Soot. Graphite. Diamond. They're all pure carbon. The sixth element in the periodic table can take forms cheap or dear, opaque or glassy, slick or sticky, pliable or unyielding. A compressed type of carbon, the aggregated diamond nanorod is the hardest material the human race has ever made.
This impervious stuff is a variant on the buckyball, a soccer ball-shaped arrangement of carbon atoms that was Nobel Prize fodder in 1996. The spherical molecule, also known as buckminsterfullerene, led to the buckytube, carbon cunningly woven into a hollow pipe. Buckyétubes are voodoo: They have more uses than duct tape. They're ultradurable, superéstiff, fireproof, and stronger than steel at one-sixth its weight. They can insulate, dissipate heat, even glow. You can dope them like silicon to make a semiéconductor. Because they're hollow, you can stuff them with payload molecules like cannelloni with ricotta. Consequently, researchers expect buckytubes to find practical use in fuel cells, aircraft, inks, paints, durable coatings, abrasives, lubricants, glass, cables, circuits, circuit boards, and an increasing range of ever more diverse uses.
So why aren't the shelves at your local Wal-Mart overflowing with newfangled buckytube-based products? The tiny things are easy enough to manufacture; the problem is assembling the molecular pipes into human-scale structures. The usual process snarls on long buckytubes - precisely the ones you want if you care about strength or conductivity.
Recently, though, buckytubes edged closer to prime time. A US-Australian research team has invented a way to assemble them at the rate of a trillion per minute. At the University of Texas, Dallas, professor Ray Baughman is growing buckytube forests by vapor deposition, then gathering them into a strip of fiber held together by van der Waals forces. Baughman figured out how to arrange his forests so the molecular attraction between buckytubes automatically binds them into high-performance materials. Consequently, his process is amazingly fast and simple. Just grab the tubes and start pulling, and they self-assemble. That means two new things under the sun: buckyribbon and buckyéyarn. These materials, which are still lab curiosities but ripe for investment capital, are stronger and lighter than their nearest rivals, Kevlar and Kapton, the previous champs of top-end ultraplastics.
When the news broke, the immediate response of the ever-visionary nanotech community was to point out that buckyéribbon is ideal for a space elevator to haul equipment and supplies from Earth to a platform in geosynchronous orbit, 22,000 miles due up. As tantalizing as a celestial dumbwaiter is, however, it's merely a glamour app. The ability to assemble buckytubes at industrial speeds and in industrial quantities changes everything we know about manufacturing.
Imagine lightweight, fireproof buildings that laugh merrily at Category 5s and Richter 8s. Imagine levees as thin as Saran Wrap but impervious to surges. Imagine 100 percent carbon computers running on 100 percent carbon solar cells. Buckytubes might serve the transformative role for the 21st century that steel did for the 19th and plastic for the 20th.
It gets weirder. Cheap, chopped-up buckyribbon or buckyyarn would be the ideal feedstock for computerized fabricators. Today's fabs make objects directly from digital plans, one lamiénated layer at a time. Why not layers of modified buckytubes? Such fabricators could make durable objects with highly tunable physical properties. If the tubes were loosely packed, the output would be light and flexible; if they were rigid and densely tangled, the resulting objects could scratch pig iron. You'd never need an assembly line again.
Of course, there's a problem with Stuff of the Future: As the clock ticks, it inevitably becomes the Stuff of the Past. That means facing the prospect of buckyjunk. Buckyjunk won't rot. Nothing will eat it. Nobody knows how to recycle it or retrieve it once it's scattered throughout the biosphere. Buckyribbon has the potential to become a cornucopia of riches, replacing a host of previous materials - but if it becomes all things to all people, it's likely to become the 21st-century equivalent of plastic bottles in the gutter, broken glass on the beach, torn asbestos in your lungs, and maybe dioxin and PCBs, all at once with a half-life that would impress plutonium.
We survived the Industrial Age, and the Silicon Age is in full effect. The best time to prepare for the Carbon Age is now.
Email bruces@well.com.POSTS
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Dawn of the Carbon Age
