From the Book of Sand

experiencing the sand. I like the feeling of walking on a beach and feeling it, you know, move beneath my toes, getting the different consistencies of sand. I like digging in the sand. But I also know plenty of people who are like an absolute no to beach time because they just don't like sand. I mean, Star Wars memes aside, They just they just don't like it.

I love the feeling. Most of what I do at the beach when I go is just like walk around and feel the sand.

I'm watching things I'm thinking about. I think one of the big ones that everyone's probably thinking of is, of course, sand as the infinite, you know, uncountable grains of sand and deserts that stretch beyond sight or on beaches that just you know, vanish into the ocean unseen. I think of sand through the hour glass. I think of the excellent short story The Book of Sand from Hory Lewis

Borges about a tone of infinite random numbered pages. So anytime you you open the book, you'll find different numbers, and they might be it might be just a small number, colossal number. I think at one point it's like a number to the ninth power that the reader finds. And and then the script itself is written in some language that he can't decipher, and sometimes with a crude image, but it is infinite, and you'll never find the same

page twice. And he fears that if he burns the book, it will an infinite book will burn infinitely and just you know, cloak the world and smoke smoke. Yeah, so you know, I think about stuff like that.

anchor again. But yeah, it describes like trying to get to the first page and it's impossible because pages just keep multiplying towards the covers. You know, it's gotten an epigraph to a poem by George Herbert that refers to the idea of ropes of sand, you know, a common metaphor for something that is like unstable or not substantial.

But the other metaphor with sand in the story is like you're saying the idea of the infinite, that sands are infinite, and therefore you know they could they could just multiply forever, like the pages of this book. The funny thing is, of course, grains of sand are not actually infinite. Grains of sand are I perfectly finite. That is a countable thing. It's not practically accountable by human beings,

but in theory is countable. And in fact, you know, mathematically speaking, any finite number is infinitely small than infinity. So the number of grains of sand in the universe is infinitely less than an actual infinity.

not all sand is the same. Some of the things we call sand, especially when we get off of our planet, you get into various discussions about is.

it's almost like a clay that you can mold. And then other times the bits of like shell in the sand that it's so like coarse and rough that you just like scrape your hands up digging in it, you know, but you can't stop because it's what you do at the beach. Likewise, digging in the sand, you quickly often realize, well, this is this is a thing, this is a world that creatures live in as well. You know, you might

encounter things like periwinkles or sand hoppers. Sand fleas whatever you want to call them, or of course the mighty sand crabs darting in and out of their little layers, and then yeah, and then just back to sand castles

as well. It's kind of like a very early experiment with the idea of what large scale things can I make out of the smallest visible pieces, you know, so you're not really you know, I'm dealing with things in an atomic level obviously, but especially as a child, like the sand seems like the boundary of smallness, and it's like, you bring these together, you make a clump, you make

a ball that becomes a tower. Towers are bridged together, becomes a castle, and yeah, I think there's there's something insightful there, Like we begin to sort of gaze into these mysteries of sand at an early age. All right, So for the majority of the section I'm taking in this episode, I wanted to talk about a couple of ideas from science fiction concerning sand. And these are little ideas that are in neither in either neither case or

they particularly key to the work. You could take them out of each work and it would it would be fine. But they've always stuck in my mind because they were neat uses of sand, and so I'm kind of using those as a place to jump off to briefly talk about some other mostly space related topics, but also some kind of like military world and infrastructure type topics.

hate vampires in this book. Armor, however, is more in keeping with like your Starship Troopers sort of world where it's humans in power armor, like crazy powerful power armor, and they're battling insect aliens on the surface of a distant desert world called Bansheet. And there are a lot of interests twist and turns in this, and the writing's really bombastic, and you know, you really feel the action.

But at one point, the human faction here with their power armored soldiers, they use a large high tech, you know, sci fi machine and a sand clotter called a Siliconite eighteen, and they use this this combination to suck sand in through the front of this machine and then it like leaves behind it essentially prints a trail of five meter tall, perfectly smooth stone wall to fortify their makeshift base out on this desert world.

add like additional in the field protection against ballistics. So I was reading a bit more about this out like why are sandbags good for this twenty sixteen study from chin at all from the National University of Singapore, and this was published by ASM International, and they conducted a study and in the study pointed out that, yeah, of course sand has been used in fortifications for a long time,

and we've known that it's great at absorbing energy. But they looked into it a little bit more and they found that sand can absorb more than eighty five percent of the energy exerted against it, and its resistance actually increases with the speed of the projectile, even at high velocities.

So they experimented by firing various projectiles at silica sand blocks, and one of the really interesting things they point out is that when a projectile hits a block of compacted sand, such as I believe like in a compacted military sand bag or a hesco bastion, which is a collapsible wire mesh container that then gets filled up with sand or soil or gravel. But the extreme frictional force of the sand particles against the projectile passing through it can potentially

break that projectile into pieces. So think to your childhood, perhaps if you were a beach going child digging in the sand and eventually feeling your hands becoming raw from all those sand particles, you know, because it's sand. Now, imagine a projectile passing through compacted sand and high speed and the friction of that. It's pretty fascinating like that this could essentially destroy the projectile as it passes through.

of the future. We think about things like power armor and suits and steel and plate. Powerful plates are energy, yeah, or plastic plastic steel, you know, some sort of crazy plastic that's as strong as steel. But at the end of the day, there's a strong case to be made like that we should not forget sand, because sand again is just an amazing you know, absorbent substance for these sorts of projectiles and the sorts of this sort of energy.

of the standard frim kit. You know, the frimekit is the thing, like you know, it's hidden away for Paul and his mother, and you know, then they have to use it on their own surviving out in the sands of Aracus.

presumably has other purposes. I think it's used slightly differently in a later book, but I'm assuming you could also use it to maybe blast the sand off of your feet, And it seemingly involves binding sand grains together with an electromagnetic charge.

from solar panels. Because you know, you have a bunch of sand accumulate, you know, even in just little bits of it on solar panels, that's going to get in the way of how effective they are. So this technology exerts an electrostatic force to remove sand from that screen. Okay, So in a sense, yeah, there's a connection to be made between these two different technologies.

printing out fortresses is on Banshee. There are actually a number of proposals to do a certain amount of manipulation of the regulith on our moon as well as on Mars. The lunar regulith isn't quite sand by many definitions. It's sometimes referred to as such, and sometimes it's called soil, though plenty of people will point out, well, it's not soil.

Like it's not just a matter of like well them up to the Moon or send them to Mars with just a bag of mix that you buy at the store. You're still dealing with something that would be difficult to carry out, especially in such an environment. And you know, essentially in some of these cases might have to be like three D printed as well. But it's a It means that you wouldn't have to bring everything as a

module up from Earth and then send it over. You could create some amount of your infrastructure, you know, foundations, you know, even whole buildings or tunnel systems by transforming you know, the sand if you will, that you have

there into some sort of concrete, AstroCrete or lunar crete substance. Now, this next example is fascinating because it also it makes perfect sense once it's rolled out, but it also feels like even more sci fi than some of these cases, Like it sounds like a little more grim dark than than anything that is actually rolled out in the book Armor,

but it's really cool. So AstroCrete, as proposed by scientists from the University of Manchester, this calls for the use of human urea and other excretions to strengthen the regalith concrete, essentially making a kind of biocomposite out of it, and is plenty of science has bricks PP bricks. But as I think, one of the main things that the headlines and even the authors of the proponents of this plan, the way that they put it is blood, saying like

this would be like the blood of astronauts. So there's a twenty twenty one study here published in Materials Today Bio and the title is Blood, Sweat and Tears Extraterrestrial regalith Biocomposits with in vivo Binders by Roberts at All And yeah, they get into it and discuss how a protein from human blood, the proteins from human blood can form this biocomposite material with the moon, the Moon's dust or the Mars dust, you know, the sand of either world,

if you will, And that the compressive strength of the biocomposite materials is ultimately on par with concrete and by incorporating incorporating urea from urine, they can actually increase the compressive strength by over three hundred percent. So there's power EMPP bricks, blood, MPP bricks, blood and MPP bricks. Yeah, and this would be something that would be potentially then three D printed on site, so something actually not unlike the wall printers in the novel Armor at least in spirit.

And one thing that they do stress and this is, you know, you get into the logistics of this, you'd have to have your astronauts essentially continuously donating plasma, you know, on top of their waste products, which are going to have to shed anyway, but donating plasma for the purposes of them later three D printing these bricks.

have to. Basically, their point is like you don't want to in any way incapacitate or decrease the effectiveness of your astronauts, while at the same time, you know, putting them on drip a little bit in order to build your bricks in the future.

and expect to easily find something exactly like Earth. So it's still very extreme. It's very cold, it has ice like rocks and possible believe volcanoes that spout liquid water. It's it's a rough place if we were to imagine ourselves physically being there. It's the second largest moon in our Solar system, trailing the Jovian moon of Ganymede. It's larger than both Earth's moon and the planet mercury, and it does have sand.

looking like coffee grounds. Interesting, So again, you know, it feels very doom metal, you know, black deserts of weird sand. And I included an image here in our notes, Joe, maybe we can even splash this up for video to see, since it's a NASA JPL image. But what I'm looking at here is an image of sand dunes on the moon of Titan. And this is detected via Cassini's radar.

really cool. But in twenty seventeen, Joshua Mendez, a granular dynamicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, proposed in a paper published in Nature Geoscience titled Electrification of Sand on Titan and its Influence on Sediment Transport that the sands might become electrically charged via the tribal electric effect. This is something we experience all the time, like say, when you have static electricity that causes packing peanuts to

clean to your fingers. You know, the grains of sand on Titan might do something similar in a very unique way for a number of reasons. So the sand grains on Titan there are fluffier than sand on Earth, and the gravity there is seven times weaker than our own, meaning that the sand particles can potentially stick together in

ways that we just do not see on Earth. So we have the same you know, the trivial electric effect is going to be in play here on Earth with sand, but we have a different gravity situation and different consistency

of our sand grains. But The headline grabbing take home here, as the researchers discuss, is that you could make a sand castle on Titan out of this crazy goth black sand and it might stay up for weeks without the need of or anything to It would just be the electric charge holding everything together.

we look at this example on Titan. We're like, oh, it's like we have here, except we're not going to have the same wind scenario on Titan to form them. This may be what's key to the formation of these dunes on Titan.

atmosphere does. And I remember the main hypothesis we looked at for that was a paper that was talking about sort of explosive gusts of gas that I think are related to volcanic activity on Io, essentially creating temporary transient winds even though though there's not really much of an atmosphere, right right, Yeah.

is the same. To make industrial glass with a high level of transparency, modern glass makers usually select high purity quartz sand, which consists of almost pure silicon dioxide or silica and some other additives, usually to aid in the manufacturing process, like they introduce stuff to lower the melting point of the silica and make it easier to produce or to produce desired characteristics in the final product. Is. One example of this is introducing boron to the glass

boron trioxide to make what's called borosilicate glass. This kind of glass has the benefit of being more resistant to thermal shock due to a low coefficient of thermal expansion. Rob And if you ever shattered something made of glass due to heat mismanagement of heat and.

and this can cause it to shatter. Borosilicate glass is better about this, which is why it is often used to make glass bake where it's not. They do also use sodaline glass to make glass bake bakeware, but borisilicate glass is less vulnerable to thermal shocks, though not invulnerable. I know people who have made baking you know, baking dishes made of glass designed for that purpose still explode

due to mismanagement of hot and cold. You don't want to like get a hot dish out of the oven, you know, you've just had it in a four hundred degree oven and then put it on like a puddle of cold water or oh, kettle or something that'll that's dangerous.

when lightning hits multiple kinds of substrate. It can form in clay or soil, or in solid rock, but the most common type of folgarite is made when lightning strikes sand, and for this reason you can often find folgiarites in beaches, on beaches or in the desert. So a common recognizable form of folgiarite is a partially buried, crusty looking tube.

But that's going to be hollow in the middle, and then on the inner surface it will be glassy but not usually smooth on the outside, so the outsides often look very rough and gnobbily. And I was thinking they look like a flute that orcs would play something of mordor technology about them, or like that effect you get when you earn a candle many times in a row, and it creates this multi wax structure on the outside.

A lot of folgiarites look like that on the outside due to I guess some kind of melting and then partial melting around the outer surface, which is going to mean that like unmelted sand, grains end up adhering to it, so you get this rough outer surface. They vary in thickness in length, somewhere between one and several centimeters thick, and they sometimes have these branching or forked shapes, which indicates the path the lightning took as it was conducted

into the ground through the soil or the rock. Around the outside, again, they're usually covered with like rough sand particles or pebbles. And the cool thing is that extremely long fulgierites have been discovered, some sources say up to twenty meters in length, though that doesn't necessarily mean you can get it out intact, because as you can imagine, it's like hard to extract a whole delicate glass tube of that length from the ground intact.

on mountain summits. So this is a really cool thing. If you go to the top of a mountain, you might find rocks near the very top have these little places that are like a dark glassy patch on the rock. What is that This is the place where the mountain has formed a natural lightning rod is striking the rock and melting it and turning it into this glassy surface.

Another thing is that when you see good examples of these really forked or branching fulgiarites, sometimes they look like a cross between a ginger root and ET's hand, but more gray and crusty, usually also worth mentioning. Sometimes artificial fulgarites can be formed by artificial injections of extreme heat and energy into sand or rock, for example, by downed power lines or by arc welders. You can make human made folgiarites that way, and Charles Darwin actually talks at

length about fulgiarites in the Voyage of the Beagle. I was trying to remember when I was making the notes if this came up in our episode on ice Formations, because in that one we were talking about Darwin's travels in South America where he's going through a pass going through what is today Chile and Argentina. But I don't

think this came up. You remember in that passage he has these misadventures going through the very high mountain pass where they tried he and his companions try to boil potatoes, but the potatoes won't cook.

day Uruguay. But I'm just going to read from Darwin here where he describes this find quote in a broad band of sand hillocks which separate the Laguna de Potrero from the shores of the Plata. At the distance of a few miles from Maldonado, I found a group of those vitrified silicious tubes which are formed by lightning entering loose sand. These tubes resemble in every particular those from

drig In Cumberland described in the Geological Transactions. He's referring to these other things that have been in the literature. The sand hillocks of Maldonado, not being protected by vegetation, are constantly changing their position. From this cause. The tubes projected above the surface, and numerous fragments lying near showed that they had formerly been buried to a greater depth.

Four sets entered the sand perpendicularly. By working with my hands, I traced one of them two feet deep, and some fragments which evidently had belonged to the same tube. When added to the other part measured five feet three inches, the diameter of the whole tube was nearly equal, and therefore we must suppose that originally it extended to a much greater depth. These dimensions are, however, small compared to those of the tubes from drig one of which was

traced to a depth of not less than thirty feet. Again, those incredibly deep. So after this he goes on describing them a little bit more. He talks about how they're vitrified, glossy and smooth on the inside, and then rough on the outside. He compares the outside to a shriveled vegetable stalk,

or to the bark of an elm tree. And then also he goes on to talk about some experiments that have been conducted in Paris where they made artificial folgiarites by passing a very strong shock of galvanism into a finely powdered glass, and they managed to recreate some of this effect. And let's see, there's one funny passage here.

He says, when we hear that the strongest battery in Paris was used, and that its power on a substance of such easy fusibility as glass was to form tubes so diminutive, we must feel greatly astonished at the force of a shock of lightning, which, striking the sand in several places, has formed cylinders in one instance of at least thirty feet long and having an internal when not compressed, of full an inch and a half. And this in a material so extraordinarily refractory as quartz.

But I'm trying to imagine how interesting it would be to go out like he did and find these in the wild, protruding, like you said, in an area without much vegetation, and these sand hillocks where you're going out, and because the sand shifts and moves, these glass formations are now sticking up into the air, exposed, and you look at them, I'd imagine and say, like, what is is that some kind of stalk or cactus or something, and then you come upon it and realize it is glass?

Scientific Reports in twenty sixteen. I looked up the author is Matthew Passick is a geochemist who was at the time affiliated with the University of South Florida, and mark Hurst is an independent geologist. But the authors of this paper just start off by talking about how powerful lightning is, and of course you know Darwin makes the same observation.

He's looking at this fused glass and then saying like the most powerful battery in Paris could barely do you know anything close to this, or imagine how powerful lightning is to fuse all the sand in this way. The authors here talk about the total energy of a lightning strike might be up to ten to the nine jewels, and that lightning can heat the air around it to a temperature above thirty thousand kelvin. And of course, you know, we think of lightning and its vast discharge of energy

as primarily destructive. When you imagine what lightning can do, we think about things that it can hurt. You've got your standard bolt of vengeance from Jupiter. You know, it strikes a person dead, and then you know, the ancient Romans might look at that in awe and like build a shrine around that area, as a Jupiter has interacted with this place, best not mess with it.

mention it. One thing that has come up on the show before, of course, is the ecological importance of lightning in starting forest fires. Like some amount of forest fires are necessary, right like, there are life forms that depend on occasional or periodic forest fires. There are plant seeds that are only activated in the presence of fire or smoke, so you know, the life cycle of forests to some

degree depends on occasional forest fires. But also the authors here bring up something that I don't think i'd ever read about before, that lightning plays a small role in nitrogen fixation on Earth, which nitrogen fixation is a process that we absolutely depend on for life. You know, nitrogen is a key component of amino acids and proteins. Without it, we could not make DNA or RNA or the proteins that build our cells. Plants couldn't make chlorophyll. So all

life on Earth pins on nitrogen. And you might think, well, that's fine, because there's plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere, right like, nitrogen is the main constituent of our atmosphere, But the form of nitrogen available in our atmosphere is actually not biologically usable. Atmospheric nitrogen exists mostly in the form of two nitrogen atoms bonded together called di nitrogen, and these two atoms are held together by an extremely strong chemical bond, so in order to be usable to life,

you have to break that bond. Dihydrogen needs to be broken apart and converted into other compounds like nitrates which are nitrogen oxygen compounds, or converted into ammonia, which is made of nitrogen and hydrogen. So what can break apart

the di nitrogen the two nitrogen atoms. The vast majority of the world's natural nitrogen fixation is done by microorganisms, so you have single celled life forms like bacteria and archaea called diazotrophs, which have special enzymes called nitrogenases that are able to break the dinitrogen bonds and generate derivative compounds.

So one example of this is Rhizobia, which is a type of bacteria that exists symbiotically in legume roots like the roots of bean plants, and together with the plant, the bacterium and the plant are able to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia or in H three. So most natural nitrogen fixation happens like that, but some small amount of

the world's nitrogen fixation is also done by lightning. So lightning is hot enough to break apart dinitrogen in the atmosphere as it cuts a path to the ground, so it breaks apart the dinitrogen and makes it react with oxygen other elements in the atmosphere, primarily oxygen, and then these nitrogen oxygen compounds are carried down to the ground by rain and then they can be absorbed and used by plants in the form of nitrate. So lightning helps.

About a quarter of these strikes occur from a cloud to the ground, and hence the number of potential fulgiarit forming events is significant. With up to ten folgarites formed globally per second.

on there? That's rock fulgiarites. The mountain is a lightning rod and the peak is being going to be struck by lightning and it makes these glassy crusts in the rock.

rock or into the soil and the sand. And these fossilized signatures of thunderbolts can play an interesting role helping scientists understand past climate patterns by allowing them to date thunderstorms.

So how does that work well? The article explains, citing the work of Jonathan Castro, who's a volcanologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mines, that when naturally formed glasses like fulgiarite and others like obsidian are exposed to the outside air and to the elements, they slowly begin to

absorb water. And by measuring the amount of water they've absorbed, and I think how deeply it's been absorbed in theory, you should be able to measure the age of these glasses because they absorbed slowly, and so you can measure that, or at least you can measure not necessarily the age since they're formed, but the age since they've been exposed to the elements. So, for example, this has been considered as a method for dating artifacts like obsidian arrowheads. But

there's a problem. They figured out there are problems with the method because quote, many of these glasses come from volcanoes and already contain water from the time they were forged,

so that water interferes with this potential dating method. But Castro and colleagues reasoned that, unlike volcanically forged obsidian, fulgurites could be free of this problem because the extremely high energy of the lightning strike that creates the folgarite actually vaporizes any water that's hiding out in there because it's so hot, So fulurite last might be a more reliable

target for this moisture absorption based dating method. So Castro and colleagues tested this out by making artificial rock fulgurite by shocking samples of rock with an arc welder. Again, these artificial things, like when you have a down to

power line and it makes folgiurite in the sand. They shocked rock with an arc welder, reaching temperatures above ten thousand degrees celsius, which is what's required to make the folgiarite, and these temperatures did indeed boil away almost all of the moisture, meaning that the fulgarite should serve as a reliable time piece allowing you to measure the time since

its creation. And after this, the researchers decided to test the dating system on natural rock fulgurites, which they harvested from some volcanic mountain peaks in Oregon in the US state of Oregon, because again mountain peaks are these lightning rods. And some of the folgiarites they sampled turned out to be hundreds of years old, and they argued that this method could be used to date fulgarite glass with a

relatively high level of accuracy compared to other methods. Other methods you might have like measuring bombardment by cosmic rays. So in a paper published in twenty twenty in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Castro and co authors wrote that quote because the lightning strike is in and of itself so effective at devolatilizing melts in an instant. The resultant folgiarites are a unique earth material that record individual weather events i e. A thunderstorm and also longer

term paleo weather intervals. And they talk about one interesting example of how this could be used. It could reveal when in history particular rocks or mountaintops became exposed and thus vulnerable to lightning strikes, for example, to identify wind glaciers began to retreat from specific areas with a high degree of precision.

on the part that I referenced earlier. But this makes me wonder if there's an example in that book, maybe examples even in Dune, or certainly any book where you have any fictional setting where you have an interaction of some sort of energy weapon or dragon breath or Godzilla breath, where you could potentially have like fulgar right scar of the battle, you know, like I'm imagining like there was some sort of interaction here, we had last guns, you know,

going off, or some sort of energy weapons, and then later it could almost leave like a forest of fulgar rite columns from where those like those missed laser beams or what have you, impacted the sand and then the rest of the sand blew away.

this is reference towards reference. Again, it might actually be referenced elsewhere in Herbert's Riding or in any of the sources we've mentioned already, But it seems like there's some some great potential there for fulgar ride battle scars.

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