The fission-survived isotope 298Fl, long expected to be doubly magic, is predicted to have alpha decay half-life around 17 days. The direct synthesis of the nucleus 298Fl by a fusion–evaporation pathway is currently impossible since no known combination of target and stable projectile can provide 184 neutrons in the compound nucleus, and radioactive projectiles such as calcium-50 (half-life fourteen seconds) cannot yet be used in the needed quantity and intensity. Currently, one possibility for the synthesis of the expected long-lived nuclei of copernicium (291Cn and 293Cn) and flerovium near the middle of the island include using even heavier targets such as curium-250, berkelium-249, californium-251, and einsteinium-254, that when fused with calcium-48 would produce nuclei such as 291Mc and 291Fl (as decay products of 299Uue, 295Ts, and 295Lv), with just enough neutrons to alpha decay to nuclides close enough to the centre of the island to possibly undergo electron capture and move inwards to the centre, though the cross sections would be small and little is yet known about the decay properties of superheavy nuclides near the beta stability line. This may be the best hope currently to synthesize nuclei on the island of stability, but it is speculative and may or may not work in practice. Another possibility is to use controlled nuclear explosions to achieve the high neutron flux necessary to create macroscopic amounts of such isotopes. This would mimic the r-process in which the actinides were first produced in nature and the gap of instability after polonium bypassed, as it would bypass the gaps of instability at 258–260Fm and at mass number 275 (atomic numbers 104 to 108). Some such isotopes (especially 291Cn and 293Cn) may even have been synthesized in nature, but would have decayed away far too quickly (with half-lives of only thousands of years) and be produced in far too small quantities (about 10−12 the abundance of lead) to be detectable as primordial nuclides today outside cosmic rays.