Today’s post is an invitation. I ask you to propose and vote for those real materials that could have come out of a sci-fi story. And I think you deserve a bit of an explanation on how I decided to write such a peculiar post.
At the risk of sounding like a nerd, I love science fiction! I think I was hooked when I first saw Blade Runner on the cinema. Years later, my friends studying Political Sciences did a report analysing sci-fi movies and the social structures they portrayed (what is used as a money, what are the main conflicts and how are they solved, etc). It was while I join one of their very creative sessions, watching Mad Max, that I realised what science fiction is all about: what we really are, what we may become and/or what we could aspire to be. I love the freedom provided by this genre to imagine societies and technologies yet to be created.
All this introduction to tell you that when Robert Frith, Director of Superblue (design company with the most appropiate name for a sci-fi post) send me a presentation about materials featured in sci-fi novels, I knew I wanted to write about it. Superblue’s project is in itself quite interesting, as the presentation was given to the Materials KTN for their annual general meeting, to inspire their members, promoting forward thinking. Have a look at the presentation following this link: novel-materials. Inspired myself by it, I thought about the idea of materials with amazing properties and realised that we already have many of those, is just that they are not very well known.
So I have a look on the web and asked a few friends around. I especially recommend you visit Futuristic Materials, from Accelerating the future. Written by Michael Anissimov, he defines his own blog as dealing with:
Transhumanism, AI, nanotechnology, and extinction risk
His blog is really complete, although some of the subjects do escape me a bit. His readers left a lot of interesting comments, with more ideas and suggestions beyond the 10 material types that Anissimov offers, which are the following (wikipedia links on all of them):
- aerogel
- carbon nanotubes
- metamaterials: A materials is a material which gains its properties from its structure rather than directly from its composition. An example, the superlens.
- bulk diamond: diamond coatings that could enhance our machinery in general. What we can already do with diamonds: synthetic diamonds, diamond enhancement,
- bulk fullerenes
- amorphous metal
- superalloys
- metal foam: Used in the Olympic swimming pool 2008. A list of suppliers here.
- transparent alumina, aluminium oxide
- e-textiles
His list of futuristic materials is really good, but I think he is proposing classes of materials and I would like to have a bit more detail. For example, he mentions bulk fullerenes, but the amount of materials included there is surprising: graphene, buckyballs, carbon nanotubes or fullerite. Héctor Mera, a good friend of mine and also a theoretical physicist working in Kurt Stokbro’s group at the Nanoscience Centre in the University of Copenhagen is a real fan of graphene:
To me, the material that seems more like a sci-fi one, and the absolute star amongst conductive materials, is graphene. Electrons and holes haven’t got effective mass and they behave a bit like photons with spin 1/2. It’s the father (or mother) of carbon nanotubes and buckyballs. You can cut it to make graphene nanoribbons, which are strips of graphene. Depending on how you cut the strips you either get a metal or an insulating material.
While Héctor was giving me this passionate defense of graphene, truly convincing, I was still considering doing a post consisting of a list of Almost sci-fi materials. But the director of Agalip, a young Galician publishing house, told me the final advice that has lead to this post. If you are not sure which materials to include, why don’t you ask people to tell you? Excellent idea, because I normally deal with pretty down to earth materials, the kind we use everyday. I’m pretty sure there are people out there that know much more than me about this incredible, but not so used yet, materials.
Please send me the materials you would like to see in the final list of “almost sci-fi” materials. If your favourite material is already there, just vote for it! If you can provide info on the material, like how is produced, properties and applications, feel free (as you would be saving me time!). You can do all this by leaving a comment at the end of this post. Thanks a lot to all of you and let’s get going!
