what Batman uses, I bet sustain his encounters with

vats of acid is a teflon batsuit. So this would be what McBain's underwear was made off in that that scene we were talking about from The Simpsons, because when the flood of acid and throws him through I think mill houses, uh trailer, that the acid like quickly eats

off all of his clothing except for his underwear. Yeah, well, I'm sure that was done for a network censorship reasons rather than than scientific accuracy reasons, but it could be could be uh teflon underwear protects you from the acid, though I don't know if that would work with every acid. That's true. I just have to assume if it works for the strongest asset in the world, is going to

be generally pretty effective. Alright, So, Joe, at this point, we've we've talked about what Hollywood acids look like, we've talked about the real properties of acids, and we're already seeing how they don't really match up to our Batman dissolving needs. Doesn't mean they're not dangerous something that are certainly credibly dangerous, but they don't behave exactly like we we want them to to make Batman burn. Well, are there other things in our natural world that do behave

like these fictionalized substances? Well, still probably not exactly. You're not going to get the green, bubbling, instant dissolving you kind of thing. But in many cases, I think if you want a chemical that burns through human flesh more like it does in the movies, what you want is not necessarily a strong acid, but a strong base on the opposite end of the pH scale, such as LIE, which would be usually sodium hydroxide in a O H

or potassium hydroxide KOH. And so I wanna bring to your mind a scene from a movie you might or might not have seen it. You've seen Fight Club, right, Oh? Yes, you remember the scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt and Edward Norton they're sitting around a table and they're making soap because this is a plot point in the movie, and one of the ingredients in making soap, and this

is true is lie. And in the scene, brad Pitt he takes Edward Norton's hand and he kisses him on the hand, and then he pours lie across the wet spot where his lips were, and this causes a reaction that begins to burn Edward Norton's hand. And for the sake of you know, kind of macho and somewhat grandiose sense of carpet d m, brad Pitt convinces Edward Norton to just sit there and endure the pain, the chemical burn,

instead of washing off the lie. And he also tells him that washing it off with water would only make it worse, and eventually he uses vinegar to neutralize the acid. Now, you shouldn't take your chemical safety information from a podcast. We are not chemical safety experts, and you should always consult those real experts before dealing with strong acids or bases. But from everything I've read, Brad Pitt's wisdom about the

vinegar here is not exactly true. Uh. It is true that a strong base like LIE is activated in the presence of water, and that you can use acids to neutralize bases. But if you've got LIE on you, my non expert opinion is that your first priorities just get it off. You get it off your skin as fast as possible, rather than running around looking for a creative lemons to squeeze on and neutralize it. Washing it off with water would be one way, but you just want

it off your skin as fast as possible. Also worth pointing out that commercial vinegar is mostly water. It's acetic acid, but it's highly diluted with water. But yes, in any case, this is an example of what strong bases can do to the skin, and in some ways the scene is kind of accurate. Like a strong base like a lie in the presence of water on the skin can definitely burn you. It can cause bad chemical burns, and can

definitely truly dissolve human flesh under the right conditions. So this is one thing we also see the movie acid being used for. It's like the Mafia hitman in the movie have some vat of acid in their basement and they whack somebody and they put him into the vat of acid and it dissolves them. But studies have actually shown that if you really want to dissolve a human body. We're not trying to give anybody pointers on how to commit murder, and of evidence is just science presented by

the Mafia Science Institute. Apparently the better way to do that would be with a strong base rather than a strong acid for for fully dissolving flesh. And one piece of evidence for this is something we've actually talked about

on the podcast before. And you remember the episode we did last October about the future of the dealing with human remains and green burials and stuff like that, and so the method, one method we talked about is known as alkaline hydrolysis, and this is a method of disposing of condevers. It's used by lots of medical facilities, and there's increasing interest in using it as a cheaper and greener alternative to traditional burial incremation. And essentially it goes

like this. You put the body into a pressurized chamber that contains a mixture of water and lie so here's your strong base, and then you heat the chamber to around a hundred and sixty degrease celsius or you know, over three hundred degrees fahrenheit, and the body is liquefied in just a few hours, and it can be washed down the drain and any remaining bone fragments that can be pulverized and dealt with however you want. But now, obviously the heat and the pressure here are playing a

big role in what's going on. But the strong base is crucial. It's an m v P dissolver of organic materials such as a human body or or an animal carcass or a batman. And so one of my suggestions is that maybe we should start replacing movie acids in our fiction with movie bases. I think part of the problem is that acid sounds cooler, acid is more even though I think most people know that you have acids

and bases. Uh, it's like the just the word itself acid. Yeah, instead of like base, you know, like which one, which one is just like linguistically potent? Yeah, for for fictional purposes, which one sounds scarier to be protonated or to be deprotonated? Yeah, and then of course acid. I mean we talk about, oh, well that person has a really you know, acidic attitude or something. You know, it's like, it's we we Acid is just going to make your sentence that much stronger.

It's gonna make your threat to the superhero that much stronger. Yeah, it's it's it has more sentence, despite the fact that it might not be as great a wonderful dissolver of organic material or something like lie. But yeah, I'm ready Robert for you to take us back to the Nostromo. All right, well, you know, the my motion detector is going off here. I think it's actually coming from inside the room at this point. So yeah, let's let's talk

about the xenomore. Yeah, okay, so we mentioned this earlier in the episode. This is one fantastic example of movie ascid. I think it's probably my favorite movie asset is the Aliens Blood Right, Yeah, I mean, it's so well utilized and uh and and feels like a real threat and helps to just position the creature. You know, we can barely touch it, we can barely wound it, and when we do wounding, it might kill us. Yeah. So we've described sort of what happens in the scene in the

first scene where these that there. There are many different ways the asset appears throughout all of the movies that have aliens in them, but it typically always burns and dissolves things. It's it's you don't want to get it on you. It might kill you, might burn you. But is is there anything we can relate this acid too in the real world? Could an organism really behave this way?

And what might it's acid blood? Be ah? Well, this is a fantastic question, um, But before I get into it, I do want to mention that, as a fun note, there is an older monster, perhaps the most famous monster in Western literature, that also boasted corrosive blood, and that's Grendel. Oh wow, Yeah, it's been so long since I've read from Bayol. It's been so long, Yes, since I've read Beowulf. I've certainly read things since then that have Grendel in them.

But it's been so long I didn't I didn't even realize this. I have sort of rediscovered this in our research. This is crazy. So, of course Beowulf is a classic of Anglo Saxon literature Old English literature, where you know you've got this epic. The hero Beowulf goes into slay the monster that's been harassing this Uh. I don't know, would you even call it a town, this encampment of humans? Uh? And so what's the deal? So he goes into slay

Grendel and he encounters some acid blood. Yeah, basically like he ends up getting this special sword, and then at the end he he's earlier. He rips off Grindel's arm, wounds him, follows Grindel back to his layer, cuts his head off, and then the blood from the from the beheading, it melts the blade. This is a translation, obviously, but the sword blade began then the blood having touched it, contracting and shriveling with battle icicles. It was a wonderful

marvel that had melted entirely. So it's my understanding that you could kind of interpret this is maybe a blood is really hot and just melted it um you know, as in a you know, a great fire, or that it's acidic, depending on your interpretation. Either way, that's that's quite uh an adaptation on the part of the Grindel organism. Oh man, I wonder if this is the oldest single version of the creature that spits toxic chemicals. Maybe, you know,

I can't. I can't think of another mythic creature that has this fire. But yeah, there's certainly fire breathing, but as far as acids or something that is corrosive that is, you know, destroying the weapons that are used against it, I can't think of one offhand. Yeah. Crazy. Well, anyway, we we should return to our modern example though, So imagine Beowulf goes into slay a xenomorph. He'd have exactly the same problem, right, The xenomorph queens in there. She's

been harassing the town. He takes in his special sword, he lops off its head, and the sword melts. Right, Yes, the sword melts, and you got the job done. But yeah, your magical weapon is ruined. Yeah, maybe spraying him on the face in the process and killing him getting the last laugh after all. Oh yeah, well, you know it's Beowulf's they probably dodge it. I always have this thing,

I always since sympathize with Grendel. Uh. Yet to see an adaptation of the story where I'm like, oh, yeah, Beawolf is a good dude, I can get behind him. I always sympathize with the monster. Well, I mean, yeah,

Grendel's the loner. Well, maybe one of the first places we should look to see what the aliens blood might be would be to look behind the scenes in the movie and see, Okay, so how do they create the special effect in the In the alien movies, you see the aliens spilled their blood like in the first movie in Ridley Scott's film, you see it's spill on the floor. It burns through the floor and it just keeps burning through floors until finally it stops. What what was going

on there? Well, I found some accounts online of the where this special effect came from, and supposedly it was created by the alien special effects supervisor Brian Johnson, and the the acid effect was essentially a combination of some various chemicals and then that was applied to and this is pretty clever styrofoam floors they just made. They made

styrofoam ship hull. I don't know what styrofoam stuff that would be the floors of the ship, and then spray painted its silver to make it look like it was metal. What's the name of the company, the corporation while wait, wait, waitl in Utahi and maybe they're just super cheap and they're like styrofoam. That's great. I'm sure that's what it was. But in any sense, so what was it made of? Well, the blood they had was made of chloroform, acetone, cyclohexylamine,

and acetic acid, which is vinegar pretty much. Acetic acid is deluded to create vinegar and then some other compounds. But I thought this is funny because so acetic acid, yes, of course is an acid diluting diluted in in water to make vinegar with some other flavorings. Acetone is not an acid, that's neutral neutral pH seven uh, Cyclohexulamine is a base. And then and then of course the head

chloroform and stuff. And apparently it eats through styrofoam all right, but it probably wouldn't eat through a real spacecraft's hull. And one of the big reasons it eats through styrofoam is probably the presence of acetone. I don't know if you've ever seen videos of what happens when you pour acetone on a styrofoam wighead or something like that. I don't think I've seen those videos. If you ever want to make a head melt for a bunch of children,

this is a fun party trick. I don't don't get any of the Well, I'll keep that in mind from my son's a fifth birthday. Yeah, so like, here's the head of your enemy and you just pour some massa tone on that styrofoam head. It's just oh no, it melts. So it works great for a special effect, but probably would not work for a real organism that wanted to melt through metal and plastic and all all of the

other stuff that probably makes up a ship. Yeah, and one is a good Uh, it's a good verb to use here, because of course that brings up the question, well, how does this occur? It? Is this an evolved trade? Is this an engineered traite? But what is the origin of the xenomorph? Then? Uh? Depending on how these work. But I have I have a couple of proposals here, Okay, as to what could be going on with the xenomore. So my my first more modest and explosive proposition is

this UH. And I'm sure that this doesn't match up to everybody's UH interpretation of the franchise or every entry of the franchise. But here's the Okay, So we see the thing bleeding acid when it's hard, right, you shoot it, cut whatever acid shoots out. And of course we also see it using the acid offensively occasions such as when that face hugger UH melt through the glass dome on the helmet. Oh yeah, I didn't have to cut itself

to do right if somehow just utilized treated this. So what if this isn't the creature's blood at all, really not properly, but rather an acid stored throughout the body to react to physical harm UH that in turn harms the attacker. That's interesting because it wouldn't have to be the blood, would it. You wouldn't be This wouldn't have to be the substance that's circulating molecular oxygen to the body tissues, right, It wouldn't be serving other purposes in

the body. It would be there expressly to rupture during physical harm to UH, to harm or destroy the attacker. And the thing is, we see something very similar, really identical in terrestrial termites and ants who also serve a queen. You know, they also I mean that the termite had

a huge influence on especially aliens. So um, so we call this sub process this practice autopsis, and this is the process by which a natural world organism destroys itself via the internal rupturing of an oregon or gland that in turn ruptures the skin. So it's a purely muscular exercise caused by deliberate contractions around the engorged tissue. Fascinating. Yeah, I mean it's crazy because this is the kind of

thing that apparently evolved from pooping on your enemy. Like what started off is like poop on the enemy when they attacked and defensive defecation. But then it becomes like, if you can't get that poop out of the ain is fast enough, just like make it rupture through your body. And that has steadily evolved over time into more complex modes of self rupturing and the body buster par excellence here is Neo caapa termes tarracula, and this is um.

This is a fabulous organism. So the species workers grow abdominal sacks of toxic blue crystals throughout their lives. But these explosive backpack to some studies refer to them, are

are most pronounced and elderly workers. So so as they become less useful to the colony, and that sort of turn into the suicide bombers exactly like you know you don't have you have dull and useless mannibles, you really know, not that much use, but you've become a stockpile for toxic substances, and that becomes your purpose when enemies invade

the termite mound. Uh, the the end they just rushed for, where the invaders then bite into their bodies, and that's when the blue crystals combine with salivary secretions to produce a deadly chemical weapon. Huh. So that would mean that the the xenomorph here would simply boast a system of pressurized acid tubes and it's it is merely the rupture of those tubes that we see, uh, and and is

therefore an act of autopices. So this would be like highly concentrated stomach acid or something else that has evolved into this defensive mode. Yeah, and of course we do see from our own stomach. So, like we talked about earlier, that it's possible for a body to contain within it some uh, some concentration of acid that would be very damaging if we encountered it externally or in the wrong

part of the body. You just need specialized cells along whatever you know, body's tissues containing it to to buffer it essentially to keep it, uh from reacting with the rest of the body exactly. Now, of course, all of this is taking a very terrestrial approach to it. It's taking a very carbon biased, water biased approach. But of course not all modes of life, not all biochemistry is out there, are necessarily based on carbon or based on water. So we might have to take it a bit bit further.

What sort of organism might have blood that is either incidentally or adaptively corrosive at least to our sort of flesh. Well, perhaps they're silicon based life forms as opposed to carbon based. So even here on Earth we have solicit acid, which is very weak acid in our hair, our nails, or but dermist. Uh, So it seems conceivable that this, or perhaps hexafluoro silsilic acid might play into a silicone based

xenomorphs anatomy. Huh. And this is the exact sort of biochemistry that could enable a life form to thrive in a sulfuric acid rich environment. Now, I'm not sure it could be as potent as what we see in the films, but this is an area where I think, you know, there any biochemist listening off to weigh in on that for us? Yeah, well, I mean, how how reactive would an acid or whatever the chemical is. Maybe it's a

strong base actually that it's releasing. How strong would it have to be to really eat through the hule that fast? Is there any chemical that would really eat through the whole that fast? I don't know about that. Maybe what if it has the fluoro antimonic acid in it? And you know, the thing is for a defense, you know, if you're if you're thinking about something that has evolved, this as a basic defense against human oid creatures that are there at least semi human like, all you would need.

You wouldn't need a very strong acid or base at all to just like get in their eyes and give you a moment's advantage in some sort of an altercation. But it seems as if it's an organism perfectly conceived to be unkillable on a spaceship for plot purposes. Indeed, it is a perfect organism. Now, some experts, including the late great Carl Saken, have speculated that alternate astrobiologies could still entail carbon but depend on something other than water.

Is the solvent such as ammonia or perhaps hydrofluoric acid. Yeah, and of course this is crazy because we we mentioned the face hugger burning through the presumably glass helmet, and uh and what does hydroflulic acid do? But it can break down glass, as we mentioned. Yeah, of course, now it does take a while. Again, one of the things that's always not quite matching up right between the movie acid and the acid in the in the real experiments

we're talking about is just rapidity. It's just the time it takes to dissolve things, right, everything instant in the films, and it just it doesn't seem to be that way with real chemistry. So here's a quote from Sagan in

nineteen eighties Cosmos, his book. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used, hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, Although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal of damage to the kind of molecules that make us up. But other organic molecules paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence. I like your Carl Sagan voice.

It's it's it's not that great of a voice. We really know what we need is we need Chuck to come in and do his kermit the frog voice, which I think also sounds very sagany. I don't think I've ever heard that. Oh you should, you should ask him to do a little kermit, but read some cosmos. I think your Carl Sagan is pretty good man. Don't don't put yourself down, all right. Well, you know, well Sagan

is not the only one to chime in on this. Uh. Plenty of other biochemists have also looked at, you know, possible alternate biochemistries, and they've presented sulfuric acid as a possibility. So it's certainly more cosmically common, you know, So it would it would make sense. In the two thousand seven book The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, and

this is a book by a number of authors. It's it's it's credited authors are the Committee on the Limits of Organic Life and Planetary Systems UM, the National Research Council, and a few other bodies. I'm not going to list them all, but in a chapter titled Hawai Water Toward More Exotic Habitats, they state the following quote, Sulfuric acid

is a reasonably good solvent that supports chemical reactivity. Sulfuric acid is known to exist above Venus, where three cloud layers at kilometers are composed mostly of aerosols of sulfuric acid, about eight in the upper layer and the nine percent in the lower layer. The temperature about three kelvin at about fifty kilometers altitude at about one point five a t m is consistent with stable carbon to carbon covalent bonds.

So the take home here is that, yes, it is conceivable that we would have a a a carbon based life form in which the solvent is sulphuric acid. It's reasonable now whether that life could actually match up to the just profound the standards that we set with the xenomorph that's another issue. Yeah, are you are you breaking my heart? Robert? Are you telling me that there's probably not a xenomorph anywhere in our Solar system. I'm saying

that the xenomorph exists in the realm of forms. Yeah, and but the universe that we live in, it's it may be at least willing to meet us halfway. Well, even a pale imitation of a xenomorph would be welcome to my ears. Yes, so my eyes as it burned them out. So if you yeah, if you lived to be um you know, several thousand years old, your your life prolonged by all the areas technology is available to you, and you set yourself on the perfect death. You want to die the the the acidic blood of of of

an alien species. There is maybe some hope. So Robert, I've enjoyed exploring this with you because I've always loved movie Acid, and I wonder what it is that captivates us so much about acid. I want to go back to that question. I started with, why you know they so they put Batman in the bank vault. Oh no, it's boiling acid. It could have been boiling water or even room temperature water, and it still would have killed him, but that wouldn't be nearly as interesting. For some reason,

we want acid. Why is acid so interesting as a way to kill people when you could get the same thing done with just a hot uh normal liquid. You know, it could be hot uh bleach. I mean, well yeah, that would be that would be a pretty weird, interesting way to kill people. But hot water, boiling water that people would be like, huh, why why didn't you go to acid? Well, because well, for one thing, boiling water

is every day, right or not every day. It's like even like most people have some experience of putting the macaroni in the boiling water. Yeah, yeah, And I think that's right. I think heating. Heating is a method of changing the chemical nature of something that's very familiar to us. Whereas the chemical reactions that take place in the bond breaking that takes place when you've got an acid solution of water, that that's something that's less familiar to us.

We don't understand what's going on there. And for that reason, it's kind of like magic. Yeah, it's to the the average viewer, like a bad guy. Dissolving an acid makes as much scientific sense as one ron silver touching on another ron silver in time cop and then becoming a big red goo of melt. But yeah, that's why they're both wonderful. That they capture the magic of nonsense exactly. They put it right into your face or on the face. Hey,

so there you have it, Hollywood acid. Uh so again, you want to check out more episodes of the podcast, You want to check out the links we're talking about some related material head and over stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's we'll find our podcast, including this one the landing page. Watch some cool links to relate a kind of on the site and off the site. The website will also have videos, blog post links out to our social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.

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