Good news everyone, scientists can (theoretically) recreate the insects from The Mist!

The Mist is a Stephen King novel turned into a movie and a TV Mini Series. I enjoyed the movie version, so I’ll reference that plot from now on. It’s about a military experiment that goes wrong, and a portal to another dimension lets in a horde of large creatures to a small town in Maine. The portal also brings in a wave of “mist,” but actually it’s fog and let me explain why.

Being Pedantic

Mist happens when warm air encounters something colder, rapidly changing water vapor into liquid droplets in the air. Fog is just a more intense version of mist. If the visibility in the mist is less than 1km, then it’s technically fog. The visibility in the movie is short, maybe 10 ft. So it’s fog, just a funny weather fact. I’m sure there’s some valid reason it’s called The Mist, though.

Wild Speculation

The other interesting implication about the fog coming from the portal: the other dimension/location must be much warmer and more humid than Maine, at least, for the fog to spread out of a small space like that. It probably has a rainforest-like climate. Additionally, The creatures in the movie look like large versions of some animals we have. So you could speculate that the portal just goes to our own world in the past or future.

Looking at our past, about 350 million years ago, during the Carboniferous period, there were many giant insects and large rainforests as well, so the portal could have simply gone there. It’s unlikely, though, because a few insects shown in the movie are much larger than any we’ve found any evidence for.

What about the future? By looking at the Carboniferous period, we might know why insects were so large: high oxygen. In a hypothetical future if oxygen levels rise significantly, insects might grow much larger, maybe even to the mountainous size in the movie. Hopefully not, though, insects are creepy enough.

Check out this silly video I made about this, “The Mist Prequel”: