Enclosure is coming this year, in late 2114. Are you and your loved ones prepared? PSTU 3 has all the latest news and coverage on pre-Enclosure events. Stay tuned here for important news as it happens. [more info]
(Cambridge, MA) As the mercury spikes and rearranges the planet’s ecosystems, scientists are increasingly focused on the one solution they say can save mankind: biodomes that insulate humans from the collapsing climate and create habitable bubbles of life. There’s just one problem: there is no material simultaneously light and strong enough to cover city-sized areas.
That may be changing, according to Emily Bishop, lead researcher at the Drenski Polymer Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Have you ever wondered why there are no giant crabs?” Bishop said, illustrating the problem on a three-dimensional holofield. “It’s because the tensile strength required for larger creatures would make them impossible to use.” At this point, an amusing image of a flailing crab, unable to lift itself from off the sea floor, appeared on the holofield. The assembled team of professors and postdocs all chuckled. “You see, the strength-to-density ratio is just too high for him to move.”
Bishop’s team may have found the solution in an unlikely source: spider webs. It turns out that a spider’s web is just an organic form of polymer with a very unusual structure. It gives spider webs a strength-to-density ratio (STDR) of 150 to 1, almost exactly what she believes will be required to make polymer shields that could conceivably cover a city. (By comparison, steel has an STDR of 32:1.)
It has completely changed the way of thinking around the lab. Until the discovery, Bishop’s team had been attempting to synthesize material using the well-worn method of polymerizing chains of monomers in preexisting combinations. Using this technique, they had refined the STDR well past steel, but far short of their ultimate goal. They were still years out from being able to produce reliable shields.
Now all they have to do is figure out how to replicate the molecular pattern to form a plane while retaining its STDR, a task Bishop is confident is not far off. She wouldn’t offer a hard prediction, but said it probably looked more like months, rather than years. “We,” she said at the end of her presentation, “will be the giant crab that can stand up.”
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