Handwavium
Jacey Bedford
rewrite has cleared up a lot of the points I was a little dubious about.
just one thing to fix...
The plot hinges around something of value being found on my new colony's
planet that is a big enough discovery to attract fleets of space
pirates.
My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
a lot of practical industrial applications.
We've talked about this before but some of the very rate elements are
dramatically unstable. Things like radium become too problematical I
think. (What the hell does raw radium look like anyway and can you mine
it with a pick and shovel and carry lumps of it away with you in a box?)
So I come back to needing something that can be recognised and 'mined'.
I'll use handwavium if I have to, but I'd be delighted to discover
something else instead.
So back to platinum...
According to Wikipedia:
Platinum is an extremely rare metal, occurring as only 0.003 ppb in the
Earth's crust. Retailers claim supply estimates of this fine metal,
being 30 times rarer than gold, that if all the world's platinum
reservoirs were poured into one Olympic size swimming pool, it would be
scarcely deep enough to cover your ankles. Gold would fill more than
three such pools.
OK, so far so good. There's a very limited supply and... it's got
numerous high tech industrial applications - demand for which is only
going to get larger and larger as (in the Jaceyverse) humans spread out
and colonise the galaxy. It could actually be that platinum is vital to
the tech that operates the 'jump gates' (yes I'm happy to make
_jumpgates_ up because enough people have done it before me).
The fly in this particular ointment is if platinum has already been
identified as being relatively easy to find and mine on asteroids etc. I
believe there are, for instance, deposits on the moon...
So am I stretching the bounds of possibility making platinum into my
handwavium? I really cringe at the thought of inventing something but I
need that plot-hinge.
Imagine we're still planet bound and still reliant upon oil and the
world's oil reserves have been completely used up except for the one
remaining oil well in... Luxemburg. How long will the Luxemburg
government be able to hold out against hostile takeover bids by all the
world's powers. Forget Iraq and Saudi. Luxemburg is the next blood-bath.
Now transfer that scenario to handwavium and my shiny new colony where
'oil = handwaviuim'
So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and more
vital to future tech? Remember it has to be something that can be
recognised and handled. At one point my guys have to take a relatively
small consignment of it off world and convert it into credit and use it
as samples for a bigger deal.
Jacey
--
Jacey Bedford
jacey at artisan hyphen harmony dot com
posting via usenet and not googlegroups, ourdebate
or any other forum that reprints usenet posts as
though they were the forum's own
Sea Wasp
>
> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and more
> vital to future tech?
Platinum is useful, but not something so rare that I can imagine
people fighting over it across light-years unless travelling
light-years is as easy as, say, driving my car cross-country. It's
going to be reasonably easy to find a supply of platinum in most solar
systems, I'd think.
I really think you need handwavium -- dilithium to channel energy,
whatever.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Jonathan L Cunningham
> Jacey Bedford wrote:
>
> >
> > So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and more
> > vital to future tech?
>
> Platinum is useful, but not something so rare that I can imagine
> people fighting over it across light-years unless travelling
> light-years is as easy as, say, driving my car cross-country. It's
> going to be reasonably easy to find a supply of platinum in most solar
> systems, I'd think.
>
> I really think you need handwavium -- dilithium to channel energy,
> whatever.
I'd vote for one of the rare earth elements, or one of the elements from
the second transition, e.g. Niobium (element 41), or Praseodymium
(element 59).
For example (from Wikipedia):
Praseodymium is a soft silvery metal in the lanthanide group. It is
somewhat more resistant to corrosion in air than europium, lanthanum,
cerium, or neodymium, but it does develop a green oxide coating that
spalls off when exposed to air, exposing more metal to oxidation. For
this reason, praseodymium should be stored under a light mineral oil
or sealed in glass.
Why? Because they are real, they are rare, and all but a very few people
will know anything about them, and even an expert will not be able to
say that it might not be useful for something. Perhaps one day someone
will discover high-temperature superconductivity in a ceramic based on a
high percentage of Praseodymium, or that it has unusual catalytic
properties. (The transition elements all tend to have unusual catalytic
properties.)
Just avoid elements 43 and 61 (Technetium and Promethium). Of the 92
naturally occurring elements, two don't occur because they are
radioactive: those two. (So there are really only 90 naturally occurring
elements, numbered from 1 to 92, but skipping 43 and 61.)
Jonathan
Remus Shepherd
> So am I stretching the bounds of possibility making platinum into my
> handwavium? I really cringe at the thought of inventing something but I
> need that plot-hinge.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it depends on the economic systems in
your universe. I am not an expert in economics, so I don't think I can
help there. :)
> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and more
> vital to future tech? Remember it has to be something that can be
> recognised and handled.
Palladium is more likely to be useful for future tech. Similar to
platinum but not quite as rare, palladium has the amazing ability to absorb
and compress hydrogen. This made it very interesting to cold fusion
researchers, until that field was discredited by Fleischman and Pons.
But a hydrogen sponge can be useful in many ways, from fuel cells to
purification filters -- and those are the known uses, without speculating
about how it could be useful on future spaceships.
Even better, Palladium occurs in natural alloys with Platinum, and these
alloys can have interesting properties. If that alloy existed in quantity
on your planet, mining it might be cheaper than trying to recreate it in
foundries using the existing supply of these two hard-to-find metals.
... ...
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com>
Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/remus_shepherd/
Comic: http://indepos.comicgenesis.com/
James Nicoll
Jacey Bedford <look...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>I've been muttering on and off about my WIR. I'm almost there now. The
>rewrite has cleared up a lot of the points I was a little dubious about.
>just one thing to fix...
>
>The plot hinges around something of value being found on my new colony's
>planet that is a big enough discovery to attract fleets of space
>pirates.
>
>My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
>platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
>a lot of practical industrial applications.
>
>We've talked about this before but some of the very rate elements are
>dramatically unstable. Things like radium become too problematical I
>think. (What the hell does raw radium look like anyway and can you mine
>it with a pick and shovel and carry lumps of it away with you in a box?)
>
>So I come back to needing something that can be recognised and 'mined'.
>I'll use handwavium if I have to, but I'd be delighted to discover
>something else instead.
>
>
>The fly in this particular ointment is if platinum has already been
>identified as being relatively easy to find and mine on asteroids etc. I
>believe there are, for instance, deposits on the moon...
>
It's hard to have interstellar travel and not get asteroid
mining as a possible side-effct.
Why not have the handwavium directly related to the fact that
the planet in question is one where colonists would want to move?
Maybe the local biochemistry has interesting by-products.
Maybe five hundred million years ago, another civilization
colonized the world and as a side-effect of their economic activity and
extinction, they concentrate but then never used vast quantities of
handwavium, handwavium that now forms deposits within the more natural
geological features of the planet.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
Ric Locke
I had to go look it up, just to make sure.
Platinum is nearly nonexistent in crustal rocks. It is found in magmatic
rocks -- that is, mantle and core material. Even there it's extremely
dispersed.
The richest ores of most economically important metals (iron, copper,
etc.) are the result of bacterial action. The huge deposits of iron ore,
especially, like the Mesabi Range of the northern US, are the remnants
of mats of bacteria. Platinum doesn't combine that way, so if there is
any around it's in clumps of a small number of atoms distributed through
magmatic rock. If iron meteorites are the source of planetary cores
(plausible) and chondritic ones the origin of crust (again plausible),
asteroid mining for platinum is going to look a lot like industrial
scale mass spectometry, as in Gilliland's /Rosinante/ stories.
The best platinum ores are placers, that is, places downstream of where
magmatic rock has been eroded by water flow. As the grains get carried
downstream, the heaavy platinum precipitates out in the oxbows and
"riffles"; the same principle as with placer gold deposits, only more
so.
If you found a planet where the ancient geology resulted in a giant
magmatic rock formation being eroded away, then the deposits covered up
with later strata, you could plausibly have an extremely rich deposit of
platinum which would also contain gold, nickel, iridium, palladium,
rhodium, ruthenium and osmium, all hard-to-extract metals with important
economic uses. I'm visualizing an ancient river bed (or network of same)
covered by later deposits, with the placers being concreted into
sandstone. So far as I know or could find by googling there's no such
deposit on Earth, which would suggest that it's plausible to say they
are extremely rare.
In such a deposit you would actually find chunks or nuggets of near-pure
platinum embedded in the matrix, available for the price of crushing and
washing. If the deposit was big enough and shallow enough the cost of
getting the metals out could be a small fraction of the energy cost of
extracting an atom at a time from nickel-iron asteroids, assuming your
culture doesn't have sources of essentially unlimited free energy. That
would be well worth sending an army to get. As a bonus, it meets two of
your other criteria: a half-kilo chunk of sandstone shot through with
twenty-gram nuggets of pure platinum would be worth a bunch, not least
in the amusement value of watching a mining engineer's eyes bug out, and
the extraction process would consist of extremely intrusive
strip-mining.
Regards,
Ric
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Ric Locke
> What the hell does raw radium look like anyway and can you mine
> it with a pick and shovel and carry lumps of it away with you in a box?
Pure radium is white, with a greenish glow of radioactivity. It doesn't
occur as an ore, being a breakdown product of uranium and found in
uranium ore (pitchblende). Radium oxidizes almost immediately to a
sulfate, which is black but still glows green.
It is probably possible for extremely-rare geological processes to
concentrate radium sulfa|ite into an ore deposit. If such were to occur,
and you dug out a bucketful, your expected survival time before the
radiation killed you would be measured in hours.
Regards,
ric
Jonathan L Cunningham
Biological products are a good idea. Poul Anderson used them as a
justification for much of the Polesotechnic league(sp?) trade.
From a (hardish SF) POV, it's easy to believe that there might be
biochemicals which are very expensive to synthesise, which justifies the
transport costs, but it's harder to believe that they'd be useful to us.
Perhaps exotic alien spices (which are non-toxic, or not very toxic)?
Another advantage of luxury goods (exotic spices) is that the price
doesn't have to reflect the real value. So it may be worth a very rich
household paying to import it, simply as a status symbol. Depends on the
culture of Jacey's society.
>
> Maybe five hundred million years ago, another civilization
> colonized the world and as a side-effect of their economic activity and
> extinction, they concentrate but then never used vast quantities of
> handwavium, handwavium that now forms deposits within the more natural
> geological features of the planet.
Maybe they faced their buildings with ceramic tiles whose
micro-structure (nano-structure?) can't be duplicated by present
technology? So all you need to do is strip the tiles off the buildings,
and send them back.
Next question: what's so special about them to make it worthwhile?
Jonathan
P.S. I don't mind handwavium as long as it's not a new element. If you
want a new element, you need to find a new whole number between 1 and
100. May as well go for a whole number between four and six, but which
isn't five. Let me know when you find it.
<rant>Dilithium is an abomination. Lithium is element 3. What is
"dilithium"? Two lithiums? Element 6 is carbon. Coal. Graphite. Or do
they mean lithium molecules with two atoms? Like in lithium vapour? If
you heat up metallic lithium, you get hot metallic lithium, not
handwavium. Ugh. </rant>
David M. Palmer
<look...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
> platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
> a lot of practical industrial applications.
If this is a nanotech-free universe, how about a mineral which is made
up of long, perfect, aligned, uniform, single-walled nanotubes.
Technobabble: there was a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid with a crater
of exactly the right shape and orientation and composition, such that
once a rotation the sunlight hits an outcropping of a very specific
material on the side of the crater, producing a sputter of carbon atoms
which are deposited on the crater floor. The crater floor is now the
growing face of this mineral, consisting of the ends of the nanotubes
and a monolayer of the catalytic chemical. The asteroid continues its
rotation and the light falls on the sputtered-carbon/catalyst mix,
which drives the reaction which attaches the carbons to the ends of the
nanotubes and pushes the catalyst up to the new end of the nanotube.
So each rotation of the asteroid (3.9 hours), all the tubes elongate by
one carbon bond length of 1.4 Angstroms, a growth rate of 1e-14
meters/s. This is way too slow to grow-your-own industrially, but
since the asteroid formed 300 million years ago, you have a source of
100 meter long nanotubes. Want to build a skyhook?
One asteroid, in one system, out of the dozens that have been explored.
Conditions have to be /just/ right or you get sludge instead.
Unfortunately, by the time you publish, or by the time it hits
paperback, or by the time someone might want to reprint, this might
look quaint. Last I checked, the state-of-the-art for bulk production
of long nanotubes gives individual tubes about as long as short-staple
cotton, and there is massive work being done to make longer ones.
--
David M. Palmer dmpa...@email.com (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)
Jacey Bedford
<seawasp...@sgeObviousinc.com> writes
>Jacey Bedford wrote:
>
>> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and
>>more vital to future tech?
>
> Platinum is useful, but not something so rare that I can
>imagine people fighting over it across light-years unless travelling
>light-years is as easy as, say, driving my car cross-country. It's
>going to be reasonably easy to find a supply of platinum in most solar
>systems, I'd think.
>
> I really think you need handwavium -- dilithium to channel
>energy, whatever.
Damn, I was afraid someone was going to say that.
Jacey Bedford
<dmpa...@email.com> writes
work for me in this particular book
Jacey Bedford
<warl...@hyperusa.com> writes
Questions: (Theoretically)
* How would you recognise 'radium sulfite'?
*Could you identify it from a safe distance?
*Could you wear protective gear, mine it/gather it and carry it away in
a safe container?
David Friedman
Jacey Bedford <look...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> In message <47C989A0...@sgeObviousinc.com>, Sea Wasp
> <seawasp...@sgeObviousinc.com> writes
> >Jacey Bedford wrote:
> >
> >> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and
> >>more vital to future tech?
> >
> > Platinum is useful, but not something so rare that I can
> >imagine people fighting over it across light-years unless travelling
> >light-years is as easy as, say, driving my car cross-country. It's
> >going to be reasonably easy to find a supply of platinum in most solar
> >systems, I'd think.
> >
> > I really think you need handwavium -- dilithium to channel
> >energy, whatever.
>
> Damn, I was afraid someone was going to say that.
It's a substantial change, but could it be something other than a
mineral? Suppose there is some extinct civilization which had very
advanced nanotech, used it to make very useful materials that cannot now
be made, and bit and pieces of their rubble are scattered around the
planet.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
Joel Polowin
> In message <1m1e4jsc22kz1$.3hz035tn42q5....@40tude.net>, Ric Locke
> <warlo...@hyperusa.com> writes
> >It is probably possible for extremely-rare geological processes to
> >concentrate radium sulfa|ite into an ore deposit. If such were to occur,
> >and you dug out a bucketful, your expected survival time before the
> >radiation killed you would be measured in hours.
The half-life of the longest-lived radium isotope, 226Ra (the one
which
is part of the 238U decay series, and is found in low concentrations
in pitchblende) is only 1600 years. I think it's unlikely that a
geological
process would be able to concentrate it; they tend to be on much
longer time scales.
> Questions: (Theoretically)
> * How would you recognise 'radium sulfite'?
> *Could you identify it from a safe distance?
> *Could you wear protective gear, mine it/gather it and carry it away in
> a safe container?
Radium sulfate (not sulfite) would be detectable most easily at a
distance by its gamma radiation. I don't know if that would be enough
to identify it more specifically than as something radioactive. If
it's
exposed and in a vacuum or at short range, the alpha radiation has
distinctive energy values. The alpha radiation is blocked by a small
amount of matter, but the only protection we know of from gamma
radiation is one or both of distance and heavy shielding.
At the usual concentrations of radium in uranium-bearing minerals,
it's the uranium which is "obvious", and the radium is a minor
component. It's typically detected by cooking a powdered mineral
sample with thoroughly nasty chemicals to dissolve the silicates,
then precipitated and measured in an alpha spectrometer. (I spent
several summers doing this stuff, a number of years ago.)
Joel Polowin
> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and more
> vital to future tech?
What's the current theory on magnetic monopoles? In or out of favour?
Joel Polowin
> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and more
> vital to future tech? Remember it has to be something that can be
> recognised and handled. At one point my guys have to take a relatively
> small consignment of it off world and convert it into credit and use it
> as samples for a bigger deal.
What about a complex biological compound? Nobody's figured out
how to synthesize it yet. Nobody's managed to get cell cultures to
survive and produce the compound. And the organism is part of,
and dependent on, a relatively complex ecological network, so
nobody has yet been able to transplant the thing away from its
planet of origin and get it to take.
Jacey Bedford
Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> writes
>In article <3fjiW05l...@parkhead.demon.co.uk>,
> Jacey Bedford <look...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
>> In message <47C989A0...@sgeObviousinc.com>, Sea Wasp
>> <seawasp...@sgeObviousinc.com> writes
>> >Jacey Bedford wrote:
>> >
>> >> So can it be platinum or, can you suggest anything more rare and
>> >>more vital to future tech?
>> >
>> > Platinum is useful, but not something so rare that I can
>> >imagine people fighting over it across light-years unless travelling
>> >light-years is as easy as, say, driving my car cross-country. It's
>> >going to be reasonably easy to find a supply of platinum in most solar
>> >systems, I'd think.
>> >
>> > I really think you need handwavium -- dilithium to channel
>> >energy, whatever.
>>
>> Damn, I was afraid someone was going to say that.
>
>It's a substantial change, but could it be something other than a
>mineral? Suppose there is some extinct civilization which had very
>advanced nanotech, used it to make very useful materials that cannot now
>be made, and bit and pieces of their rubble are scattered around the
>planet.
>
into it. And besides I'd still have the problem of inventing the 'useful
material that cannot now be made' - i.e. handwavium.
Gerry Quinn
warl...@hyperusa.com says...
Also, the bucket would melt.
- Gerry Quinn
Jacey Bedford
<b118e0e9-0c86-440a...@k2g2000hse.googlegroups.com>, Joel
Polowin <jpol...@hotmail.com> writes
Isn't it a bit difficult to mine a hypothetical particle? Or did you
have something else in mind.
My level of knowledge is zilch but Wikipedia says:
'It therefore remains possible that monopoles do not exist at all. The
failure of given experiments to find magnetic monopoles also places
constraints on their possible properties and hence on the physical
theories that predict them. Some current models suggest that while
magnetic monopoles could exist, they are so massive that they may never
be observed in practice.'
Jacey Bedford
Damien Sullivan
>I'd vote for one of the rare earth elements, or one of the elements from
>the second transition, e.g. Niobium (element 41), or Praseodymium
>(element 59).
>Why? Because they are real, they are rare, and all but a very few people
Eh, they're not that much rarer than other rare stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundances_of_the_elements_%28data_page%29
go down to the "Sun and solar system", emphasis on the latter.
>Just avoid elements 43 and 61 (Technetium and Promethium). Of the 92
>naturally occurring elements, two don't occur because they are
>radioactive: those two. (So there are really only 90 naturally occurring
To be clearer: all the isotopoes of those elements have short
half-lives. Other elements are also entirely radioactive, but either
have long half-lives (uranium) or are standard decay products from the
former (radium).
My own first thoughts for handwavium/unobtainium are magnetic monopoles
or primordial black holes, but I think they'd fail to meet plot needs.
Especially the latter.
-xx- Damien X-)
Damien Sullivan
>Platinum is nearly nonexistent in crustal rocks. It is found in magmatic
>rocks -- that is, mantle and core material. Even there it's extremely
>dispersed.
Back to Wikipedia again, crust is only one source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum
"Platinum is produced commercially as a by-product of nickel ore
processing in the Sudbury deposit. The huge quantities of nickel ore
processed makes up for the fact that platinum is present as only 0.5 ppm
in the ore.
Platinum exists in relatively higher abundances on the Moon and in
meteorites. Corrospondingly, platinum is found in slightly higher
abundances at sites of bollide impact on the Earth that are associated
with resulting post-impact volcanism, and can be mined economically; the
Sudbury Basin is one such example."
Crus is 0.003 ppb, Sudbury -- an impact remains -- is 0.5 ppm, 100,000
times richer than crust.
It also says platinum was used in pre-Columbian jewelry. Rare, but not
impossibly so.
And there's 10 ppm of platinum groups in this igneous complex.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushveld_igneous_complex
-xx- Damien X-)
Damien Sullivan
>>What's the current theory on magnetic monopoles? In or out of favour?
>
>Isn't it a bit difficult to mine a hypothetical particle? Or did you
>have something else in mind.
The idea is that in your universe, they'd be rare but not hypothetical.
Perhaps they were hypothetical until they were found here, for unknown
reasons. (Perhaps synthesized by a lost alien race, rather than
primordial -- synthesized via star-sized engineering projects.)
A physicist on the Orion's Arm group says they could catalyze the nearly full
conversion of matter to energy, without antimatter, via induced proton
decay. And that's a simple property; get enough of them of various
types and you can build scrith (the Ringworld substance.) OTOH, they
are very dense and magnetic, so I'm not sure about manual mining and
transport.
>'It therefore remains possible that monopoles do not exist at all. The
Which leaves them as harder (more plausible) science than jumpgates.
-xx- Damien X-)
Jonathan L Cunningham
> I've been muttering on and off about my WIR. I'm almost there now. The
> rewrite has cleared up a lot of the points I was a little dubious about.
> just one thing to fix...
>
> The plot hinges around something of value being found on my new colony's
> planet that is a big enough discovery to attract fleets of space
> pirates.
On the "relics of ancient/lost civilisations" theme, is that completely
ruled out for plot reasons? If not, artefacts could be valuable to
collectors (if there are collectors rich enough).
A couple of other ideas:
A store of anti-matter left by an alien civilization (think "fuel
dump"). That idea won't work if your starships are powered by
anti-matter.
A repository of mini black holes. Bound to be useful for something, and
very hard to make. You might have trouble transporting them though.
Sticking with the original handwavium:
It could be a mysterious mineral which doesn't appear to be made of
normal matter. What *is* it made of, we wonders, Precious? Maybe an
unusual ("crystallised") form of dark matter. Dark matter doesn't
usually interact with normal matter, but this unusual form does,
slightly, giving it properties that are both strange and incredibly
valuable (e.g. it doesn't even melt at temperatures up to tens of
thousands of degrees, but it can be worked).
Or maybe its heat capacity is nearly infinite, so whatever you do to it,
in the short term, it's always at the same temperature (which is the
average temperature of where you found it). I can think of lots of uses
for something like that (including making very small, compact, power
packs that are *safe* *safe* *safe*).
Jonathan
Damien Sullivan
>P.S. I don't mind handwavium as long as it's not a new element. If you
>want a new element, you need to find a new whole number between 1 and
>100. May as well go for a whole number between four and six, but which
>isn't five. Let me know when you find it.
Or go for an island of stability around 140 or so, created by an unusual
type of stellar process (or aliens) recently enough that they're still
around here in useful quantities, but not to be found in every solar
system.
Or, for "recent nuclear processes", a deposit of technetium. Not sure
it'd be that valuable, though.
><rant>Dilithium is an abomination. Lithium is element 3. What is
>"dilithium"? Two lithiums? Element 6 is carbon. Coal. Graphite. Or do
Two lithiums, one of which is in hyperspace. :)
-xx- Damien X-)
Julian Flood
JF
Rik Roots
> Tantalum: rarest element around here.
>
> JF
>
each others to get their hands on such an element ...
Rik
Daniel R. Reitman
<jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote:
> Tantalum: rarest element around here.
The deposits recede every time you try to mine them. :-)
Dan, ad nauseam
Jonathan L Cunningham
> sp...@sofluc.co.uk.invalid (Jonathan L Cunningham) wrote:
>
> >P.S. I don't mind handwavium as long as it's not a new element. If you
> >want a new element, you need to find a new whole number between 1 and
> >100. May as well go for a whole number between four and six, but which
> >isn't five. Let me know when you find it.
>
> Or go for an island of stability around 140 or so, created by an unusual
> type of stellar process (or aliens) recently enough that they're still
> around here in useful quantities, but not to be found in every solar
> system.
Yep. I'd buy that in a story. In fact, Poul Anderson's _Mirkheim_ ?
I don't recall if the possibility (around 120??) has been completely
ruled out yet: the superheavy nuclei which have been made around that
number are a bit short on the number of neutrons they'd need. So a
surprise discovery of relatively stable even heavier elements sounds ok
for a story, as far as I'm concerned.
I think my earliest encounter with the idea was before quarks were
invented: a story where some very heavy elements were stable because
they were held together by "hyperons" instead of "mesons". It sounded
cool at the time (but I was only a boy).
I don't remember if this was the same story (or comic-book series[*])
which had "impervium" in it or not. :-)
Jonathan
[*] One of the comics I read included a prose short story, as well as
the cartoon strip stories, at least for some number of issues.
Jonathan L Cunningham
> sp...@sofluc.co.uk.invalid (Jonathan L Cunningham) wrote:
>
> >I'd vote for one of the rare earth elements, or one of the elements from
> >the second transition, e.g. Niobium (element 41), or Praseodymium
> >(element 59).
>
> >Why? Because they are real, they are rare, and all but a very few people
>
> Eh, they're not that much rarer than other rare stuff:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundances_of_the_elements_%28data_page%29
> go down to the "Sun and solar system", emphasis on the latter.
Thanks for the link. I didn't check first - I was suggesting them more
because they *sound* exotic than for their rarity. And also because (I
could be wrong) I thought they were probably less studied.
I was also thinking that they were at least vaguely plausible for very
high temperature (room temperature) superconductors.
[checks] From wiki, La[1.85]Ba[0.15]CuO4, and YBCO
(Yttrium-Barium-Copper-Oxide) seem to be the recipes I was thinking of:
note the lanthanum and yttrium ingredients :-)
I can't believe that, even yet, every possible combination (and with
more usual elements) has been tried - particularly since non-integral
stoichiometric ratios are required. Has anyone tried
Nb[0.8]La[1.05]Ba[0.15]CuO4 yet? :-)
I don't actual believe it (some recipe) would work, but even if there is
a theoretical reason why it wouldn't, there have been so many surprises
in superconductor research that it's not a showstopper. And, who knows,
it might?
Room temperature superconductivity would be so valuable that we would
quickly exhaust the easily available supply of ores on Earth. (Catalytic
converters in cars are already an issue - some cheaper catalysts will
probably need to be found. But there may be no cheaper alternative for a
room temperature superconductor.)
It might still not be valuable enough to be worth transporting - depends
on transport costs. I think it's what I'd use -- well, I already said
that, didn't I? :-)
Anyway, it's not up to us: it's up to Jacey.
I quite like the primordial black hole idea myself, although
transporting anything that massive will be a problem.
Jonathan
Jonathan L Cunningham
I suggested Niobe, JF suggested her dad.
Niobe had all her children murdered (because she boasted about them).
Tantalus got a rather tantalising punishment in Hades.
Palladium is named after Athena's girlfriend, wot she accidentally
killed. (Well, named after Athena, who added her friend's name to her
own, after she killed her. "It was an accident, honest! I'm only a
goddess, I can't help it if I kill people. I had *no* idea she was
dating that boy." I bet she only got let off because of her dad pulling
strings.)
Promethium is named after Prometheus, who is currently chained to a
mountain where an eagle is gnawing on his liver.
It's not easy being an element.
Jonathan
Logan Kearsley
wrote:
> Damien Sullivan <phoe...@ofb.net> wrote:
> > s...@sofluc.co.uk.invalid (Jonathan L Cunningham) wrote:
>
> > >P.S. I don't mind handwavium as long as it's not a new element. If you
> > >want a new element, you need to find a new whole number between 1 and
> > >100. May as well go for a whole number between four and six, but which
> > >isn't five. Let me know when you find it.
>
> > Or go for an island of stability around 140 or so, created by an unusual
> > type of stellar process (or aliens) recently enough that they're still
> > around here in useful quantities, but not to be found in every solar
> > system.
>
> Yep. I'd buy that in a story. In fact, Poul Anderson's _Mirkheim_ ?
>
> I don't recall if the possibility (around 120??) has been completely
> ruled out yet: the superheavy nuclei which have been made around that
> number are a bit short on the number of neutrons they'd need. So a
> surprise discovery of relatively stable even heavier elements sounds ok
> for a story, as far as I'm concerned.
>
> I think my earliest encounter with the idea was before quarks were
> invented: a story where some very heavy elements were stable because
> they were held together by "hyperons" instead of "mesons". It sounded
> cool at the time (but I was only a boy).
Strangely*, that terminology still kinda works. 'Hyperon' is a
sometimes-used term for nucleons containing quarks other than the
usual u & d varieties (with 'hypermatter' being the corresponding term
for stuff made of atoms containing hyperons). Assuming that bound
strange quarks are stable**, nuclei containing strange quarks ought to
be stable for any arbitrarily high weight.
Hypermatter would give you a potential useful material that could've
been created and left behind by an alien civilization that would not
be found naturally and yet is completely stable.
-l.
*Hah! I pun!
**Which, as far as I know, isn't known; nobody's tried making hyper-
atoms to check yet.
Bob Throllop
> I've been muttering on and off about my WIR. I'm almost there now. The
> rewrite has cleared up a lot of the points I was a little dubious about.
> just one thing to fix...
>
> The plot hinges around something of value being found on my new colony's
> planet that is a big enough discovery to attract fleets of space
> pirates.
>
> platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
> a lot of practical industrial applications.
I much prefer platinum or something else real. The notion that
anything radioactive = super science seems naive and obsolete, like
something from the Buck Rogers era. I would much rather you devote
your hand-waving to some of the basic economic realities of mining.
For instance, maybe there's a deposit of platinum on your planet
that's comparable in grade to existing mines on asteroids, but the
cost of production on a habitable planet is lower--making the
difference between a marginally profitable operation and a money pot.
Or you could give us some hand-waving on a technological advance that
created a new demand for platinum, raising the price to a point where
previously marginal sources suddenly become valuable. Or you could
give us a planetary-science reason why this is the only planet in
known space whose supply of platinum isn't all located at the core.
Everything everyone has told you about why platinum tends to be
vanishingly rare on terrestrial planets--maybe this location is the
one-in-a-billion exception where you can just pick up big nuggets on
the beach.
There was a Frederick Forsyth thriller, _The Dogs Of War_, about a
fight over a platinum mine. Forsyth took some time to explain that at
the time the story was set, the US was about to require catalytic
converters in all new cars, guaranteeing that there would be a market
for the platinum that was about to be mined.
Catja Pafort
<throws bunch of grapes>
Catja
--
writing blog @ http://beyond-elechan.livejournal.com
Jacey Bedford
<pho...@ofb.net> writes
Fred and Alice stepped down from their rocket ship, survey scanners in
hands. Alice's machine started to chitter excitedly. She looked down. At
her feet was a spherical object... no, a load of spherical objects,
easily recognisable by the dense black glow emanating from their
crystalline surface
"Good gods," Fred said. "A clutch of magnetic monopoles. Get the bucket,
Alice, we just struck it rich."
Err... maybe not...
:-)
I could easily turn magnetic monopoles into a load of spherical objects
purely because I haven't a clue how to use the idea. I'd need to know
about the physical manifestation and handling properties of a
theoretical particle of which Wikipedia also said
'Some current models suggest that while magnetic monopoles could exist,
they are so massive that they may never be observed in practice.'
Obviously not something to carry home in a bucket.
John W. Kennedy
Nah! It's element 126, discovered in mine tailings in the little Swedish
village of Dilith.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Those in the seat of power oft forget their failings and seek only the
obeisance of others! Thus is bad government born! Hold in your heart
that you and the people are one, human beings all, and good government
shall arise of its own accord! Such is the path of virtue!"
-- Kazuo Koike. "Lone Wolf and Cub: Thirteen Strings" (tr. Dana Lewis)
Joel Polowin
> I could easily turn magnetic monopoles into a load of spherical objects
> purely because I haven't a clue how to use the idea. I'd need to know
> about the physical manifestation and handling properties of a
> theoretical particle of which Wikipedia also said
> 'Some current models suggest that while magnetic monopoles could exist,
> they are so massive that they may never be observed in practice.'
>
> Obviously not something to carry home in a bucket.
I think that that "so massive that they may never be observed in
practice" is referring to attempts to generate single subatomic
particles by high-energy collisions in particle accelerators. On the
scale of subatomic particles, these things would be incredibly
massive and would require ludicrous amounts of energy to create --
energy levels that would have been typical in the universe very
very shortly after the Big Bang. But this is still referring to a
mass
that would be, say, a few orders of magnitude more massive than
a single normal atom. The only problem with carrying it in a
bucket is that of keeping it in the bucket and finding it afterwards.
You'd need some kind of containment device. It might not have
to be particularly large.
Julian Flood
>> Tantalum: rarest element around here.
> 'kay - I misread that as 'talentium'. I could imagine people killing
> each others to get their hands on such an element ...
In my experience, a highly over-rated substance. Once thought necessary
in order to produce many sorts of art, it was found in the late 2oth
century to be much inferior to hypium, same-as-the-last-onium and
goodenuffium.
JF
Jacey Bedford
<jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> writes
> Tantalum: rarest element around here.
I misread that as Talantum at first.
:-)
I'd like to be able to mine that.
But tantalum (or coltan - ore) could be a serous contender depending on
the frequency of natural occurrence. It certainly seems to have fostered
its share of conflict already.
I wonder if there are any estimates as to how long current reserves will
last at the projected rate of technological growth.
And I wonder if there are other substances that will do the same job if
tantalum becomes too expensive or rare. I'd have to find a specific
reason for using tantalum
Interesting that price in $ per pound rose to 220 in 2000 but dropped
back to around 30 in subsequent years, showing what kind of effect on
world markets speculation can have. (In this case the dot com boom
apparently.)
I found an article at:
http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=33992
Which states:
According to the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries
report and the Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center:
1. World-wide demand for tantalum is currently (2006) 6 million
pounds per year;
2. Consumption has been increasing approx. 7% per annum over
the past 20 years;
3. Primary mine production has increased 38% since 2004 to 2.84
million pounds in 2006;
4. The U.S. imports 87% of its 1.5 million pounds annual
requirement (the balance reclaimed from recycling) and, according to the
U.S. Defense Logistics Agency;
5. The U.S.’s current stockpile of tantalum will be depleted
by the end of 2007 at current disposal rates.
The above facts add up to an impending major imbalance in supply and
demand starting in 2008 and quite possibly a major escalation in the
price per pound of tantalum in the years ahead.
Interesting.
Thanks
Julian Flood
>
> Interesting.
It really is the rarest element in this arm of the Galaxy. I've got a
mad emperor who is using it to clad his tomb on the 'if it's rare it
must be worth doing' principal.
> impatient shake of his head, the Emperor activated the induction
modeller. Implanted neurons resonated within his brain, reacted with the
control fields from the unit. Alexander sat down abruptly. The robots
stepped back. The architects breathed again.
A model image grew around him, blackness of space, bright dustings
of stars, actinic light of ionised gases hurtling down into the inferno
that bordered the Worm. The black hole was sucking matter from the
photosphere of its parent sun, accelerating the helium and hydrogen
towards its own event horizon. The gas flared into incandescence as it
fell towards eternal doom beyond time and space. Against the glare, the
tomb, a huge structure of crystals and interlaced tetrahedra, gleamed
silver in the light.
The Emperor tried to speak and felt his voice scatter like a spew of
radiation from an antique drive unit, not like sound at all as the
virtual field of the model distorted his perceptions. Bigger than any
other structure he had ever seen, almost asteroidal in its size, the
building floated above him. It was to be the greatest mausoleum ever
built by humans. He tried to speak once more and this time the sound
came, a tiny bleat in all that vastness.
"Yes! Yes indeed! A tomb fit for an Emperor."
They all stood in silence for a while, contemplating the titanic shape.
"There is one problem, Majesty." The leader of the architects was
nervous, for it is never good to deny the whims of the mighty.
"Problem? How can there be a problem?"
"The design is based on the form of a tantalum crystal..."
"Yes, yes, of course. It is the rarest element in this arm of the
galaxy. Of course we use the rarest metal, it is only fitting. Clad in
tantalum it will be even more beautiful."
"The Simonides Corporation tells us they are unable to supply us
with the bulk metal."
The Emperor bit his lip as he controlled the rage inside, tasting
the salt tang of blood on his tongue. The diagnostics machines could
make of it what they would: sometimes it was good to be angry.
"We have a contract?"
"Of course. It dates back seventy years, right back to the
inception of the project. They claim there is trouble on their mining
planet. Dub, they bring the metal from a place called Dub."
His Majesty smiled.
"Then we will send some units of the Imperial Navy to Dub and see
what is going on. Gentlemen and ladies, you may withdraw."
Bowing, the team shuffled backwards out of the presence. Once clear
of the outer doors they relaxed.
"Well," said one, expressing the general feelings of relief, "that
went OK. But I'd not like to be old Simonides when the Fleet catches up
with him."
JF
Perhaps I have perpetrated space=opera. Oh dear.
David Friedman
Jacey Bedford <look...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
...
> Interesting that price in $ per pound rose to 220 in 2000 but dropped
> back to around 30 in subsequent years, showing what kind of effect on
> world markets speculation can have. (In this case the dot com boom
> apparently.)
>
> I found an article at:
> http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=33992
...
> The above facts add up to an impending major imbalance in supply and
> demand starting in 2008 and quite possibly a major escalation in the
> price per pound of tantalum in the years ahead.
Note that if the major escalation was predictable at this point, it
would have already occurred--due to speculation. Price goes up when
people who are willing to bet money on their predictions expect that
it's going to go up.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
David Friedman
<77cec693-6b59-4606...@s8g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
Bob Throllop <bobth...@brandx.net> wrote:
> > My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
> > platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
> > a lot of practical industrial applications.
>
> I much prefer platinum or something else real. The notion that
> anything radioactive = super science seems naive and obsolete, like
> something from the Buck Rogers era. I would much rather you devote
> your hand-waving to some of the basic economic realities of mining.
> For instance, maybe there's a deposit of platinum on your planet
> that's comparable in grade to existing mines on asteroids, but the
> cost of production on a habitable planet is lower--making the
> difference between a marginally profitable operation and a money pot.
One point worth thinking about--how big does your deposit have to be in
the galactic scale? You want it to provide the motivation that results
in lots of people with lots of spaceships and guns and stuff trying to
grab it. But the society is big enough, lots of people with lots of
spaceships and guns might still be a tiny fraction of its total
resources, and might be motivated by a planet that contained two percent
of the known deposits of (say) platinum, even if platinum represented
only (say) a tenth of a percent of the total value of all mined minerals.
At a slight tangent, have you read _The Dogs of War_? It's a thriller
whose plot centers on a discovery of large deposits, I think of platinum
but am not sure, in an African country. Also a good--and, in its own
way, moral--book.
Jacey Bedford
Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> writes
novel The Mission Song.
Bob Throllop
wrote:
> [...] they bring the metal from a place called Dub."
> His Majesty smiled.
> "Then we will send some units of the Imperial Navy to Dub and see
> what is going on. Gentlemen and ladies, you may withdraw."
> Bowing, the team shuffled backwards out of the presence. Once clear
> of the outer doors they relaxed.
> "Well," said one, expressing the general feelings of relief, "that
> went OK. But I'd not like to be old Simonides when the Fleet catches up
> with him."
I'm concerned with the way this story is going--I have the uneasy
feeling that it may start to get silly.
Julian Flood
>
> I'm concerned with the way this story is going--I have the uneasy
> feeling that it may start to get silly.
Cps 1 & 3 are essentially a short story I sold to Interzone. Children of
a Greater God. The novel grew into a celebration of various ways of
trying to live forever. Knotting the various time-lines together was tricky.
> SYNOPSIS
>
> Jinks Hammer is a comic, failing on stage until, in desperation,
he discovers that committing hara kiri makes the audience laugh. As he
dies, he is offered the chance of a job by Sonja D., owner of Rosie's
Bar, the best nightclub in Night City. He is carted off by robots to
Megahotel -- almost the worst of the resurrection hotels -- where he is
broken down, rebuilt and regrown for the next night, with his memories
being stored in the Hendry Anomaly, a vast tantalum deposit which acts
like the artificially built holostores which form the basis for robotic
intelligence. []
> For decades, Dub has been screened off from The Empire of Known
Space, which presents a major problem to the two owners of the Night
City tantalum mine, Andromeda and Nepho Simonides. []
> Andromeda Simonides has solved the problems of interstellar
distance –- there is no faster-than-light travel and the best that can
be managed using fusion-powered Casimir drives is ultra-high sub-light
speeds -– by having herself adapted for cold sleep, a process which
involves extremely slow and painful dehydration. In unconscious
resistance to this, she has eaten herself up to enormous size, her bulk
enabling her to survive days without water while increasing the pain of
the process. Andromeda is in orbit around Dub, trying to pierce the screen.
> Nepho Simonides uses high light speeds and relativistic time
dilation a []
> Alexander IV has been kept alive by medical means but he is soon to
die, and the approach of death increases his desire for some sort of
immortality. His administrative planet is in orbit in a system which
also contains the Worm, a spinning black hole, and his initial plan is
to send his body and tomb into the Worm and hence into the future. []
> In his second attempt at comedy, Jinks uses an underground
technology, disruptors, to kill two fellow performers. The audience is
only mildly amused as they think that day will come and everyone will be
rebuilt, not knowing that the disruptors destroy every cell, leaving
nothing for the resurrection machines to regrow. Jinks's stooges are not
just dead, they are dead dead, and their interminable lives of pain and
death and rebirth are over. When this becomes apparent, Jinks becomes a
hero, admired by the audience as someone who can end their appalling
condition.
> The lives of all the protagonists converge on Dub. Alexander
assembles a fleet and travels [] Nepho, who sees the mine as his only
chance to reach an accommodation with the Emperor, is also in the
system. Hauser is already melded with the Hendry Anomaly which, holding
as it does all the memories of the tortured inhabitants, increases his
feelings of compassion. The resultant enhanced meld, the Dub Child,
seizes control of the Empire's cargo fleet: []
[]
closing it to begin a new cycle. The only humans to outlast time, they
watch as they smash into the last galaxy, re-igniting the Big Bang*.
> #
> Time begins again.
Silly compared to what?
JF
*Eat yer heart out, Amalfi.
Brian M. Scott
<jul...@ooopsfloodsclimbers.co.uk> wrote in
<news:13sodc8...@corp.supernews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> The resultant enhanced meld, the Dub Child, seizes
> control of the Empire's cargo fleet: [] [] closing it to
> begin a new cycle. The only humans to outlast time, they
> watch as they smash into the last galaxy, re-igniting the
> Big Bang*.
> > #
> > Time begins again.
See, this is what happens when you put Dickson on the big
screen in French: the Dub Child cycle.
[...]
> *Eat yer heart out, Amalfi.
Sounds like they could take lessons from the crew of the
Leonora Christine.
Brian
Bob Throllop
> So back to platinum...
>
> According to Wikipedia:
> Platinum is an extremely rare metal, occurring as only 0.003 ppb in the
> Earth's crust. Retailers claim supply estimates of this fine metal,
> being 30 times rarer than gold, that if all the world's platinum
> reservoirs were poured into one Olympic size swimming pool, it would be
> scarcely deep enough to cover your ankles. Gold would fill more than
> three such pools.
One other thing to remember...even a rare element exists in very large
quantities when you consider stellar distances and planetary masses.
The Earth masses 6x10^27 grams; at one part per billion that would
make 6 quadrillion kg of platinum. If even a little fraction of that
was concentrated and accessible at the surface, you'd have all the
platinum your miners could ever want. So in a sense, it's not your
handwavium that's rare; it's the planetological processes that put it
where it's useful which are rare.
Damien Sullivan
>One other thing to remember...even a rare element exists in very large
>quantities when you consider stellar distances and planetary masses.
>The Earth masses 6x10^27 grams; at one part per billion that would
>make 6 quadrillion kg of platinum. If even a little fraction of that
>was concentrated and accessible at the surface, you'd have all the
>platinum your miners could ever want. So in a sense, it's not your
That depends on the size of the economy. An industry capable of making
something useful out of Venus might be able to find uses for all that
platinum.
-xx- Damien X-)
Charles...@gmail.com
> My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
> platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
> a lot of practical industrial applications.
I don't know if this has been suggested elsewhere in the thread (I
haven't read the whole thing) but perhaps if platinum isn't rare
enough in solar system bodies (as has been suggested) maybe we just
aren't thinking on a grand enough scale. If you need more than traces
of the stuff for your application (say several (or more) cubic meters
of the stuff for your "jump-cores") or if say that that platinum is
actually destroyed in the process of use (i.e. the core is "exhausted"
after a jump, say the platinum is rendered into lead or something, or
made radioactive and thus useless, or simply disappears to another
dimension) that may make the material useful enough to fight over. Of
the two options I think that making the Platinum an expendable
resource is the better of the two options, since you can set whatever
rate of use you need to and people always need to find new sources
rather than recycle what they have. That makes it a more "oil-like"
resource.
Now the problem is if you put deposits of platinum in that significant
a density (to exceed asteroidal mining) on the surface of the planet,
what does that mean of the composition of the planet? Is it lousy with
other heavy metals too? Most heavy metals are bad for us humans by the
way.
David Friedman
<e1817208-9e94-49e6...@d62g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
Charles...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Mar 1, 11:13 am, Jacey Bedford <lookin...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
> > My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
> > platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
> > a lot of practical industrial applications.
>
> I don't know if this has been suggested elsewhere in the thread (I
> haven't read the whole thing) but perhaps if platinum isn't rare
> enough in solar system bodies (as has been suggested) maybe we just
> aren't thinking on a grand enough scale. If you need more than traces
> of the stuff for your application (say several (or more) cubic meters
> of the stuff for your "jump-cores") or if say that that platinum is
> actually destroyed in the process of use (i.e. the core is "exhausted"
> after a jump, say the platinum is rendered into lead or something, or
> made radioactive and thus useless, or simply disappears to another
> dimension) that may make the material useful enough to fight over.
That's a clever idea that hadn't occurred to me.
For another possibility ... . Suppose your Handwavium is a particular
rare isotope of a known element?
Charles...@gmail.com
wrote:
> In article
> <e1817208-9e94-49e6-97bf-3e15351a0...@d62g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
> CharlesRCap...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Mar 1, 11:13 am, Jacey Bedford <lookin...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> > > My handwavium was an invented mineral, but - reading up - what about
> > > platinum? Could I substitute platinum for handwavium? It's rare and has
> > > a lot of practical industrial applications.
>> [snip]... or if say that that platinum is
> > actually destroyed in the process of use (i.e. the core is "exhausted"
> > after a jump, say the platinum is rendered into lead or something, or
> > made radioactive and thus useless, or simply disappears to another
> > dimension) that may make the material useful enough to fight over.
> That's a clever idea that hadn't occurred to me.
I had written a long post comparing the market for finished goods in
virtual economies to the market for raw materials in a space based
future economy, but decided to cut it since I think most people here
would grasp the simple laws of supply and demand that govern it.
Basically, there is always more demand for consumable goods than
durable goods.
The conclusion though is pertinent: There is in general, an unlimited
amount of raw materials in a virtual economy while the real universe
has a large but finite amount of handwavium. (probably) No matter how
much you mine out, eventually you will need more. So depending on how
you decide to set up the rules in your story you can make the
situation as dire as you want. Yes, platinum can be worth killing an
entire planet over if you set it up right. So yes, platinum can be
handwavium. So can iron, silicon, or hydrogen if you want to get crazy
about it. However platinum satisfies the particulars of this type of
handwavium without having to stretch believability.
Chris Dollin
> *Eat yer heart out, Amalfi.
"Creation began."
--
Far-Fetched Hedgehog
"Who do you serve, and who do you trust?" /Crusade/
Julian Flood
> Julian Flood wrote:
>
>> *Eat yer heart out, Amalfi.
>
> "Creation began."
>
The fading face suddenly grinned. "Pretty good, don't you think? Pretty
good for a monkey just down from the trees."
The last words trailed away, leaving nothing behind.
In silence they watched the starbow growing above them until the
vast circle that was everything filled the sky from horizon to horizon.
"Not long now."
"No. It's been... well, not fun, more interesting."
"I'm glad you're here, Jinksie. It's best to be together at a time
like this."
"Pretty lonely even so. Everyone we knew, everything is gone,
billions of years into the past, millions more years away at every tick."
"And because of us it's not all pointless."
"Not a bad epitaph: 'they gave meaning to life'."
#
The sky blazed with huge light, growing impossibly quickly, filling
everything. The hurtling mass smashed into the last and greatest galaxy.
Stars swirled in its wake, the structure of the spiral tearing. Gas
clouds shocked into motion formed new stars, stars that flickered into
existence and out again in just a few billion years. []
#
Faster and faster, tighter and tighter, the geometry closes in on
itself, then tighter still. Matter dissolves into plasma, []
First there is heat, nothing but smooth heat, in a bubble expanding
at the local speed of light. Not quite smooth. Two discontinuities
disturb the featureless structure, produce ripples. []
the symmetry. Time and change are born. The first stars begin to form.
The cycle begins again.
#
Not bad at all.
Interesting, the switch from past to present: I do it in my sleep.
JF