What if arenak was for real?

Cafe Society
1

In E. E. “Doc” Smith’s epic Space Opera novel The Skylark of Space (1928), he describes a substance called arenak. It’s a transparent metal 500 times stronger and harder than the strongest and hardest steel. However, it’s only like this when it’s “finished” – it’s opaque and relatively soft when its base material, or “matrix,” is first mixed. One passage in chapter 19 describes a re-building of the hero’s spherical spaceship hull out of arenak:

We can assume that this substance is about the same density as steel (8 grams per cubic centimeter), does not rust, has a very high melting point, and would have about the same cost per pound as aluminum. What would the social and technological impact be on society, if such a material really existed?

IMHO (which is why I posted this thread to IMHO), the following changes would happen:

[ul]
[li]Arenak buildings would be built in 1/5 to 1/50 of the time it takes to build a conventional building today. This would drive housing costs way down.[/li][li]A 20-story arenak building, even one not very well engineered, would be more stable than most earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, flood-proof, everything-else-proof 2-story buildings built today. This would drive up the availability of housing and thus drive the housing price down even further, even in densely populated urban areas.[/li][li]Since arenak is transparent, you wouldn’t have to decide where the windows would go before you built the place. And said windows would never chip or shatter.[/li][li]Cars would be super lightweight. Car engines would likewise be much much lighter. An arenak SUV would get about the same gas mileage as a steel motorcycle.[/li][li]Cars would also be practically indestructable. The danger of getting crushed to death inside your car would no longer exist. Car safety technology will shift to passenger cushioning and restraints, which are already pretty good.[/li][li]This increase in car safety will cause speed limits to rise dramatically. The number of accidents will go up, but accident fatalities, and the dollar amounts of property damage, will go down.[/li][li]Every part of a car made of arenak, including its engine, will last practically forever. It won’t be uncommon to see hundred-year-old arenak cars driving the streets, none of which requires much maintenance.[/li][li]Power tools, screws, nails, etc., would also be made of arenak. In fact, arenak saw blades might be the only way to bring down an arenak building.[/li][li]At 500 times harder than the strongest and hardest steel, this puts arenak above the hardness rating for diamonds. The market for industrial diamonds will disappear overnight.[/li][li]The steel, glass, and structural polymers markets will also disappear overnight.[/li][li]Airplanes, once considered the most fragile of contraptions, would become indestructable. Airplane crashes involving the deaths of most passengers would become a thing of the past. Military fighter planes would become a heck of a lot harder to shoot down.[/li][li]Not that military fighter planes would be very useful anymore. Tanks would be completely invincible, and even ordinary foot soldiers wearing light arenak body armor and helmets would be damn hard to kill.[/li][li]Motorcyclists, in states which currently have helmet laws, will be required to wear arenak helmets and body armor.[/li][li]Power and telephone outages due to weather and vandalism will be much rarer, since the lines and mounts will now have arenak factored into their construction.[/li][li]Kitchen knives will never need sharpening.[/li][li]Arenak baseball bats will be so light, baseball players can hit one out of the park every time.[/li][li]The rubber in the tires of an arenak bicycle will weigh more than its frame, handle bars, wheel rims, spokes, pedal assembly, and chain combined. Bicycling will become even more efficient than it is today. And their chains will not break any more.[/li][li]In fact, practically every everyday item would get lighter: brief cases, filing cabinet drawers, laptop computers, CRTs and TVs (whose picture tubes could be made of arenak instead of glass), stereos, stereo racks, bookshelves, you name it.[/li][li]Arenak coins would never wear down. Mint it once, and it’s in circulation forever.[/li][li]Arenak spacecraft and launch vehicles would reduce the cost of satellite launches SO much that cheap access to space will finally become a reality. Space colonization will not be far behind.[/li][li]Four words: Glass bottom blimp ride.[/li][/ul]

Any others?

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Oh, I know!
[ul]
[li]Because arenak does not burn, neither will houses made of arenak. The fear of neighborhoods burning down from out-of-control fires will become a thing of the past.[/li][/ul]

3

How about adamantium, mithril, or bullshitium?

4

Don’t forget the fuel-efficient dilithium crystals heating the arenak house while you’re at it.

5

He who lives in a fully transparent aranak house shouldn’t take pictures of the people next door who, because they also live in a fully transparent house, can be seen with no difficulty.

And have fun walking into walls that are 500 times harder than steel.

6

IIRC EE Doc Smith describes another similar material in the same series called Inosen which is used to construct the hulls of space vessels.

As for cars and crash hats made out of this stuff, they would be more dangerous than the current ones because both are designed to absorb impact by deforming, still at least crashed ones would be undamaged but the cleaning bill might be quite high.

Bicycles would be pretty awful to ride.There have been several composite materials used in recent years and the classic mistake that the new fresh-faced graduate frame builders make is to them far too stiff.Great for racing on tracks but crap for racing on roads. I’ve tried descending down hills at over 50mph and such frames transmit the imbalance of the rotating mass of the wheels all too well and cornering at speed on roads where it’s usually quite bumpy causes the bicycle to skip in tiny steps sideways.

Airplane crashes would still kill most of the passengers as the forces as decelaration would still be present and would liquidise them and if they recovered the aircraft would you want to fly in a seat in which the last occupant was a stain in the upholstery?

Miltary aircraft being indestructable ? In that case all my tanks would be made of the same stuff and my body armour- come and get some dude!!

Hundred year old cars eh? So what incentive would anyone have to replace a perfectly sound vehicle with a more environmentaly freindly one ? It also sounds boring to be stuck with the same designs for centuries, that is aside from the obvious economic implications.

Baseball bats - love to see what that does to the ball and the shockwave travelling up the handle would be interestng too.

Are arenak coins free from the ravages of inflation? This is the main reason that coins are withdrawn rather than wear.

:slight_smile:

7

General Product hulls, made by the Puppeteers.

8

casdave wrote:

Yep. And inoson was 4 times stronger than arenak, too.

But inoson had three disadvantages:
[ol]
[li]It was “higher tech,” which means a technological species (like us humans) would discover arenak first; that was why I suggested inserting arenak, not inoson, into the human experience as a kind of “first test.”[/li][li]It was not formed out of a putty-like material that could be molded in place into the shape you want to before hardening. And[/li][li]it wasn’t completely transparent, it was transparent purple. If arenak and inoson were both available, you’d still want to make you windows out of arenak.[/li][/ol]

Hmmm … good points. We’d have to have arenak cars and planes with crumple zones. Either that or really really good airbags.

However, even if arenak airplane crashes were still fatal, arenak planes would be much, much lighter. Their arenak engines would be lighter too. This would dramatically decrease the fuel costs and increase the range of your average airliner. Supersonic airliners might finally become economically feasible.

But if the wheel rims and spokes were made of arenak, they could be made so thin as to be practically weightless. Would to rotating mass of just the rubber be sufficient to cause the same problems?

This is similar to the problem you’d have with old arenak buildings. How do you go about tearing them down, when you want to build new ones? When no one wants an arenak car anymore, or its non-arenak parts (hoses etc.) wear out, and you send it to the junkyard, how do you go about crushing it into one of those little cubes? Can arenak be recycled? E. E. “Doc” Smith doesn’t give any indication that arenak can be de-hardened once the salt solution and electric current are applied, nor does he give a melting point.

Yow – forgot about the hurty hands! You’d almost certainly want to put a thick rubber grip around the handle to dampen the shock.

As far as what it does to the ball (besides transforming every solid hit into a home run, of course), it’ll probably damage the ball more severely than a hit from a wooden or aluminum bat. But then again, a single professional baseball game nowadays already goes through 60-odd baseballs, replacing them whenever they get scuffed.

Maybe in some of those other namby-pamby European countries, but good old-fashioned American coins have never been withdrawn from circulation due to currency devaluation. A 1909 penny can still be used as a penny. An 1869 nickel can still be used as a quarter, too, but you’d probably get some funny looks if you tried to spend it. True, the dimes, quarters, half dollars, and silver dollars minted before 1965 were withdrawn, but that was because they were specie (silver worth the value stamped on the coin), and we were moving away from specie money. The only non-specie reason U.S. coins are withdrawn from circulation is that after about 30 years they get so worn down as to be useless. With arenak coins, wear will no longer be an issue.

Incidentally, the permanence of arenak will also be a boon to future generations of archaeologists.

9

Surgoshan wrote:

We already have a solution for this. It’s called opaque house paint. But I like your glass house analogy. :wink:

Actually, E. E. “Doc” Smith did mention, somewhere in The Skylark of Space, that it was possible to make arenak opaque by adding coloring agents to the initial matrix material. But once you chose the color you could never change it, for obvious reasons.

I’d think it wouldn’t hurt my nose any more to than running into a brick wall. Relative to the human nose, both arenak and bricks fall into the “so hard it won’t give or bend” category.

10

Fraid it is the rubber that is the cause of all the problems on bicycle tyres.The wheels are built to be balanced and a tyre can be fitted during the final phase of construction but when that tyre wore out the replacement would not be exactly the same.

There is a more fundamental problem though and that is the laws of precession.

When a mass rotates around its dynamic axis if you try to twist it away from that position the rotation of the rest of the mass acts to produce a force at right angles to the one you just put in, and this is the force that leeps you upright whilst bicycling.The wheels you propose would be incredibly light.

The lighter the wheels are the livelier the machine is and it responds to deflecting bumps without the tendency to self correct, it will be very much more agile but there comes a practical limit where it is so unstable as to be unusable.
Most bicycle wheel rims also flex slightly which improves the grip of the tyre.This flex is about the only suspension that a bicycle has apart from the tyre sidewall.
Even on full suspension mountainbike the carbon fibre wheels which are very rigid do not perform IMHO as spoked wheels do.
I think you might get round some of the problems by adding balanced weights to the rims.

How are we going to recycle or get rid of the stuff, we have enough problems with plastics as it is.

11

casdave wrote:

’

I didn’t say every impact arenak had on society would be a good one…

(The “impact” of getting hit with an arenak baseball bat certainly wouldn’t do you any good. :wink: )

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Oh, another one I just though of:

Arenak roadways. They’d never get potholes in them, and could support trucks weighing hundreds of tons.

Just hope you don’t have to dig up the street to get at a buried pipe or power line!

13

Not really. In the war of Arms vs. Armor, Armor has always lost eventually.

Accelerate a projectile fast enough and it can penetrate armor much tougher than the projectile itself. If nothing else, you could make the shells themselves out of Arenak, and they should have no problem with destroying Arenak tanks.

< Trying to imagine the damage a Arenak shell would do to the average building if it was shoot out of a rail gun >

Another possibility: How useful is Arenak at blocking radiation? Microwaves? It’s transparent, so what are the possibilities of lasers? If nothing else, you could burn out the retinas of the tank drivers…

14

Burn retinas?? Lasers nowadays have enough power to destroy an ICBM over 500 km distance!

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Sealemon88 wrote:

Assuming the building was also made of arenak, you’d have to shoot it really fast. A railgun might be able to approach the speeds necessary for an arenak shell to bust through arenak armor, but practically nothing else would. Low speed arenak hitting arenak would just bounce off, just like a steel projectile would bounce off a steel wall.

It is possible to make arenak opaque, if you add colorizing compunds to the matrix before it hardens. And as far as microwaves go, hey, arenak is a metal, right? Surrounding yourself with arenak walls would be like sitting in a Faraday cage. (Of course, this would make it rather difficult to send or receive radio communications, unless you used the walls themselves as part of your antenna.)

BTW, are there any real-life metals that are transparent?

16

Ranma wrote:

Sure, if you’re willing to set off a small nuclear explosion to pump the laser optics.

(Of course, if you set off the nuke inside an arenak detonation chamber, you might be able to contain it completely. Or open one end and let the blast roar out in one direction only. Hmmm … nuclear cannons…)

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Tracer: This link shows that lasers have been used to successfully destroy missles.

Ranma: I was assuming that arenak would have an extremelly high melting point/voprization point. But now that you mention it, what effect would a high powered laser (Gamma, say) have?

Back to the kinetic debate: My knowlage of physics isn’t what it could be. I was basing my statements on the fact that an object with enough velocity can penetrate armor that is much harder than the projectile (Clothyard shaft vs. breastplate, 50 caliber bullet vs, steel plate or concrete, Sabbot ammo vs. cobolm armor). Hell, as shown [http://members.aol.com/tornadfoto/p-wdwd2.html"]here](
[url), wheat straw can penetrate a telephone pole if it has enough velocity.

I figure that if the shell and the target are made out of the same material, then it shouldn’t be that hard to accelerate the shell right through the target.

Besides, unless anerak has some sort of kenetic absorbtion property you could still disable a tank even if the shell didn’t penetrate (The occupents would probably be pasted ).

18

Sigh…

Did I mention that my spelling isn’t what it should be either?

19

Sealemon88 wrote:

… which it almost certainly does not. (Arenak is 500 times harder than the strongest and hardest steel, which implies that it would transmit kinetic energy to objects on the other side with practically zero absorption.)

Yep. As would the occupants of an arenak car in a car crash (even though the car would probably emerge without a scratch).

The existence of arenak vehicles – particularly arenak military vehicles – would dramatically accelerate the development of impact-reducing technology, e.g. air bags, safety belts, etc… One option might be to build separate outer and inner hulls out of arenak, and put a really good shock absorbing system in between.

20

Sorry for the necropost, but I’m a serious Doc Smith fan, and have been for half a century.

Arenak, while 500 times as strong as our best Earthly steel, was not 500 times as RIGID as steel. In fact, much of its strength comes from the property of flexing with the force to keep it from concentrating in a single point. Like our best steels, it will snap back to its original form when the stress flexing it reaches its peak and is distributed throughout the mass of the object struck. In that way, it was compared to rubber rather than metal. Don’t confuse strength with rigidity, the best swords and armor BEND when you use them, to keep them from breaking. Arenak does not crack when it bends, it spreads forces against it, and it snaps back, possibly returning the impact force to the object that imparted it. Perhaps the creator of “Vibranium” was inspired by Arenak. Certainly comic book creators were inspired by OTHER Doc Smith properties – such as DC’s Green Lantern Corps, taken practically whole cloth from Smith’s “Lensman” series. The “creative borrowing” (cough, ahem) was SO egregious that the only reason the Smith estate didn’t come down on them like a free planet gone inert, is because they gave the gesture of two GL characters, Arisia Rhab and Eddore of Tront.

Inoson wasn’t 4 times as strong as Arenak. It was “the absolute peak of strength and obduracy that could be obtained by a material substance”. You may be thinking of another Smithian synthetic metal, Dagal, the “water white” synthetic metal of the planet Urvania, that had invaded Osnome, beginning the plot of the second book of the Skylark series, Skylark Three. (Skylark Two was the Arenak-hulled rebuilt original Skylark of Space, built on Osnome. This is made clear at the end of Skylark Three, where it is mentioned that Skylark Two was in its own special berth. It was of great use in the third book, Skylark of Valeron.) I’m fairly sure (I’d have to look it up) that it was Dagal that was four times the strength of Arenak, not Inoson.

Seaton and Crane themselves wore suits of Arenak armor, automatically braced with attractors and repellors to keep from being shoved about by the force of an attack. Bullets would literally flatten themselves on the face shields of their armor, right before their eyes.

In Skylark Three, some of the disruption of the metals industry of Earth were being felt, household products starting to be seen made of Arenak or Dagal. Inoson was reserved for spaceships, and the industries that built them. In the fourth book, Skylark DuQuesne, a “gosh” moment was when the Jelmi, a race of humanity from a galaxy incredibly far from our own, had found and landed on Earth’s moon, to work on instrumentality to protect them from the leader of a race called the Llurdi, when they went back to their home galaxy to defeat the Llurdi and free their race from servitude. The Jelmi, to hide their presence on Earth’s moon, reduced their smaller ship that had brought them there to powder. It was a point of superlativity that the energy required to turn a huge starship into powder, the hull being made of Inoson. (It was considered inevitable that races sufficiently advanced to need Inoson would figure out how to make it, and it’s the same regardless of who made it.)

I’ve been reading Smith since I was 11. I have a copy of “The Universes of E. E. “Doc” Smith”, by Ron Ellik. It was published in 1966, and was as close to a complete concordance of the Skylark and Lensman universes. It didn’t include “The Galaxy Primes”, nor any of Smith’s other side works, more’s the pity. You can still get one on AbeBooks. Be warned, it’s expensive.

The main point I made this necropost for was that a new alloy was discovered some years ago, but the technology required to measure its strength did not exist until recently. It’s an equal-proportion alloy of Chromium, Cobalt, and Nickel. They call it “CrCoNi”, and was discovered to be 500 times as strong as some of our best steel. It has the odd property of getting STRONGER when exposed to extremely low temperatures. A difference between CrCoNi and Arenak is that CrCoNi is NOT transparent.

Metal Alloy Identified as the Toughest Material on Earth | Technology Networks.