Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, if you're watching
Speaker 3: on video, obviously we are not in our normal places,
Speaker 3: not coming to you from the Gray Matt underworld or
Speaker 3: the other world, I can't remember what we decided to
Speaker 3: call it, the places we usually come from. Today we
Speaker 3: are recording remotely at the studio at Baja Mar because
Speaker 3: they are a sponsor of this episode.
Speaker 4: That's right, we're in the Bahamas. I made a point
Speaker 4: of walking in the sand on the beach before I
Speaker 4: came in here today because we are going to be
Speaker 4: talking about sand. I kind of like to tie these
Speaker 4: kind of things together when there's some travel involved. I'm
Speaker 4: also you can't see it, but I am wearing flip flops.
Speaker 4: It felt appropriate. It felt like Jimmy Buffett would want
Speaker 4: me to wear flip flops for this recording, so I
Speaker 4: honor his spirit in doing so.
Speaker 3: Stuff on a pop top.
Speaker 4: Yet fortunately not and you don't want to engineer that.
Speaker 4: That's you know, it ruins the magic of it, of course. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So yeah, we're going to talk about sand here today,
Speaker 4: and I think sand is a great topicause in in general,
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people have certain feelings about it,
Speaker 4: you know, in the imagination, but also very personal opinions
Speaker 4: about sand. I don't know about you, Joe. I enjoy
Speaker 4: the sand. I don't like sand where it's not supposed
Speaker 4: to be. But I like going into a region of sand,
Speaker 4: experiencing the sand. I like the feeling of walking on
Speaker 4: a beach and feeling it, you know, move beneath my toes,
Speaker 4: getting the different consistencies of sand. I like digging in
Speaker 4: the sand. But I also know plenty of people who
Speaker 4: are like an absolute no to beach time because they
Speaker 4: just don't like sand. I mean, Star Wars memes aside,
Speaker 4: They just they just don't like it.
Speaker 3: And it goes everywhere I feel about the sand the
Speaker 3: way I feel about sweat, which is I like being
Speaker 3: sweaty when you're supposed to be sweaty, and I hate
Speaker 3: being sweaty when you're not supposed to be sweaty. There
Speaker 3: you go, you know, working up a sweat when you're
Speaker 3: exercising feels great. Working up a sweat when you're like
Speaker 3: getting dressed ready to go out somewhere is like the
Speaker 3: worst feeling. Yeah, and sand. Yeah, it's like when you're
Speaker 3: at the beach, there's nothing better. Actually, I like, literally
Speaker 3: I love the feeling. Most of what I do at
Speaker 3: the beach when I go is just like walk around
Speaker 3: and feel the sand.
Speaker 2: On my feet.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's you know. I'm not a huge swimmer, but
Speaker 3: I do love that. But yeah, getting like sand in
Speaker 3: your shoes or sand in your underwear when you're not
Speaker 3: at the beach, that's not so great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, where the bed is one of the reasons I've
Speaker 4: never even much of a sand camper. I've done a
Speaker 4: little of it, but it's not really my cup of tea,
Speaker 4: just because I have a harder time maintaining that that
Speaker 4: line between the sand world and mine, a non sandy world.
Speaker 4: But still I've had some great times camping on the
Speaker 4: beach as well.
Speaker 3: You know, I was just thinking about how in Dune
Speaker 3: there is so much about the absence and preciousness of water.
Speaker 3: But I was struggling to remember, are there equivalent sentiments
Speaker 3: the characters express about the abundance or over abundance of sand.
Speaker 4: Hmmm, well, I'm trying to remember you've been reading Herbert
Speaker 4: more recently than I have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, though, so now I'm reading Dune Messiah, which I've
Speaker 3: actually never read before, So I'm finally getting into the sequels.
Speaker 3: I'm enjoying it, though I'm aware there are diminishing returns
Speaker 3: as you continue, but.
Speaker 4: It depends if you open your whole heart to it.
Speaker 4: I'm of the opinion there there are gems to be
Speaker 4: found in each of the books, but those the first
Speaker 4: two books are special in my opinion. Well, I I've
Speaker 4: enjoyed them all, but but yeah, there's it's it's different
Speaker 4: once you get into the later books.
Speaker 3: The second book, I've noticed so far there is significantly
Speaker 3: less ecology in it and it is more politics and conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's a dark read in its own right. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we will be talking a little bit about done as
Speaker 4: we proceed here. We'll talk a little bit about some technology,
Speaker 4: some FRIM and technology from the frimkit. But yeah, this
Speaker 4: is where I guess we get more into the imagination
Speaker 4: sphere for sand because it does bring up a lot
Speaker 4: of ideas, and so I was thinking, like, what are
Speaker 4: some of the core ideas I keep coming back to
Speaker 4: and I keep seeing and in my readings and things
Speaker 4: I'm watching things I'm thinking about. I think one of
Speaker 4: the big ones that everyone's probably thinking of is, of course,
Speaker 4: sand as the infinite, you know, uncountable grains of sand
Speaker 4: and deserts that stretch beyond sight or on beaches that
Speaker 4: just you know, vanish into the ocean unseen. I think
Speaker 4: of sand through the hour glass. I think of the
Speaker 4: excellent short story The Book of Sand from Hory Lewis
Speaker 4: Borges about a tone of infinite random numbered pages. So
Speaker 4: anytime you you open the book, you'll find different numbers,
Speaker 4: and they might be it might be just a small number,
Speaker 4: colossal number. I think at one point it's like a
Speaker 4: number to the ninth power that the reader finds. And
Speaker 4: and then the script itself is written in some language
Speaker 4: that he can't decipher, and sometimes with a crude image,
Speaker 4: but it is infinite, and you'll never find the same
Speaker 4: page twice. And he fears that if he burns the book,
Speaker 4: it will an infinite book will burn infinitely and just
Speaker 4: you know, cloak the world and smoke smoke. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: you know, I think about stuff like that.
Speaker 3: I read this story last night. Actually, oh you were
Speaker 3: telling me about Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's like three pages long, it's it's it's great. One
Speaker 4: of the things I love about Borhees, He's deep, he's
Speaker 4: often very brief.
Speaker 3: One thing I like about that story is that it begins,
Speaker 3: as with so many Borhees stories, with a traveler arriving
Speaker 3: strange traveler who has an artifact to share with you,
Speaker 3: and then the protagonist greatly desires to acquire the artifact,
Speaker 3: and so in this case, yeah, he becomes entranced because
Speaker 3: he finds a page in the book that has a
Speaker 3: tiny illustration of an anchor on it, and then he
Speaker 3: like turns the pages and then can't ever find the
Speaker 3: anchor again. But yeah, it describes like trying to get
Speaker 3: to the first page and it's impossible because pages just
Speaker 3: keep multiplying towards the covers. You know, it's gotten an
Speaker 3: epigraph to a poem by George Herbert that refers to
Speaker 3: the idea of ropes of sand, you know, a common
Speaker 3: metaphor for something that is like unstable or not substantial.
Speaker 3: But the other metaphor with sand in the story is
Speaker 3: like you're saying the idea of the infinite, that sands
Speaker 3: are infinite, and therefore you know they could they could
Speaker 3: just multiply forever, like the pages of this book. The
Speaker 3: funny thing is, of course, grains of sand are not
Speaker 3: actually infinite. Grains of sand are I perfectly finite. That
Speaker 3: is a countable thing. It's not practically accountable by human beings,
Speaker 3: but in theory is countable. And in fact, you know,
Speaker 3: mathematically speaking, any finite number is infinitely small than infinity.
Speaker 3: So the number of grains of sand in the universe
Speaker 3: is infinitely less than an actual infinity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, some of you may be thinking of this.
Speaker 4: We're not really going to get into this concept in
Speaker 4: this episode, but Archimedes of course famously tried to figure
Speaker 4: out what was the upper bound for the number of
Speaker 4: sand grains in the universe, So it's you know, he
Speaker 4: was of the mind it can be counted, or at
Speaker 4: least estimated, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Which, you know, and whole like methods of estimation of
Speaker 3: substances like that, I think are a really interesting topic.
Speaker 3: We've talked about on the show before. Long ago we
Speaker 3: did an episode on fermi estimation, remember that, which is
Speaker 3: just like a sort of orders of magnitude based system
Speaker 3: for estimating numbers of uncountable things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And you mentioned sand falling through the fingers passing
Speaker 4: through the fingers. The ephemeral nature of things made out
Speaker 4: of sand, that is I think another major theme you
Speaker 4: see over and over again. Of course, you see it
Speaker 4: in things like sand mondolas or sand castles, you know,
Speaker 4: where you can create this thing of beauty out of
Speaker 4: the sand, but it will not last, and it's not
Speaker 4: supposed to last, and of course neither do we. Let's
Speaker 4: see other ideas. Sand is a varied substance. Of course,
Speaker 4: not all sand is the same. Some of the things
Speaker 4: we call sand, especially when we get off of our planet,
Speaker 4: you get into various discussions about is.
Speaker 2: It sand, is it soil? Is it soil?
Speaker 4: Is it really sand? And you kind of go back
Speaker 4: and forth, and then sometimes people just call it sand.
Speaker 3: Am I correct in understanding that sand is not a
Speaker 3: name for a substance. It's a name for a size
Speaker 3: of particle. Sand is a grit size, right.
Speaker 4: But people can get a little particular, like, for instance,
Speaker 4: we're not really going to get into the hourglass here.
Speaker 4: We might come back and do a full episode in
Speaker 4: the hour glass in the future, but some people will
Speaker 4: point out, well, actually it's not sand in an hour glass,
Speaker 4: it's this particular recipe of particles that works well with
Speaker 4: an hour glass.
Speaker 3: And I guess there are things that might fit the
Speaker 3: definition if you just go by grain size, but nobody
Speaker 3: would call them sand, like would sugar be sand by
Speaker 3: If you just go particles.
Speaker 4: You would get you would get weird looks. If you
Speaker 4: ask for it's like, give me the sweet sand, the
Speaker 4: sand that goes in my coffee. People would ask, who
Speaker 4: is this space aly? But uh, yeah, I mean the
Speaker 4: other thing is, yeah, you have different colors of sand,
Speaker 4: different sistencies of sand, Like digging in the beach. I
Speaker 4: know that like sometimes you have that sand it is
Speaker 4: like a powder, or when it's compacted it's like a
Speaker 4: it's almost like a clay that you can mold. And
Speaker 4: then other times the bits of like shell in the
Speaker 4: sand that it's so like coarse and rough that you
Speaker 4: just like scrape your hands up digging in it, you know,
Speaker 4: but you can't stop because it's what you do at
Speaker 4: the beach. Likewise, digging in the sand, you quickly often realize, well,
Speaker 4: this is this is a thing, this is a world
Speaker 4: that creatures live in as well. You know, you might
Speaker 4: encounter things like periwinkles or sand hoppers. Sand fleas whatever
Speaker 4: you want to call them, or of course the mighty
Speaker 4: sand crabs darting in and out of their little layers,
Speaker 4: and then yeah, and then just back to sand castles
Speaker 4: as well. It's kind of like a very early experiment
Speaker 4: with the idea of what large scale things can I
Speaker 4: make out of the smallest visible pieces, you know, so
Speaker 4: you're not really you know, I'm dealing with things in
Speaker 4: an atomic level obviously, but especially as a child, like
Speaker 4: the sand seems like the boundary of smallness, and it's like,
Speaker 4: you bring these together, you make a clump, you make
Speaker 4: a ball that becomes a tower. Towers are bridged together,
Speaker 4: becomes a castle, and yeah, I think there's there's something
Speaker 4: insightful there, Like we begin to sort of gaze into
Speaker 4: these mysteries of sand at an early age. All right,
Speaker 4: So for the majority of the section I'm taking in
Speaker 4: this episode, I wanted to talk about a couple of
Speaker 4: ideas from science fiction concerning sand. And these are little
Speaker 4: ideas that are in neither in either neither case or
Speaker 4: they particularly key to the work. You could take them
Speaker 4: out of each work and it would it would be fine.
Speaker 4: But they've always stuck in my mind because they were
Speaker 4: neat uses of sand, and so I'm kind of using
Speaker 4: those as a place to jump off to briefly talk
Speaker 4: about some other mostly space related topics, but also some
Speaker 4: kind of like military world and infrastructure type topics.
Speaker 2: So the first before.
Speaker 4: I get to Doon, the one I want to mention
Speaker 4: is a nineteen eighty four novel that fewer people have read,
Speaker 4: but it still has quite a following.
Speaker 2: It's called Armor.
Speaker 4: It's by an author by the name of John Stakley
Speaker 4: st A. K. L. E. Y. If you're looking him up.
Speaker 4: This is the same guy who wrote Vampires with a
Speaker 4: Dollar Sign, which John Carpenter. Well, John Carpenter directed the
Speaker 4: adaptation of it. As we've discussed before, probably not at
Speaker 4: anybody like the top of anybody's Carpenter list.
Speaker 2: Still has some great moments in it.
Speaker 3: Uh, they're seeing the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Actual, Oh you haven't.
Speaker 3: I was not able to finish it at the time
Speaker 3: I tried to watch it. I can't remember a huge
Speaker 3: Carpenter fan, but I just didn't love this one.
Speaker 2: It it has its moments, but the book, the book
Speaker 2: was better in my memory.
Speaker 3: Arm the Dollar Sign.
Speaker 2: The dollar Sign was cool. Uh is it about money?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: You know, the business of slaying vampires. I'm a little
Speaker 4: foggy on that. The main thing that I that sticks
Speaker 4: with me out of that book is just how scary
Speaker 4: the vampires were, Like, they were just scary and nasty
Speaker 4: in a way that they touched on a little bit
Speaker 4: in the movie. But they're just really awful. You just
Speaker 4: hate vampires in this book. Armor, however, is more in
Speaker 4: keeping with like your Starship Troopers sort of world where
Speaker 4: it's humans in power armor, like crazy powerful power armor,
Speaker 4: and they're battling insect aliens on the surface of a
Speaker 4: distant desert world called Bansheet. And there are a lot
Speaker 4: of interests twist and turns in this, and the writing's
Speaker 4: really bombastic, and you know, you really feel the action.
Speaker 4: But at one point, the human faction here with their
Speaker 4: power armored soldiers, they use a large high tech, you know,
Speaker 4: sci fi machine and a sand clotter called a Siliconite eighteen,
Speaker 4: and they use this this combination to suck sand in
Speaker 4: through the front of this machine and then it like
Speaker 4: leaves behind it essentially prints a trail of five meter tall,
Speaker 4: perfectly smooth stone wall to fortify their makeshift base out
Speaker 4: on this desert world.
Speaker 3: Okay, so it sucks in sand and it adheres it
Speaker 3: into a solid substance.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it creates like a solid sand brick wall, which
Speaker 4: I always thought was pretty cool. And I'm kind of
Speaker 4: surprised I haven't seen that used in media elsewhere, in
Speaker 4: video games or something.
Speaker 2: Maybe it is, but.
Speaker 4: This is this is really interesting because yes, we're talking
Speaker 4: about sci fi far future warfare here, but of course
Speaker 4: humans have been doing this in the real world for
Speaker 4: quite a while, often in the form of sandbags.
Speaker 3: Yeah, funny story. So this podcast started a lot of
Speaker 3: people who listen probably don't even know this. This podcast
Speaker 3: started originally when we were writers and editors for the
Speaker 3: website HowStuffWorks dot com many many years ago, which was
Speaker 3: like a encyclopedic informational website that had articles like, you know,
Speaker 3: how a car engine works and stuff. So I was
Speaker 3: hired on you were a writer at that website when
Speaker 3: I joined as an editor and I don't know what
Speaker 3: in twenty ten.
Speaker 2: Or something, and then be four times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that long long ago, and one of the first
Speaker 3: articles I edited for the website was how sand bags work. Now,
Speaker 3: you wouldn't think that there's that much to say about
Speaker 3: how a sandbag works, But I remember it being a
Speaker 3: surprisingly rich and interesting topic. But all the things sandbags
Speaker 3: can do and in fact to do better than other
Speaker 3: more high tech solutions exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. Like I grew up in a
Speaker 4: household my dad was always into a lot of like
Speaker 4: World War II stuff and did models of tanks, and
Speaker 4: so I was familiar with pictures of tanks, and in
Speaker 4: reading about sandbags here, I had to go back and
Speaker 4: remind myself, Oh, yeah, they would off. You see all
Speaker 4: these images of World War two tanks with sandbags layered
Speaker 4: on top of the metal armor of the tank to
Speaker 4: add like additional in the field protection against ballistics. So
Speaker 4: I was reading a bit more about this out like
Speaker 4: why are sandbags good for this twenty sixteen study from
Speaker 4: chin at all from the National University of Singapore, and
Speaker 4: this was published by ASM International, and they conducted a
Speaker 4: study and in the study pointed out that, yeah, of
Speaker 4: course sand has been used in fortifications for a long time,
Speaker 4: and we've known that it's great at absorbing energy. But
Speaker 4: they looked into it a little bit more and they
Speaker 4: found that sand can absorb more than eighty five percent
Speaker 4: of the energy exerted against it, and its resistance actually
Speaker 4: increases with the speed of the projectile, even at high velocities.
Speaker 4: So they experimented by firing various projectiles at silica sand blocks,
Speaker 4: and one of the really interesting things they point out
Speaker 4: is that when a projectile hits a block of compacted sand,
Speaker 4: such as I believe like in a compacted military sand
Speaker 4: bag or a hesco bastion, which is a collapsible wire
Speaker 4: mesh container that then gets filled up with sand or
Speaker 4: soil or gravel. But the extreme frictional force of the
Speaker 4: sand particles against the projectile passing through it can potentially
Speaker 4: break that projectile into pieces. So think to your childhood,
Speaker 4: perhaps if you were a beach going child digging in
Speaker 4: the sand and eventually feeling your hands becoming raw from
Speaker 4: all those sand particles, you know, because it's sand. Now,
Speaker 4: imagine a projectile passing through compacted sand and high speed
Speaker 4: and the friction of that. It's pretty fascinating like that
Speaker 4: this could essentially destroy the projectile as it passes through.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, the same.
Speaker 4: Projectile, if it is powerful enough to pass through a
Speaker 4: metal barrier, it will just pass through and can continue
Speaker 4: to you know, decimate somebody or something on the other side.
Speaker 4: So one of the things they end up arguing in
Speaker 4: this paper is like we should be looking at more
Speaker 4: ways to use sand, either in place of substances like
Speaker 4: steel or figuring out how the best layer them with
Speaker 4: steel or other materials. Like I guess it's it's just
Speaker 4: fascinating to think. You know, we think about the armor
Speaker 4: of the future. We think about things like power armor
Speaker 4: and suits and steel and plate. Powerful plates are energy, yeah,
Speaker 4: or plastic plastic steel, you know, some sort of crazy
Speaker 4: plastic that's as strong as steel. But at the end
Speaker 4: of the day, there's a strong case to be made
Speaker 4: like that we should not forget sand, because sand again
Speaker 4: is just an amazing you know, absorbent substance for these
Speaker 4: sorts of projectiles and the sorts of this sort of energy.
Speaker 3: Well, I know you were already talking about this. I
Speaker 3: think maybe this came up when we were talking last night,
Speaker 3: But you know, I recall seeing plenty of examples through
Speaker 3: you know, world history, military history of like metal, plate,
Speaker 3: armor and sand used in combination, like one one against
Speaker 3: the other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, certainly you see a
Speaker 4: lot of like makeshift you can pack up the sand
Speaker 4: bags and you create a little wall. And then there's
Speaker 4: the example of the tanks. But I don't know, there's
Speaker 4: something about like I don't recall ever really putting it
Speaker 4: together too much that oh yeah, I'm looking at sandbags
Speaker 4: on those tanks. You know, it's one of those things
Speaker 4: that's so mundane. You know, you see sand bags a lot,
Speaker 4: you can kind of become blind to what's going on.
Speaker 3: There, to the beauty of the sand bag.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, all right, Now, moving from the sandbag back
Speaker 4: into the science fiction future, let's come at last to done. Okay,
Speaker 4: Frank Herbert's nineteen sixty five novel, and then the same
Speaker 4: technology does come up a little bit at least in
Speaker 4: one of the other books, but it does make it.
Speaker 4: It does hit in the first one as well. So
Speaker 4: the Friemen make use of a sand compactor as part
Speaker 4: of the standard frim kit. You know, the frimekit is
Speaker 4: the thing, like you know, it's hidden away for Paul
Speaker 4: and his mother, and you know, then they have to
Speaker 4: use it on their own surviving out in the sands
Speaker 4: of Aracus.
Speaker 3: So that's also going to have still suit yep, still suit.
Speaker 3: It goes on your body, it protects you it keeps
Speaker 3: you from losing moisture to the environment. Does it have
Speaker 3: a thumper the thumper, yeah, around kit it either is
Speaker 3: it either a tract or it distracts the worm? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, both.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a yeah, depending on how you're using it.
Speaker 4: There's the tent, I believe, and then there are probably
Speaker 4: some things that aren't mentioned. There's probably I'm thinking there's
Speaker 4: a mint in there, maybe a piece of gum.
Speaker 2: I don't know why not.
Speaker 4: But the sand compact, Yeah, you want a little moisturizer,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe a nice note. Oh there was a note,
Speaker 4: but I don't know how nice it was. It's like, hey, sorry,
Speaker 4: but I had to do this. But yeah, the sand
Speaker 4: compactor is probably one of the weirder ones. And I
Speaker 4: remember like thinking it was really cool when I first
Speaker 4: read Dune, because it is described as a sand compaction
Speaker 4: tool that realigns sand grains and allows you allows you
Speaker 4: to effortlessly burrow out of a sand buried tint, and
Speaker 4: presumably has other purposes. I think it's used slightly differently
Speaker 4: in a later book, but I'm assuming you could also
Speaker 4: use it to maybe blast the sand off of your feet,
Speaker 4: And it seemingly involves binding sand grains together with an
Speaker 4: electromagnetic charge.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 4: Now, as I understand it, the cool thing about this
Speaker 4: is that this particular gadget, of course, remains a tool
Speaker 4: of the far future imperium we see in dune, but
Speaker 4: we do have electrostatic gadgets that can clean up sand.
Speaker 4: There's something called an EDS electrodynamic screen, which is kind
Speaker 4: of an electrostatic cleaning system for removal of sand particles
Speaker 4: from solar panels. Because you know, you have a bunch
Speaker 4: of sand accumulate, you know, even in just little bits
Speaker 4: of it on solar panels, that's going to get in
Speaker 4: the way of how effective they are. So this technology
Speaker 4: exerts an electrostatic force to remove sand from that screen. Okay,
Speaker 4: So in a sense, yeah, there's a connection to be
Speaker 4: made between these two different technologies.
Speaker 3: Like an electromagnetic vacuum.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But again, this is the kind of thing I
Speaker 4: feel like would make me more of a beach camper
Speaker 4: if I could like point a flashlight sort of shaped
Speaker 4: object at my feet and just kind of like hose
Speaker 4: them off with pure dry electrostatic charge or something. Now,
Speaker 4: coming back to the idea of sand constructions on other worlds,
Speaker 4: So kind of coming back to that armor example of
Speaker 4: printing out fortresses is on Banshee. There are actually a
Speaker 4: number of proposals to do a certain amount of manipulation
Speaker 4: of the regulith on our moon as well as on Mars.
Speaker 4: The lunar regulith isn't quite sand by many definitions. It's
Speaker 4: sometimes referred to as such, and sometimes it's called soil,
Speaker 4: though plenty of people will point out, well, it's not soil.
Speaker 2: Earth. Soil is of.
Speaker 4: Course essentially a living, thriving, organically active thing, and that.
Speaker 2: Is not what you get on the moon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've gone into more depth than this sort of
Speaker 4: thing before when we talked about like like what is
Speaker 4: like lunar dust, and often dust is a is a
Speaker 4: is good or a better descriptor as well. But there
Speaker 4: is the idea that we could create various sort of
Speaker 4: sometimes called lunar crets or astrocrets, that are essentially there
Speaker 4: are a lot basically there are a lot like terrestrial concretes.
Speaker 4: They would they would still be complicated to carry out.
Speaker 4: Like it's not just a matter of like well them
Speaker 4: up to the Moon or send them to Mars with
Speaker 4: just a bag of mix that you buy at the store.
Speaker 4: You're still dealing with something that would be difficult to
Speaker 4: carry out, especially in such an environment. And you know,
Speaker 4: essentially in some of these cases might have to be
Speaker 4: like three D printed as well. But it's a It
Speaker 4: means that you wouldn't have to bring everything as a
Speaker 4: module up from Earth and then send it over. You
Speaker 4: could create some amount of your infrastructure, you know, foundations,
Speaker 4: you know, even whole buildings or tunnel systems by transforming
Speaker 4: you know, the sand if you will, that you have
Speaker 4: there into some sort of concrete, AstroCrete or lunar crete substance. Now,
Speaker 4: this next example is fascinating because it also it makes
Speaker 4: perfect sense once it's rolled out, but it also feels
Speaker 4: like even more sci fi than some of these cases,
Speaker 4: Like it sounds like a little more grim dark than
Speaker 4: than anything that is actually rolled out in the book Armor,
Speaker 4: but it's really cool. So AstroCrete, as proposed by scientists
Speaker 4: from the University of Manchester, this calls for the use
Speaker 4: of human urea and other excretions to strengthen the regalith concrete,
Speaker 4: essentially making a kind of biocomposite out of it, and
Speaker 4: is plenty of science has bricks PP bricks. But as
Speaker 4: I think, one of the main things that the headlines
Speaker 4: and even the authors of the proponents of this plan,
Speaker 4: the way that they put it is blood, saying like
Speaker 4: this would be like the blood of astronauts. So there's
Speaker 4: a twenty twenty one study here published in Materials Today
Speaker 4: Bio and the title is Blood, Sweat and Tears Extraterrestrial
Speaker 4: regalith Biocomposits with in vivo Binders by Roberts at All
Speaker 4: And yeah, they get into it and discuss how a
Speaker 4: protein from human blood, the proteins from human blood can
Speaker 4: form this biocomposite material with the moon, the Moon's dust
Speaker 4: or the Mars dust, you know, the sand of either world,
Speaker 4: if you will, And that the compressive strength of the
Speaker 4: biocomposite materials is ultimately on par with concrete and by
Speaker 4: incorporating incorporating urea from urine, they can actually increase the
Speaker 4: compressive strength by over three hundred percent. So there's power
Speaker 4: EMPP bricks, blood, MPP bricks, blood and MPP bricks. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and this would be something that would be potentially then
Speaker 4: three D printed on site, so something actually not unlike
Speaker 4: the wall printers in the novel Armor at least in spirit.
Speaker 4: And one thing that they do stress and this is,
Speaker 4: you know, you get into the logistics of this, you'd
Speaker 4: have to have your astronauts essentially continuously donating plasma, you know,
Speaker 4: on top of their waste products, which are going to
Speaker 4: have to shed anyway, but donating plasma for the purposes
Speaker 4: of them later three D printing these bricks.
Speaker 3: So I think that's they're not going to be under
Speaker 3: any stress or anything.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but the authors here do make a point of
Speaker 4: saying you would need to figure out exactly what the
Speaker 4: right regiment for this would be, you know, because I
Speaker 4: guess on the way over, maybe they were to a
Speaker 4: certain extent more be more downtalent downtime, and you could
Speaker 4: kind of like put your astronauts on drip and get
Speaker 4: some fluids from them. But we know that journeys between
Speaker 4: planets and journeys between our world and its moon, these
Speaker 4: are not stress free environments either, so you can't you
Speaker 4: have to. Basically, their point is like you don't want
Speaker 4: to in any way incapacitate or decrease the effectiveness of
Speaker 4: your astronauts, while at the same time, you know, putting
Speaker 4: them on drip a little bit in order to build
Speaker 4: your bricks in the future.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, so I don't know, I really really like
Speaker 2: this idea.
Speaker 4: It's been out for a few years, so I can
Speaker 4: only imagine that somebody's latched onto it. In science fiction,
Speaker 4: certainly some of the more recent Mars colony Lunar colony visions, well,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: You could imagine that if if the stress on the
Speaker 3: astronaut's body is too much, you could have a kind
Speaker 3: of separate classes of people going to other planets. So
Speaker 3: you'd have you'd have the astronauts who were there to work,
Speaker 3: and then the ones who were there to be a
Speaker 3: to be a blood and peepye bag. Oh you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that that's interesting.
Speaker 4: That certainly, that's the kind of idea you could explore
Speaker 4: in some of these and some of them have talking
Speaker 4: about different caste systems for far future humans on other worlds.
Speaker 3: But a Mars blood boy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Mary, yeah, I ad read it all right. I
Speaker 4: have one more one last spacesand topic I want to
Speaker 4: discuss here, and it involves the electric sand of Titan,
Speaker 4: which I have to admit, so it's pretty metal. It
Speaker 4: is ultimately pretty metal.
Speaker 3: So we've covered tight song by Sleep I think.
Speaker 4: It could very much be a sleep song or an
Speaker 4: early electric Wizard song from some of their spacier material. Yeah,
Speaker 4: basically could fit just about any like seventies dim sound.
Speaker 3: Drop out of Life on a rope of sand.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that kind of vibe. Yeah, So we're going
Speaker 4: to tighten for this topic. We've covered Titan on the
Speaker 4: show before. This is Saturn's largest moon. It has a
Speaker 4: thick atmosphere and earth like systems of flowing liquid only
Speaker 4: instead of water. It has liquid hydrocarbons such as methane
Speaker 4: and ethane. However, it may have a subsurface ocean of water,
Speaker 4: and in many ways it is very earth like. But
Speaker 4: with that caveat caveat of don't go anywhere beyond Earth
Speaker 4: and expect to easily find something exactly like Earth. So
Speaker 4: it's still very extreme. It's very cold, it has ice
Speaker 4: like rocks and possible believe volcanoes that spout liquid water.
Speaker 4: It's it's a rough place if we were to imagine
Speaker 4: ourselves physically being there. It's the second largest moon in
Speaker 4: our Solar system, trailing the Jovian moon of Ganymede. It's
Speaker 4: larger than both Earth's moon and the planet mercury, and
Speaker 4: it does have sand.
Speaker 3: I think that comes with an asterisk though.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, anytime we're talking about sand in other worlds, we
Speaker 4: have to add the caveat that we scientists will disagree
Speaker 4: on terminology from time to time, but scientists will often
Speaker 4: use the term sand when talking about it, at least,
Speaker 4: you know, with the public. So, as described on the
Speaker 4: NASA fact sheet for Titan, dark earth like sand dunes
Speaker 4: stretch across the cross parts of Titan, and the sand
Speaker 4: is composed of dark hydrocarbon grains, often described as probably
Speaker 4: looking like coffee grounds. Interesting, So again, you know, it
Speaker 4: feels very doom metal, you know, black deserts of weird sand.
Speaker 4: And I included an image here in our notes, Joe,
Speaker 4: maybe we can even splash this up for video to see,
Speaker 4: since it's a NASA JPL image. But what I'm looking
Speaker 4: at here is an image of sand dunes on the
Speaker 4: moon of Titan. And this is detected via Cassini's radar.
Speaker 3: So like just long, long, parallel dunes like you might
Speaker 3: see in some deserts on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 4: So it's frequently compared to deserts on Earth and people
Speaker 4: pointing out, yeah, yeah, this is kind of like an
Speaker 4: Earth desert, except very different in other ways. But where
Speaker 4: this gets really cool? I thought, I mean, it's already
Speaker 4: really cool. But in twenty seventeen, Joshua Mendez, a granular
Speaker 4: dynamicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, proposed
Speaker 4: in a paper published in Nature Geoscience titled Electrification of
Speaker 4: Sand on Titan and its Influence on Sediment Transport that
Speaker 4: the sands might become electrically charged via the tribal electric effect.
Speaker 4: This is something we experience all the time, like say,
Speaker 4: when you have static electricity that causes packing peanuts to
Speaker 4: clean to your fingers. You know, the grains of sand
Speaker 4: on Titan might do something similar in a very unique
Speaker 4: way for a number of reasons. So the sand grains
Speaker 4: on Titan there are fluffier than sand on Earth, and
Speaker 4: the gravity there is seven times weaker than our own,
Speaker 4: meaning that the sand particles can potentially stick together in
Speaker 4: ways that we just do not see on Earth. So
Speaker 4: we have the same you know, the trivial electric effect
Speaker 4: is going to be in play here on Earth with sand,
Speaker 4: but we have a different gravity situation and different consistency
Speaker 4: of our sand grains. But The headline grabbing take home here,
Speaker 4: as the researchers discuss, is that you could make a
Speaker 4: sand castle on Titan out of this crazy goth black
Speaker 4: sand and it might stay up for weeks without the
Speaker 4: need of or anything to It would just be the
Speaker 4: electric charge holding everything together.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm imagining not.
Speaker 4: Sand castle's, but like weird, like Wayne Barlow esque alien
Speaker 4: sculptures on Titan out of this stuff. The deeper application
Speaker 4: here is that, you know, beyond the flashy headlines, is
Speaker 4: that it might explain the shape and formation of these
Speaker 4: sand dunes we just explained that can't as easily be
Speaker 4: accounted for by the wind. So, you know, we look
Speaker 4: at the way sand dunes form on Earth and then
Speaker 4: we look at this example on Titan. We're like, oh,
Speaker 4: it's like we have here, except we're not going to
Speaker 4: have the same wind scenario on Titan to form them.
Speaker 4: This may be what's key to the formation of these
Speaker 4: dunes on Titan.
Speaker 3: That's really interesting. Yeah, reminds me of something we've talked
Speaker 3: about on the surface of Jupiter's moon Io, where there
Speaker 3: was a similar question about has shifting sand dunes sand
Speaker 3: dunes that move over time and we can see that
Speaker 3: through like orbit imagery, and so the question is how
Speaker 3: do they move because Io basically has no appreciable atmosphere.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not going to have winds like our
Speaker 3: atmosphere does. And I remember the main hypothesis we looked
Speaker 3: at for that was a paper that was talking about
Speaker 3: sort of explosive gusts of gas that I think are
Speaker 3: related to volcanic activity on Io, essentially creating temporary transient
Speaker 3: winds even though though there's not really much of an atmosphere,
Speaker 3: right right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 4: All right, we're going to move on to another section
Speaker 4: here and this this is your angle. And I think
Speaker 4: this is a great selection, in part because it gets
Speaker 4: into some other like major things that come to our mind.
Speaker 4: When we think about sand, things that sand can be
Speaker 4: turned into. They go well beyond just making it into
Speaker 4: a brick or a.
Speaker 2: Bag of sand.
Speaker 3: It's not just for sand bags. So yeah, we've talked
Speaker 3: about sand in its loose form, and of course I
Speaker 3: think everybody knows that melting sand is how you make glass,
Speaker 3: but when it comes to making glass, not all sand
Speaker 3: is the same. To make industrial glass with a high
Speaker 3: level of transparency, modern glass makers usually select high purity
Speaker 3: quartz sand, which consists of almost pure silicon dioxide or
Speaker 3: silica and some other additives, usually to aid in the
Speaker 3: manufacturing process, like they introduce stuff to lower the melting
Speaker 3: point of the silica and make it easier to produce
Speaker 3: or to produce desired characteristics in the final product. Is.
Speaker 3: One example of this is introducing boron to the glass
Speaker 3: boron trioxide to make what's called borosilicate glass. This kind
Speaker 3: of glass has the benefit of being more resistant to
Speaker 3: thermal shock due to a low coefficient of thermal expansion.
Speaker 3: Rob And if you ever shattered something made of glass
Speaker 3: due to heat mismanagement of heat and.
Speaker 4: Cold, ooh maybe I haven't.
Speaker 3: Well you're lucky.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, generally it's just the fingers to blame. Yeah, poor,
Speaker 4: poor guesswork on how much of the table I have
Speaker 4: set the glass on.
Speaker 2: That sort of thing that can do it too.
Speaker 3: But so, yeah, normal glass expands and contracts a lot,
Speaker 3: relatively a lot. You know, it expands and contracts due
Speaker 3: to changes in temperature. And so if you've got you know,
Speaker 3: a glass or a glass baking you know, a glass container,
Speaker 3: and you you change the temperatures on it too rapidly.
Speaker 3: It creates stress on the brittle structure of the glass
Speaker 3: because like in one part of it, it's getting hotter
Speaker 3: faster than the other part and expanding faster or vice versa,
Speaker 3: and this can cause it to shatter. Borosilicate glass is
Speaker 3: better about this, which is why it is often used
Speaker 3: to make glass bake where it's not. They do also
Speaker 3: use sodaline glass to make glass bake bakeware, but borisilicate
Speaker 3: glass is less vulnerable to thermal shocks, though not invulnerable.
Speaker 3: I know people who have made baking you know, baking
Speaker 3: dishes made of glass designed for that purpose still explode
Speaker 3: due to mismanagement of hot and cold. You don't want
Speaker 3: to like get a hot dish out of the oven,
Speaker 3: you know, you've just had it in a four hundred
Speaker 3: degree oven and then put it on like a puddle
Speaker 3: of cold water or oh, kettle or something that'll that's dangerous.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's that's good to know, because that is the
Speaker 4: sort of thing I could conceivably do, and I will
Speaker 4: I will make a point of not doing.
Speaker 3: Don't don't do that. Yeah, that's how to make your
Speaker 3: your baking dish explode anyway, that's industrial glass. But of
Speaker 3: course there are also natural forms of glass made from
Speaker 3: melted sand, and I want to talk about one type
Speaker 3: of naturally occurring sand based glass called folgurite. So fulgurite
Speaker 3: is a mineral made of silica or elicon dioxide that
Speaker 3: has been fused by the heat of a bolt of lightning.
Speaker 3: I thought that's pretty cool. So the name comes from
Speaker 3: the Latin word for lightning, and it can be formed
Speaker 3: when lightning hits multiple kinds of substrate. It can form
Speaker 3: in clay or soil, or in solid rock, but the
Speaker 3: most common type of folgarite is made when lightning strikes sand,
Speaker 3: and for this reason you can often find folgiarites in beaches,
Speaker 3: on beaches or in the desert. So a common recognizable
Speaker 3: form of folgiarite is a partially buried, crusty looking tube.
Speaker 3: But that's going to be hollow in the middle, and
Speaker 3: then on the inner surface it will be glassy but
Speaker 3: not usually smooth on the outside, so the outsides often
Speaker 3: look very rough and gnobbily. And I was thinking they
Speaker 3: look like a flute that orcs would play something of
Speaker 3: mordor technology about them, or like that effect you get
Speaker 3: when you earn a candle many times in a row,
Speaker 3: and it creates this multi wax structure on the outside.
Speaker 3: A lot of folgiarites look like that on the outside
Speaker 3: due to I guess some kind of melting and then
Speaker 3: partial melting around the outer surface, which is going to
Speaker 3: mean that like unmelted sand, grains end up adhering to it,
Speaker 3: so you get this rough outer surface. They vary in
Speaker 3: thickness in length, somewhere between one and several centimeters thick,
Speaker 3: and they sometimes have these branching or forked shapes, which
Speaker 3: indicates the path the lightning took as it was conducted
Speaker 3: into the ground through the soil or the rock. Around
Speaker 3: the outside, again, they're usually covered with like rough sand
Speaker 3: particles or pebbles. And the cool thing is that extremely
Speaker 3: long fulgierites have been discovered, some sources say up to
Speaker 3: twenty meters in length, though that doesn't necessarily mean you
Speaker 3: can get it out intact, because as you can imagine,
Speaker 3: it's like hard to extract a whole delicate glass tube
Speaker 3: of that length from the ground intact.
Speaker 4: Like I'm thinking, I mean, it's kind of like the
Speaker 4: lightning has just cooked the sand, and so you could
Speaker 4: imagine something like I don't know a cake that is,
Speaker 4: the cake is on the whole not all that well cooked,
Speaker 4: but you have like this thread going through it that
Speaker 4: is really cooked.
Speaker 3: Through thread going through the middle where part of the
Speaker 3: cake has been vaporized and left as a hollow, and
Speaker 3: then a section around that has been liquefied and then
Speaker 3: re solidified, and this glassy, smooth inner channel, and then
Speaker 3: a rougher surface around the outside. There are other types
Speaker 3: of fulgarite, though it's not just sand. There are rock fulgarites.
Speaker 3: These are a bit different. They usually appear as glassy
Speaker 3: layers or glassy crusts on top of a rock, often
Speaker 3: on mountain summits. So this is a really cool thing.
Speaker 3: If you go to the top of a mountain, you
Speaker 3: might find rocks near the very top have these little
Speaker 3: places that are like a dark glassy patch on the rock.
Speaker 3: What is that This is the place where the mountain
Speaker 3: has formed a natural lightning rod is striking the rock
Speaker 3: and melting it and turning it into this glassy surface.
Speaker 3: Another thing is that when you see good examples of
Speaker 3: these really forked or branching fulgiarites, sometimes they look like
Speaker 3: a cross between a ginger root and ET's hand, but
Speaker 3: more gray and crusty, usually also worth mentioning. Sometimes artificial
Speaker 3: fulgarites can be formed by artificial injections of extreme heat
Speaker 3: and energy into sand or rock, for example, by downed
Speaker 3: power lines or by arc welders. You can make human
Speaker 3: made folgiarites that way, and Charles Darwin actually talks at
Speaker 3: length about fulgiarites in the Voyage of the Beagle. I
Speaker 3: was trying to remember when I was making the notes
Speaker 3: if this came up in our episode on ice Formations,
Speaker 3: because in that one we were talking about Darwin's travels
Speaker 3: in South America where he's going through a pass going
Speaker 3: through what is today Chile and Argentina. But I don't
Speaker 3: think this came up. You remember in that passage he
Speaker 3: has these misadventures going through the very high mountain pass
Speaker 3: where they tried he and his companions try to boil potatoes,
Speaker 3: but the potatoes won't cook.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, yes, they're at very.
Speaker 3: High altitude, so the boiling point of water is lowered,
Speaker 3: so the potatoes won't get hot enough moman boiling them.
Speaker 3: But that's also the episode where he found the upside
Speaker 3: down frozen horse in the Pinnacles of Ice yes, but anyway,
Speaker 3: the part where he talks about finding Folgierites is in
Speaker 3: chapter three of the Voyage of the Beagle called Maldonado,
Speaker 3: where Darwin is traveling in what is I think modern
Speaker 3: day Uruguay. But I'm just going to read from Darwin
Speaker 3: here where he describes this find quote in a broad
Speaker 3: band of sand hillocks which separate the Laguna de Potrero
Speaker 3: from the shores of the Plata. At the distance of
Speaker 3: a few miles from Maldonado, I found a group of
Speaker 3: those vitrified silicious tubes which are formed by lightning entering
Speaker 3: loose sand. These tubes resemble in every particular those from
Speaker 3: drig In Cumberland described in the Geological Transactions. He's referring
Speaker 3: to these other things that have been in the literature.
Speaker 3: The sand hillocks of Maldonado, not being protected by vegetation,
Speaker 3: are constantly changing their position. From this cause. The tubes
Speaker 3: projected above the surface, and numerous fragments lying near showed
Speaker 3: that they had formerly been buried to a greater depth.
Speaker 3: Four sets entered the sand perpendicularly. By working with my hands,
Speaker 3: I traced one of them two feet deep, and some
Speaker 3: fragments which evidently had belonged to the same tube. When
Speaker 3: added to the other part measured five feet three inches,
Speaker 3: the diameter of the whole tube was nearly equal, and
Speaker 3: therefore we must suppose that originally it extended to a
Speaker 3: much greater depth. These dimensions are, however, small compared to
Speaker 3: those of the tubes from drig one of which was
Speaker 3: traced to a depth of not less than thirty feet. Again,
Speaker 3: those incredibly deep. So after this he goes on describing
Speaker 3: them a little bit more. He talks about how they're vitrified,
Speaker 3: glossy and smooth on the inside, and then rough on
Speaker 3: the outside. He compares the outside to a shriveled vegetable stalk,
Speaker 3: or to the bark of an elm tree. And then
Speaker 3: also he goes on to talk about some experiments that
Speaker 3: have been conducted in Paris where they made artificial folgiarites
Speaker 3: by passing a very strong shock of galvanism into a
Speaker 3: finely powdered glass, and they managed to recreate some of
Speaker 3: this effect. And let's see, there's one funny passage here.
Speaker 3: He says, when we hear that the strongest battery in
Speaker 3: Paris was used, and that its power on a substance
Speaker 3: of such easy fusibility as glass was to form tubes
Speaker 3: so diminutive, we must feel greatly astonished at the force
Speaker 3: of a shock of lightning, which, striking the sand in
Speaker 3: several places, has formed cylinders in one instance of at
Speaker 3: least thirty feet long and having an internal when not compressed,
Speaker 3: of full an inch and a half. And this in
Speaker 3: a material so extraordinarily refractory as quartz.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So Darwin was not confused about what these things were.
Speaker 3: He already knew what they are, that they're made by lightning.
Speaker 3: But I'm trying to imagine how interesting it would be
Speaker 3: to go out like he did and find these in
Speaker 3: the wild, protruding, like you said, in an area without
Speaker 3: much vegetation, and these sand hillocks where you're going out,
Speaker 3: and because the sand shifts and moves, these glass formations
Speaker 3: are now sticking up into the air, exposed, and you
Speaker 3: look at them, I'd imagine and say, like, what is
Speaker 3: is that some kind of stalk or cactus or something,
Speaker 3: and then you come upon it and realize it is glass?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 4: Yeah, just like alien formations growing up out of the sand.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I guess they eventually get broken off by
Speaker 3: the weather, but sometimes they're just just having a good
Speaker 3: old poke up there.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to also mention one scientific paper I
Speaker 3: came across because the authors of this paper did an
Speaker 3: interesting bit of calculation in their background section to estimate
Speaker 3: the rate of Fulgiar right formation on Earth. So this
Speaker 3: was a paper called a Fossilized Energy Distribution of Lightning.
Speaker 3: This is by Matthew Passick and Mark Hurst, published in
Speaker 3: Scientific Reports in twenty sixteen. I looked up the author
Speaker 3: is Matthew Passick is a geochemist who was at the
Speaker 3: time affiliated with the University of South Florida, and mark
Speaker 3: Hurst is an independent geologist. But the authors of this
Speaker 3: paper just start off by talking about how powerful lightning is,
Speaker 3: and of course you know Darwin makes the same observation.
Speaker 3: He's looking at this fused glass and then saying like
Speaker 3: the most powerful battery in Paris could barely do you
Speaker 3: know anything close to this, or imagine how powerful lightning
Speaker 3: is to fuse all the sand in this way. The
Speaker 3: authors here talk about the total energy of a lightning
Speaker 3: strike might be up to ten to the nine jewels,
Speaker 3: and that lightning can heat the air around it to
Speaker 3: a temperature above thirty thousand kelvin. And of course, you know,
Speaker 3: we think of lightning and its vast discharge of energy
Speaker 3: as primarily destructive. When you imagine what lightning can do,
Speaker 3: we think about things that it can hurt. You've got
Speaker 3: your standard bolt of vengeance from Jupiter. You know, it
Speaker 3: strikes a person dead, and then you know, the ancient
Speaker 3: Romans might look at that in awe and like build
Speaker 3: a shrine around that area, as a Jupiter has interacted
Speaker 3: with this place, best not mess with it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, when we think of putting it to use,
Speaker 4: it's generally going to be bringing of Frankenstein's monster to
Speaker 4: life or powering a time traveling glorean, and that that's
Speaker 4: pretty much it. Those are the only applications.
Speaker 2: Bold of lightning. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so it can do that. We know also
Speaker 3: it can start fires, natural forest fires, and it causes
Speaker 3: destruction and damage to buildings. But the authors here just
Speaker 3: mentioned briefly a couple of things people might not appreciate
Speaker 3: about how lightning is also somewhat ecologically important, like it
Speaker 3: does good things for us. This is a detour, but
Speaker 3: I thought it was interesting, so I just wanted to
Speaker 3: mention it. One thing that has come up on the
Speaker 3: show before, of course, is the ecological importance of lightning
Speaker 3: in starting forest fires. Like some amount of forest fires
Speaker 3: are necessary, right like, there are life forms that depend
Speaker 3: on occasional or periodic forest fires. There are plant seeds
Speaker 3: that are only activated in the presence of fire or smoke,
Speaker 3: so you know, the life cycle of forests to some
Speaker 3: degree depends on occasional forest fires. But also the authors
Speaker 3: here bring up something that I don't think i'd ever
Speaker 3: read about before, that lightning plays a small role in
Speaker 3: nitrogen fixation on Earth, which nitrogen fixation is a process
Speaker 3: that we absolutely depend on for life. You know, nitrogen
Speaker 3: is a key component of amino acids and proteins. Without it,
Speaker 3: we could not make DNA or RNA or the proteins
Speaker 3: that build our cells. Plants couldn't make chlorophyll. So all
Speaker 3: life on Earth pins on nitrogen. And you might think, well,
Speaker 3: that's fine, because there's plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere,
Speaker 3: right like, nitrogen is the main constituent of our atmosphere,
Speaker 3: But the form of nitrogen available in our atmosphere is
Speaker 3: actually not biologically usable. Atmospheric nitrogen exists mostly in the
Speaker 3: form of two nitrogen atoms bonded together called di nitrogen,
Speaker 3: and these two atoms are held together by an extremely
Speaker 3: strong chemical bond, so in order to be usable to life,
Speaker 3: you have to break that bond. Dihydrogen needs to be
Speaker 3: broken apart and converted into other compounds like nitrates which
Speaker 3: are nitrogen oxygen compounds, or converted into ammonia, which is
Speaker 3: made of nitrogen and hydrogen. So what can break apart
Speaker 3: the di nitrogen the two nitrogen atoms. The vast majority
Speaker 3: of the world's natural nitrogen fixation is done by microorganisms,
Speaker 3: so you have single celled life forms like bacteria and
Speaker 3: archaea called diazotrophs, which have special enzymes called nitrogenases that
Speaker 3: are able to break the dinitrogen bonds and generate derivative compounds.
Speaker 3: So one example of this is Rhizobia, which is a
Speaker 3: type of bacteria that exists symbiotically in legume roots like
Speaker 3: the roots of bean plants, and together with the plant,
Speaker 3: the bacterium and the plant are able to convert atmospheric
Speaker 3: nitrogen into ammonia or in H three. So most natural
Speaker 3: nitrogen fixation happens like that, but some small amount of
Speaker 3: the world's nitrogen fixation is also done by lightning. So
Speaker 3: lightning is hot enough to break apart dinitrogen in the
Speaker 3: atmosphere as it cuts a path to the ground, so
Speaker 3: it breaks apart the dinitrogen and makes it react with
Speaker 3: oxygen other elements in the atmosphere, primarily oxygen, and then
Speaker 3: these nitrogen oxygen compounds are carried down to the ground
Speaker 3: by rain and then they can be absorbed and used
Speaker 3: by plants in the form of nitrate. So lightning helps.
Speaker 4: Yeah, something to keep in mind the next time we
Speaker 4: see some electrical activity in the storms, like we're looking
Speaker 4: at a factory of sorts.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So anyway, coming to the part about fulgurites, the
Speaker 3: authors do some interesting mass to calculate how often folgiarites
Speaker 3: around the world might be formed, and they I just
Speaker 3: want to read this section. They say, quote, lightning is
Speaker 3: a ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, with a global flash rate
Speaker 3: of about forty five times per second, a majority seventy
Speaker 3: five to ninety percent of which occur over continental land mass.
Speaker 3: About a quarter of these strikes occur from a cloud
Speaker 3: to the ground, and hence the number of potential fulgiarit
Speaker 3: forming events is significant. With up to ten folgarites formed
Speaker 3: globally per second.
Speaker 2: WHOA.
Speaker 3: This estimate depends on the efficiency of fulgarite formation by lightning,
Speaker 3: which is highest when striking barren sand, soil or rock.
Speaker 3: So obviously there's going to be less formation when it's
Speaker 3: striking like a forested area.
Speaker 4: Still that is significantly more than I would have guessed.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about
Speaker 3: folgier ites is actually not about folgiar rights in sand.
Speaker 3: This is about rock fulgiarites. But I thought this was
Speaker 3: interesting too, so I wanted to get into it. Robin
Speaker 3: the outline. I've got a picture you can look at
Speaker 3: of the peak of Mount Shasta in California, and you
Speaker 3: can see these dark scars in the rock. What's going
Speaker 3: on there? That's rock fulgiarites. The mountain is a lightning
Speaker 3: rod and the peak is being going to be struck
Speaker 3: by lightning and it makes these glassy crusts in the rock.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4: To the untrained eye, you might just think it's like
Speaker 4: deposits of something some sort of like mineral vein in
Speaker 4: the rock.
Speaker 2: But wow, that's fulgrit. Wow.
Speaker 3: So the last thing I want to talk about here
Speaker 3: is This news article in the journal Science from December
Speaker 3: twenty twenty by Nick Ogassa called fossilized lightning to reveal
Speaker 3: when ancient storms struck. So, when lightning strikes a mountaintop
Speaker 3: like this, like when it hits the peak of Mount Shasta,
Speaker 3: it leaves this glassy residue, And you can think of
Speaker 3: this in a way as fossilized lightning. It is a
Speaker 3: record in the rock of lightning hitting. So in a
Speaker 3: way it is a record of weather projected into the
Speaker 3: rock or into the soil and the sand. And these
Speaker 3: fossilized signatures of thunderbolts can play an interesting role helping
Speaker 3: scientists understand past climate patterns by allowing them to date thunderstorms.
Speaker 3: So how does that work well? The article explains, citing
Speaker 3: the work of Jonathan Castro, who's a volcanologist at the
Speaker 3: Johannes Gutenberg University of Mines, that when naturally formed glasses
Speaker 3: like fulgiarite and others like obsidian are exposed to the
Speaker 3: outside air and to the elements, they slowly begin to
Speaker 3: absorb water. And by measuring the amount of water they've absorbed,
Speaker 3: and I think how deeply it's been absorbed in theory,
Speaker 3: you should be able to measure the age of these
Speaker 3: glasses because they absorbed slowly, and so you can measure that,
Speaker 3: or at least you can measure not necessarily the age
Speaker 3: since they're formed, but the age since they've been exposed
Speaker 3: to the elements. So, for example, this has been considered
Speaker 3: as a method for dating artifacts like obsidian arrowheads. But
Speaker 3: there's a problem. They figured out there are problems with
Speaker 3: the method because quote, many of these glasses come from
Speaker 3: volcanoes and already contain water from the time they were forged,
Speaker 3: so that water interferes with this potential dating method. But
Speaker 3: Castro and colleagues reasoned that, unlike volcanically forged obsidian, fulgurites
Speaker 3: could be free of this problem because the extremely high
Speaker 3: energy of the lightning strike that creates the folgarite actually
Speaker 3: vaporizes any water that's hiding out in there because it's
Speaker 3: so hot, So fulurite last might be a more reliable
Speaker 3: target for this moisture absorption based dating method. So Castro
Speaker 3: and colleagues tested this out by making artificial rock fulgurite
Speaker 3: by shocking samples of rock with an arc welder. Again,
Speaker 3: these artificial things, like when you have a down to
Speaker 3: power line and it makes folgiurite in the sand. They
Speaker 3: shocked rock with an arc welder, reaching temperatures above ten
Speaker 3: thousand degrees celsius, which is what's required to make the folgiarite,
Speaker 3: and these temperatures did indeed boil away almost all of
Speaker 3: the moisture, meaning that the fulgarite should serve as a
Speaker 3: reliable time piece allowing you to measure the time since
Speaker 3: its creation. And after this, the researchers decided to test
Speaker 3: the dating system on natural rock fulgurites, which they harvested
Speaker 3: from some volcanic mountain peaks in Oregon in the US
Speaker 3: state of Oregon, because again mountain peaks are these lightning rods.
Speaker 3: And some of the folgiarites they sampled turned out to
Speaker 3: be hundreds of years old, and they argued that this
Speaker 3: method could be used to date fulgarite glass with a
Speaker 3: relatively high level of accuracy compared to other methods. Other
Speaker 3: methods you might have like measuring bombardment by cosmic rays.
Speaker 3: So in a paper published in twenty twenty in the
Speaker 3: journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Castro and co authors
Speaker 3: wrote that quote because the lightning strike is in and
Speaker 3: of itself so effective at devolatilizing melts in an instant.
Speaker 3: The resultant folgiarites are a unique earth material that record
Speaker 3: individual weather events i e. A thunderstorm and also longer
Speaker 3: term paleo weather intervals. And they talk about one interesting
Speaker 3: example of how this could be used. It could reveal
Speaker 3: when in history particular rocks or mountaintops became exposed and
Speaker 3: thus vulnerable to lightning strikes, for example, to identify wind
Speaker 3: glaciers began to retreat from specific areas with a high
Speaker 3: degree of precision.
Speaker 2: Fascinating. Yeah, huh.
Speaker 3: I'm not a crystal guy. And if you start googling
Speaker 3: Fulgar rightes, a lot of the people who want to
Speaker 3: talk about these things have thoughts about the powers of crystals.
Speaker 4: Oh, okay, there are certain powers attributed to Folgar rights
Speaker 4: in particular.
Speaker 3: I think some people I don't know. I didn't go
Speaker 3: deep in that world. I just saw a bunch of
Speaker 3: Google hits and I'm like, Okay, I don't have time
Speaker 3: for that.
Speaker 4: I'll research it the next time I'm in Asheville going
Speaker 4: to the various crystal stores.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm not that kind of crystal guy. But
Speaker 3: now I'm kind of like I want some vulgarite very
Speaker 3: interested in this it.
Speaker 4: You know, I didn't get a chance to reread Armor
Speaker 4: in full for this episode. It's just like zeroing in
Speaker 4: on the part that I referenced earlier. But this makes
Speaker 4: me wonder if there's an example in that book, maybe
Speaker 4: examples even in Dune, or certainly any book where you
Speaker 4: have any fictional setting where you have an interaction of
Speaker 4: some sort of energy weapon or dragon breath or Godzilla breath,
Speaker 4: where you could potentially have like fulgar right scar of
Speaker 4: the battle, you know, like I'm imagining like there was
Speaker 4: some sort of interaction here, we had last guns, you know,
Speaker 4: going off, or some sort of energy weapons, and then
Speaker 4: later it could almost leave like a forest of fulgar
Speaker 4: rite columns from where those like those missed laser beams
Speaker 4: or what have you, impacted the sand and then the
Speaker 4: rest of the sand blew away.
Speaker 3: There are whole passages in Doing Messiah where Paul is
Speaker 3: like looking out over the planes where Fremen fought the
Speaker 3: Sarto car and he talks about the landscape and even
Speaker 3: the rocks and the scarps and all that. But I
Speaker 3: don't think he ever mentions anything like that.
Speaker 4: I mean, it would be temporary, you know, because the
Speaker 4: elements would be we was over. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 4: you can also imagine a scenario where things like this
Speaker 4: might be collected because they're essentially you know, the mentos
Speaker 4: of the battle, that sort of thing. But it's one
Speaker 4: of those things I kind of want to look out
Speaker 4: for now, and certainly listeners if you were like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: there's a you know place in Game of Thrones where
Speaker 4: this is reference towards reference. Again, it might actually be
Speaker 4: referenced elsewhere in Herbert's Riding or in any of the
Speaker 4: sources we've mentioned already, But it seems like there's some
Speaker 4: some great potential there for fulgar ride battle scars.
Speaker 3: I like it, are there energy weapons in Game of Thrones?
Speaker 2: Well, you have dragons, Oh okay, I'm thinking of breath
Speaker 2: weapon or.
Speaker 4: You know, some sort of magical effects or or you know,
Speaker 4: you know, other like high potency explosives. I don't know,
Speaker 4: but certainly dragon fire it seems like that might be
Speaker 4: the kind of thing that could produce fulgar rides in
Speaker 4: some cases.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: In D and D what level of electricity spells like
Speaker 3: lightning or thunderbolt spells you have to get to to
Speaker 3: make fulgar ride.
Speaker 4: I think it would happen right away. I mean, just
Speaker 4: your as soon as you're able to forget off the
Speaker 4: top of my head, I don't have make character sheet
Speaker 4: in front of me.
Speaker 2: I can't remember.
Speaker 4: You know, you get the lightning bolt spell and then
Speaker 4: you can like really ramp it up depending on what
Speaker 4: what spell over you're casting at. But right out the gate,
Speaker 4: it's pretty strong spell, especially if you can get your
Speaker 4: enemies to line up.
Speaker 2: That's my favorite part.
Speaker 3: Get them wet right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but sometimes that's where you have to like make
Speaker 4: a case for it with your dungeon master. But if
Speaker 4: your dungeon master makes a mistake of lining up all
Speaker 4: of the villains, all of the bad guys, all the
Speaker 4: monsters in us in a row, and you're able to
Speaker 4: move your your player to the side of them, you're
Speaker 4: able to flank them, then you can just like shoot
Speaker 4: that lightning bolt straight down the middle. And if they're
Speaker 4: you know, made up of land, you create fulgar rides.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah based enemies.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, there's some sand based creatures. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: There's some sort of lightning spells on like a rock elemental.
Speaker 4: Yeah, have some sort of sand golm that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: then you have a fulgar ride golum and that's a
Speaker 4: whole new thing you have to contend with.
Speaker 3: Okay, does that do it for today?
Speaker 2: I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 4: This has been a blast. You know, this is not
Speaker 4: our normal recording scenario, but I had a lot of
Speaker 4: fun doing it. Thanks to the studio here at Baja Mar,
Speaker 4: great staff, great facilities. This has been a lot of fun, totally. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's good seeing you in person, Rob.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Normally we're still doing the zoom thing, so we
Speaker 4: were not in the same space when we do it.
Speaker 2: So yeah, this has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: As always, we put the call out to listeners though
Speaker 4: if you have things you want to add to the
Speaker 4: topics we discussed here, certainly you know, getting into the
Speaker 4: sci fi visions, but also your own experience with sand
Speaker 4: and even just where you fall on the whole love
Speaker 4: hate relationship with beach Sand.
Speaker 2: Write in. We would love to hear from you.
Speaker 4: Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to
Speaker 4: Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast.
Speaker 4: We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form
Speaker 4: episodes on Wednesdays and then on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 4: most serious concerns, so just talk about a weird film
Speaker 4: on Weird House Cinema. We've been doing this for a
Speaker 4: long time. At this point, you can find a pretty
Speaker 4: deep archive of Stuff to Blow Your Mind wherever you
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Speaker 4: are watching this in video from on.
Speaker 2: Netflix and you can find more recent.
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Speaker 4: that video content moving forward for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway,
Speaker 3: and big thanks to our guest producer today, Carlisle.
Speaker 2: Yes, Carlisle.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
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