December 6, 2013 • 30 mins
Why is the idea of an indestructible material so attractive? Is there actually such a thing? What are some materials that, while not indestructible, might have very special properties?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everybody, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says we are
living in a material world. I'm Joe McCormick, I'm Lauren Volgabon,
(00:22):
and our host Jonathan Strickland is outsick today because modern
medicine isn't that good yet. Oh We're we're working on it. Um.
I was just kidding. It's pretty good, getting better every
day we do, according to Dr you know McCoy from
Star Trek. We're we're all we're all pretty silly right now.
But yeah, well so he is out and we hope
(00:43):
he's feeling better soon. But we're going to take you
on a little brain journey with the two of us.
And today we wanted to talk about following up with
a recent video that Jonathan recorded about indestructible materials, right
because because this whole Thoor film series has come out,
and so we were thinking a lot about Uru, the
(01:05):
mystical material that Thor's hammer is made out of, which
is completely indestructible. I don't know how much you can
really think about Uru, but I get what you're saying
I don't know. I've known some nerds that would probably
disagree with you, um, that have thought long and hard.
But but yeah, so so what I got there? Hard?
Oh I didn't even mean to pun. This is going
to be I'm sorry, guys. I apologize accidental puns or
(01:27):
even worse than ones on purpose. Okay, Well, what's the concept.
It's a it's a hammer that's like super hard. You
can't miss smash a lot of stuff with it without
making it smash. Yeah, which which material scientists are actually
working on? I mean maybe not in the thor hammer
applications specifically that I'm personally aware of. If if this
research is being done, it's not being reported to me personally. Um.
(01:52):
But but but I mean, but that would be pretty cool, right,
having having material that that you can do a lot
of stuff too and it doesn't get hurt. Yeah. Um,
So if we're on a search for an indestructible material,
I want to think about for a second, like what
that would really mean, because in one sense, you can't
really have an indestructible material because material is made of atoms, right,
(02:16):
and we know that even atoms themselves can be destroyed. Yeah,
atoms can be destroyed as in converted into energy in
a nuclear reaction. Right, That's what you do when you
split an atom to create break the protons of the
nucleus apart from from the electrons in a you know,
if if if you're really trying hard, but that's difficult
a splitting the atom. Yeah. So I think what we
(02:39):
mean when we're talking about indestructible materials is a a
material structure on a scale that's meaningful to us that
doesn't I'm gonna use an Internet word here, that doesn't
fail structurally. So it's a it's it would never make
it onto the chemistry fail blog. Okay, yeah, I know
(03:00):
that makes sense. In terms of material science. When you're
talking about a a fail proof material, you can you
can talk about kind of three different categories. It's it's hardness,
which is going to be it's its resistance um to
to localized deformation a k A like scratching um. If
if you can poke it, scratch it, a braise it,
dent it um, then it's hardness is poor all right. Um.
(03:24):
Then you've got strength, which is the ability of a
material to withstand applied stress without fracture um without breaking right. So,
so within this category you've got like um tent sile strength,
which is pulling, and compressive strength, which is pushing. So
what we're talking about here is is yeah, like like
tearing or ripping or smooching on the other end of it. Okay,
(03:45):
you're not talking about being deformed, but about coming apart, right, right. So,
for for example, if you're talking about something really strong,
it would be um like like ceramics or metals, and
something really weak on on that scale would be something
like would oh okay that you know that that you
can can't you know ceramic You're not going to pull
(04:05):
on it and you're not going to shred it, but right,
And then that last category is going to be toughness,
which is um the the amount of energy and material
can absorb before it cracks or breaks or otherwise permanently deforms.
And that's how brittle an object is. So so going
back to like ceramics, ceramics are very strong but also
very brittle. Uh if you if you slack a hammer
(04:26):
at them, whether it's made of ub or not, it's
probably going to shatter into a billion pieces. Okay, So
it's not like rubber, right right, rubber is is also
very tough, but um, but not hard at all. It's
soft you can poke it and leave a dent and
uh and not extremely strong. At a certain point it'll
bust apart. Okay, So that's interesting. So we want to
(04:46):
talk about materials that are resilient in these different ways. Um,
But first of all, like do we really need this?
Like what would you actually use a material that's all
that hard for besides just a hammer? I mean, I
understand weapons and armor, but do we always have to
be so violent? Like can we use these in a
(05:07):
way that's that's nice. Well, going along with with armor,
I guess you could use it for stain resistant clothing
or stain proof clothing that's non violent and pretty cool.
Oh yeah, Actually, well lots of violence isn't caused by people, right,
So there's the violence that say an airplane with stands
when it's flying high speed against wind resistance. You could,
(05:28):
I guess build stronger airplane parts to like withstand all
that tension and what would you call it shaking? Yes, yeah?
Or um or or engine parts even if if you
if you make the plane engine out of parts that
are extremely strong, then you know, not having some some
part of an engine fail would be pretty good. Yeah, um,
(05:50):
you could think about I guess load bearing features too,
for building bridges and buildings and stuff like that. Yeah. Absolutely,
I if fewer bridge fail years over over the test
of time would be great. Yeah. Actually, a YouTube comment
or left a really cool comment on Jonathan's video, and
we we generally do have awesome YouTube commenters. But I'm
(06:11):
still personally a little bit just pleasantly shocked whenever someone
says something nice and not terrible YouTube. So so good
for good for you in particular, but but for thinking
viewers in general. Yeah, yeah, we love our people YouTube broadly.
You might be surprised if something nice happens. But yeah.
A commenter called the simulationist a little shout out there
(06:33):
on the video left a great suggestion. They said, what
about a sun probe? And I thought, oh wow, yeah,
by that, I assumed this person meant a solar probe, like,
you know, you're going to shoot into the body of
the Sun and send information back. Um, so that could
be really interesting. Now, that would be a certain specific
(06:54):
type of material resilience. It would need to survive super
high temperatures and gravity core, So I do want to
raise a question there. If we sent a probe straight
into the Sun, and that probe were built out of
some kind of magic material that meant it weren't destroyed,
I wonder if it would be able to transmit information
back to US UM because the Sun provides a lot
(07:16):
of radiation interference. Like even when you have a satellite
that's crossing across the sky, if when it's in transit
across the Sun, meaning you know, the Sun is right
behind it, we often have satellite outages because of the
interference caused by the Sun's radiation. So if something were
like going all the way into the Sun, I would
think that level of interference would be so strong it
(07:38):
would be hard to get any information back from it
at all. But sure, also I'm wondering, I'm wondering if
you could um broadcast out from inside a material that's indestructible.
That sounds like maybe you would run into problems. I
don't know, maybe, but still it's a cool idea, and
I like the way the person that Yeah, but let's
(07:59):
talk about some super strong or super hard or super
tough materials. What's out there, what's the best we got
Diamonds diamonds. Yeah, you always hear that, right, Diamonds they're
the strongest material, um, are they are? They not? Diamonds
are hard, meaning they they resist they have strong resistance
(08:23):
to indentation like we're talking about, so it's hard to
like scratch them. And so this is true that they're
very strong. I think for a long time people thought
they were the strongest material. Uh, turns out they're not.
Actually they're not even the hardest naturally occurring substance. Um
they once thought that. But I mean they're still pretty good.
We can use them for abrasive purposes, like diamond drill bits, right,
(08:49):
which are not made of pure diamond the way that's
a James Bond movie drill bit would would be made.
It just got diamond dust and an extremely extravagant drill.
I kind of kind of want that drill. I'm not
gonna lie the most lavish tool bench every Yeah it's
made of gold and you're just like drilling gold on
a Saturday for fun. Um No, So, but yeah, you
(09:11):
would have incorporated little pieces of diamonds to help make
it harder. Right, Because because although they may not be
the hardest naturally occurring substance. They're harder than many other things.
They had pretty much everything else. Yeah. So yeah, and
also you can you can like grind up diamond dust
and use that as like an abrasive paste. It's really powerful.
(09:33):
UM And actually funny little tidbit isn't totally related, but
I just couldn't resist. In case you all have never
heard of this, UM, there's at least one known exo
planet out there that may be made of diamond entirely
of diamond entirely. Not entirely, no, but but still a
significant significant portion of the planet may be made of diamonds.
(09:56):
It's can cree E. It's planet's about forty light years
away from this solar system and it's in the constellation
Cancer UM. And we don't know it's composition for sure,
but basically last year UM they looked at its transit
signature across the star in that solar system out there,
and based on that information, they deduced that it might
(10:18):
be a hard carbon planet, that it might a significant
amount of its structure might be pure diamond. Sweet, there's
the I. I just that just reminds me of this
Doctor Who episode where wherein they were stuck on a
diamond planet, and really terrifying things happened. It was very upsetting.
If they were on this planet would be terrifying because
it's like it's the hottest place ever just that there
(10:41):
ever was. I think, well that that would also not
be good uh less less good for resort stays. But
actually so that wouldn't Even if this planet were made
entirely of diamonds, it wouldn't be the hardest planet possible. Um. No,
you could make harder planets out of a couple of
other naturally occurring materials. Um. I'm going to refer to
the findings reported in a two thousand nine Physical Review
(11:04):
Letters paper called Harder than Diamond Superior indentation strength of
word site, boron nitride and lawnsdale light by Pan Sung
Jiang and Chin uh And that, yeah, that named a
couple of things that have been found in nature that
are actually harder than a diamond. And so word site
(11:25):
boron nitride and the molecule is born nitride. Word site
refers to the crystal structure of it, and that's formed
in volcanic eruptions. And apparently this stuff they found could
withstand eighteen percent more indentation stress than a diamond lawnsdale light.
Note how it just horribly Yeah, it doesn't unpleasant. These
(11:45):
names are tongue the way that diamond does. I mean. Also,
I guess there hasn't been entire industry selling me um
lawnsdalelight since I was a tiny child as a symbol
of hope for my romantic future. Yeah, Lonsdale eight is
basically it's a different form of diamond kind of it's
a hexagonally configured diamond. These hexagonal structures you're gonna see
(12:06):
are really important. But it's uh, it's found in tiny quantities,
I like in some meteorites sometimes, and it could withstand
fifty eight percent condentations dressed in diamonds. So these are
things you can find in nature, though admittedly in pretty
tiny quantities. All Right, you're not gonna just just stumble
across the whole rock of that. What if if you're
(12:27):
out for a walk or something. Yeah, Now, something you're
probably not going to find in nature is aggregated diamond
nano rods. Aggregated diamond nano rod sounds like an eighties
insult exact nano rod. Yeah, we're well, we're all nano
rods around here. But basically it's a It comes from carbon,
(12:48):
and a lot of these very resilient materials are made
of carbon um. But basically it's a way of processing
carbon high heat and pressure into this higher density diamond
form um and based. These things could also be really
useful in industrial settings like diamonds. Uh, they're a little
stronger and they could be used for machine ing or abrasives. Um.
(13:09):
They're basically like beefed up diamonds stuff. No, no, no,
that's that's cool, and that makes sense a lot of
what we're talking about because because carbon is is a
type of atom that can bond really easily with other stuff,
including itself, it can form into all different um allotropes
of of carbon, which is where you get you know,
(13:29):
the fact that that graphite is one of the softest
naturally occurring substances that we know and diamond is one
of the hardest, and they're both made of the same stuff,
just arranged slightly differently. So so that's so that's fascinating.
This is this is all good. Well, I wanted to
give one more shout out something that occurs in the
natural world, again, not indestructible, but spider silk, right, yeah,
(13:51):
i'd i'd read about that. Um it's being ridiculously tensile. Yeah,
it's it's got a high tensile strength, which is different. Um. Basically,
what that means is you can pull it like a
rope without it snapping, and you can even know it's
a thread thread thin. Yeah, incredibly high weight load bearing
on that. So and that just comes out of a
(14:12):
spider's butt. So that's pretty impressive, right. Yeah. Not many
things that are that strong are made that easily. UM.
For for example, graphing is another one of these allotropes
of well, okay, it's it's graphing is a is a
single layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in this
hexagonal matrix. Um. So, so it's a single atom thick
(14:32):
sheet of graphite. UM. I'm not buying it. That's super
hard right now, It's really it's really, it's really quite hard. Um. Uh.
You know, graphites a crystal form of carbon, and so
when you get this this atom thick sheet, um, it
can be six times lighter and a hundred times stronger
than steel of the same thickness. Um. It's it's just
(14:54):
the way that it does. UM. I mean, basically, since
it's a technically a two dimensional object, or as close
as we can get to to a two dimensional object
that we can still perceive. Since it's an atom thick um,
you would have to bust apart the atoms to really
get it to break, which is not that easy to do. Unfortunately,
it also comes I mean by by the time that
(15:16):
you've got graphine um. This this is what carbon nanotubes
are made of. Most of the time you're going to
roll it up into these into these couple atom thick
tubes of of awesome um that you can use to
do a lot of different stuff. I think carbon nanotubes
for me, they fit into the category of science magic
where it's like there are two main things. There's nanotechnology
(15:38):
and carbon nanotubes, and anytime you need magic to happen,
you just say, yeah, just put some carbon nanotubes in there.
It's one or the other. But but there may be
a good reason for that, because these things are pretty
dern magical. Yeah. And in addition to being that strong,
it's more conducive than copper. They can either emit or
absorb light depending on what you're having them do. Um.
(16:02):
One of my h they were okay, so so Graphing
was known about in theory for decades, but it was
never created in practice until around two thousand four. Assists
and researchers in a laboratory. Um, we're using scotch tape
like sellotape to to clean the surface of blocks of graphite.
And then all of a sudden they noticed they they
(16:23):
like pulled. They wanted to get it cleaner, and so
they were using the sticky stuff and then they pulled
it up and kind of noted that there was this
near translucent, very thin layers of graphite stuck to the
scotch tape. And they were like, oh, that's interesting. That's
the interesting parts. We were just throwing that away. You
put on your face to clean your pores. You've seen
(16:44):
those commercials, right, except it for graphic creates the hardest
substance on earth, right. Yeah, no, And this is a
legit scientific way of making sheets of graphing. Well, it's
a little bit thicker at that point. These days they're
using pretty precise, like heat scraping methods. I don't entirely
understand without looking at that a whole lot, but um,
(17:05):
but so okay, So, so you can use this kind
of stuff for I mean, the big one that everyone
is always excited about with graphine and carbon nanotubes is
space elevators, right, because you've you've got to make that
tether that so strong and so thin. Just a refresher
if you haven't listened to our space elevator episode. And
the idea is that you have a base on Earth
(17:27):
with a flexible tether running out into space to a
place in geo stationary orbit, and basically, um the two
forces are pulling, so gravity is pulling down on the tether,
and then the centrifugal force of spinning around with the
Earth is pulling up on the tether, getting it tout right,
and by both those forces pulling in the opposite directions,
it stays so that you can climb it with a
(17:49):
climbing vehicle. The problem is to make a tether like this,
it would have to be so strong it's just unthinkable,
all right, and the way that steel works, it would
have to be you know, like a you miles wide,
I think, in order to make it strong enough to
go that high. It's like something completely ridiculous, right, that
is just not practical in any way, um on on
(18:09):
a smaller scale, alright, So uh, typically speaking, your carbon nantitubes,
even in a really ideal lab environment, are only going
to be a few centimeters long. I think that researchers
just have made one that was like half a meter long,
and everyone is incredibly impressed by this. But researchers at
Rice University have created a UM a process called wet spinning,
(18:34):
which which kind of which kind of smooshes them together
and like like sort of dissolves them and then re
smoshes them in a very specific way that can form
this thread UM and then you can spin this threat
into spools and you can use it to for example,
both hang and power and LED lamp at the same time,
because because it's conducive and it's super strong and so
(18:56):
and so this is you know, that kind of process
I think is going to may be some day hopefully
lead us up to space elevators. But right now I'm
pretty impressed that they're hanging a lamp. That's pretty awesome, UM,
and elevators kind of like hanging lamp, a very large
geostationary lamp. Yeah yeah, sorry, please go ahead, no no, UM.
(19:17):
I was also going to say that, you know, people
talk about incorporating carbonana tubes into other materials like uh,
like like again the body of planes or cars. This
is going to It would make something that's very lightweight
but hypothetically very strong, which is good for for fuel
efficiency and all kinds of fancy stuff like that. Also,
(19:37):
since they're conducive, you could put them into stuff like
a like computer chips hypothetically and uh and make some
some really fancy stuff like that. Awesome. Yeah, I've actually
read about that being used in h microprocessors. But what's
the deal with carbine? Jonathan talked about it in the
video and he's not here to explain it to me,
(19:58):
all right. Carbine. Carbine is another allotrope of carbon more carbon. Specifically,
it is linear act alnic carbon I'm gonna go with
that pronunciation u uh, and it forms in a single
chain of atoms, the most successful form so far as pollens,
which are alternating single and triple atomic bonds in the
(20:21):
single chain. And since it's a single chain, it's sometimes
referred to as being a one dimensional object, as opposed
to the kind of two dimensional graphing plane, which is
not really um but it also doesn't I mean, okay,
so so people have kind of almost made it happen
in labs, but most of the time when they try
to create it in labs, it's sort of this black
(20:42):
goo at the bottom of a test tube that no
one can really do anything with. It mostly exists in
theory and as computer models because these things are just
just really hard to make and not superstable as of yet. Um.
But hypothetically the stuff could be twice as strong as
graphing in terms of tensile strength, and um three times stiffer,
like harder than diamond. So yeah, that's pretty good. Also,
(21:06):
when you twist it like ninety degrees from its normal state,
it could act as a magnetic semiconductor, so important stuff.
You know, it could be really lightweight and have a
huge surface area if you could, you know, create threads
of this and use those to create some kind of
three dimensional object, and therefore it could be amazing for
(21:26):
making like battery electrodes or chemical sensors, anything that you want.
Those those properties in space elevators. Again, space elevators, Yeah,
it's nice. The future is carbon related space elevators of
some kind. Well, so pretty much everything we've talked about
so far is carbon based. But I do you want
to talk about something with special properties that's not heard of,
(21:47):
super alloys. I have not to tell me about them,
super alloys, Okay. So basically they're they're alloy metals that
have good performance in extreme conditions. So you can think
about like nickel alloys and what they do. As they say,
it's strong at really really high heat, whereas something like steel, say,
might be weakened structurally by high heat. Yeah. These nickel
(22:10):
super alloys, you can heat them way up and they
still stay strong, and they also resist corrosion, and this
makes them ideal for stuff like gas turbine parts. So
it's really hot in there, they're not going to get
distorted or be more prone to breaking over time than
become brittle the way that right, normal metal might. Right,
So this would make them great, say in jet jet
(22:31):
engines for airplanes, or in like power generator hardware. Yeah. Um.
Also an interesting thing is that it was a nickel
alloy that Jonathan was talking about in the video when
he referred to the m I T scientists discovering the
self healing materials. Yeah yeah, yeah. So this was another
(22:52):
paper in Physical Review Letters published October. It was called
Healing Nano Cracks by disclinations but zoo and dim cowits.
And essentially what this showed was that nano cracks, so
really tiny fractures in the in the plane of the
metal would repair themselves without being compressed together. Um. And
(23:14):
so these like these little tiny crystal in structures within
the metal would would gloop back together without having to
be pushed into each other. And so so we're basically
talking about yeah kind of yeah Patrick nano scale. Yeah. Um,
hopefully less grumpy than him, because you know, he never
had that sense of humor like the the original Terminator
(23:37):
did he really he really never He never made any jokes.
He had just dour about everything killing all the time. Yeah.
Hopefully these crystal defects have you know, less interest in
the total destruction of the human race. Yeah, yeah, okay,
fingers crossed, Yeah, okay, So I want to I want
to talk about one more thing that. Um, the funny
(23:59):
thing you'll know this is that none of these that
we've talked about are actually indestructible, uh spoiler. We don't
know of any material that's actually indestructible in the way
that we talked about at the beginning, and that it's
impossible to cause it to fail structurally, right, But aren't
there basically a lot of of elements that we don't
(24:20):
really know the full scope of properties of. Yeah, this
is another thing I wanted to talk about. When we're
speaking about materials with special properties, you can pull up
the periodic table and you can look at it and say, hmm, okay,
well we're focusing a lot on this one square of it,
which is carbon. Or you can make molecules out of,
(24:40):
you know, combining different combining different stuff, and we're getting
pretty good at creating computer models of what that would
look like without ever having to actually smooth atoms together. Yeah,
but we've got nothing indestructible yet. But um, there's if
you go down to the bottom of the periodic table,
all these weird symbols like you you p U T
(25:03):
you know what is all that about. I have never
had any idea at all. After like Boron, I'm just like, yeah,
it gets boring after Boron. No, actually it doesn't. It
gets really interestingly Yeah, Okay, So I wanted to talk
about a little bit earlier this year, something that happened,
um was that a group of scientists confirmed the synthesis
(25:26):
of element one fifteen otherwise known as unnpenti um um.
That just that again pentium. Either way, it rolls off
the tongue much like those. It's a horrible name and
it's a temporary name. The way they come up with
names for what these are called are transuranic elements. There
are there are all these elements that are way up
(25:46):
higher than uranium, because uranium is the biggest element that
you're likely to find in nature. So yeah, you can
find hunks of uranium in the desert. You're never going
to find a hunk of unupenti um in the desert.
And and that's because of the the molecular are not molecular,
but the atomic structure, because because it's such a heavy
(26:07):
I mean that's that's a dred and fifteen protons and
in a single nucleus. Yeah, yeah, exactly um. And so
the bigger these nucle i get when you're making these
bigger elements, they tend to split apart really fast um.
And that's why you don't find them in nature. Obviously,
even if they'd been fused in nature, they wouldn't hang
around for very long. And by not very long, we're
(26:29):
talking about like like fractions of a second right. Um,
so how do we discover these new things? Well, we
actually create them. We create these higher level elements in
the lab by smashing together elements with lower atomic numbers
and hoping that they combine to produce this bigger atom.
(26:51):
So so like in a in a particle accelerator, this
kind of thing would be going on exactly right. Um. Yeah,
So they recently confirmed earlier scientists us in dubbed No
Russia and Lawrence Livermore had created element one um and
that was I think in two thousand three, but they
just now confirmed it that they recreated it and so
(27:11):
hopefully it's going to get a permanent name. Some of
these other ones don't have those weird like systematic names,
liken pentium, which actually just means one one five e
m um um, pretty clever. Yeah. But the cool thing
about all these is that, um, we don't know for
sure all of the properties of these elements until we
(27:32):
synthesize them. So if we could we we could create
some and get it to stabilize enough to hang out
for more than a few fractions of a second, then um,
then yeah, it might it might be able to do.
Who knows, Yeah, it might work, might have a technological application. Um,
this shows up in science fiction and there's actually there
(27:52):
was a UFO conspiracy theorist named Bob Lasar, and if
you read about him, I don't think so. Now. Yeah,
he claimed that he worked at air A fifty one
and that he worked on alien spacecraft. What he said
was that they used that their anti gravity fuel was
made of elopment one ff of on unpentium. Well that
(28:12):
seems unlikely. No, it's not true at all. Um, It's
obviously he's not telling the truth about that. But what
it highlights, what I said in my blog, is that
he couldn't say that about lead, I mean, just because
we know. But it does highlight the unknown potential of
these as yet undiscovered atoms. And so uh, if you
(28:36):
could find atoms that were really big and actually did
stay around for a long time before breaking apart at
the nucleus, that could be cool. Maybe they actually would
be useful in some technological sense. Um, So are we
ever going to find atoms like that? Well, we don't know.
But there is this idea. It's called the island of stability,
(28:57):
and it's been theorized by people like in Seaborg, who
was a chemist who won the Nobel Prize he discovered
plutonium um and uh, what he said is that, look,
you know, it could be that we get up to
a certain point on the periodic table and we actually
find some really really big atoms that, because of the
(29:17):
you know, the structure of the nucleus and the ratio
of neutrons to protons within the nucleus, don't fly apart immediately.
They're more stable than all of the ones around them.
So they're in this sea of instability, but they're the
island of stability. I haven't found anything like that yet.
The really high numbers we've found so far are short lived,
(29:39):
but uh, it's cool to keep looking. Yeah, I mean,
if there is an entire planet mostly made of diamond
out there, then I think that probably the universe is
a very strange and wonderful place we should continue exploring. Yet. Yeah, Okay,
well I think that's enough for today. Um, now that
we've talked about some very very special material. Yes, um,
(30:00):
we we hope that you have enjoyed this kind of
addendum to two Johnson's video. If you didn't check that out,
then going over to you Forward thinking dot com. That's
FW Thinking dot com and you can. You can also
find all of our podcasts and blog posts over there
and get in touch with us and we'll talk to
you again really soon. For more on this topic and
(30:25):
the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everybody, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says we are
living in a material world. I'm Joe McCormick, I'm Lauren Volgabon,
(00:22):
and our host Jonathan Strickland is outsick today because modern
medicine isn't that good yet. Oh We're we're working on it. Um.
I was just kidding. It's pretty good, getting better every
day we do, according to Dr you know McCoy from
Star Trek. We're we're all we're all pretty silly right now.
But yeah, well so he is out and we hope
(00:43):
he's feeling better soon. But we're going to take you
on a little brain journey with the two of us.
And today we wanted to talk about following up with
a recent video that Jonathan recorded about indestructible materials, right
because because this whole Thoor film series has come out,
and so we were thinking a lot about Uru, the
(01:05):
mystical material that Thor's hammer is made out of, which
is completely indestructible. I don't know how much you can
really think about Uru, but I get what you're saying
I don't know. I've known some nerds that would probably
disagree with you, um, that have thought long and hard.
But but yeah, so so what I got there? Hard?
Oh I didn't even mean to pun. This is going
to be I'm sorry, guys. I apologize accidental puns or
(01:27):
even worse than ones on purpose. Okay, Well, what's the concept.
It's a it's a hammer that's like super hard. You
can't miss smash a lot of stuff with it without
making it smash. Yeah, which which material scientists are actually
working on? I mean maybe not in the thor hammer
applications specifically that I'm personally aware of. If if this
research is being done, it's not being reported to me personally. Um.
(01:52):
But but but I mean, but that would be pretty cool, right,
having having material that that you can do a lot
of stuff too and it doesn't get hurt. Yeah. Um,
So if we're on a search for an indestructible material,
I want to think about for a second, like what
that would really mean, because in one sense, you can't
really have an indestructible material because material is made of atoms, right,
(02:16):
and we know that even atoms themselves can be destroyed. Yeah,
atoms can be destroyed as in converted into energy in
a nuclear reaction. Right, That's what you do when you
split an atom to create break the protons of the
nucleus apart from from the electrons in a you know,
if if if you're really trying hard, but that's difficult
a splitting the atom. Yeah. So I think what we
(02:39):
mean when we're talking about indestructible materials is a a
material structure on a scale that's meaningful to us that
doesn't I'm gonna use an Internet word here, that doesn't
fail structurally. So it's a it's it would never make
it onto the chemistry fail blog. Okay, yeah, I know
(03:00):
that makes sense. In terms of material science. When you're
talking about a a fail proof material, you can you
can talk about kind of three different categories. It's it's hardness,
which is going to be it's its resistance um to
to localized deformation a k A like scratching um. If
if you can poke it, scratch it, a braise it,
dent it um, then it's hardness is poor all right. Um.
(03:24):
Then you've got strength, which is the ability of a
material to withstand applied stress without fracture um without breaking right. So,
so within this category you've got like um tent sile strength,
which is pulling, and compressive strength, which is pushing. So
what we're talking about here is is yeah, like like
tearing or ripping or smooching on the other end of it. Okay,
(03:45):
you're not talking about being deformed, but about coming apart, right, right. So,
for for example, if you're talking about something really strong,
it would be um like like ceramics or metals, and
something really weak on on that scale would be something
like would oh okay that you know that that you
can can't you know ceramic You're not going to pull
(04:05):
on it and you're not going to shred it, but right,
And then that last category is going to be toughness,
which is um the the amount of energy and material
can absorb before it cracks or breaks or otherwise permanently deforms.
And that's how brittle an object is. So so going
back to like ceramics, ceramics are very strong but also
very brittle. Uh if you if you slack a hammer
(04:26):
at them, whether it's made of ub or not, it's
probably going to shatter into a billion pieces. Okay, So
it's not like rubber, right right, rubber is is also
very tough, but um, but not hard at all. It's
soft you can poke it and leave a dent and
uh and not extremely strong. At a certain point it'll
bust apart. Okay, So that's interesting. So we want to
(04:46):
talk about materials that are resilient in these different ways. Um,
But first of all, like do we really need this?
Like what would you actually use a material that's all
that hard for besides just a hammer? I mean, I
understand weapons and armor, but do we always have to
be so violent? Like can we use these in a
(05:07):
way that's that's nice. Well, going along with with armor,
I guess you could use it for stain resistant clothing
or stain proof clothing that's non violent and pretty cool.
Oh yeah, Actually, well lots of violence isn't caused by people, right,
So there's the violence that say an airplane with stands
when it's flying high speed against wind resistance. You could,
(05:28):
I guess build stronger airplane parts to like withstand all
that tension and what would you call it shaking? Yes, yeah?
Or um or or engine parts even if if you
if you make the plane engine out of parts that
are extremely strong, then you know, not having some some
part of an engine fail would be pretty good. Yeah, um,
(05:50):
you could think about I guess load bearing features too,
for building bridges and buildings and stuff like that. Yeah. Absolutely,
I if fewer bridge fail years over over the test
of time would be great. Yeah. Actually, a YouTube comment
or left a really cool comment on Jonathan's video, and
we we generally do have awesome YouTube commenters. But I'm
(06:11):
still personally a little bit just pleasantly shocked whenever someone
says something nice and not terrible YouTube. So so good
for good for you in particular, but but for thinking
viewers in general. Yeah, yeah, we love our people YouTube broadly.
You might be surprised if something nice happens. But yeah.
A commenter called the simulationist a little shout out there
(06:33):
on the video left a great suggestion. They said, what
about a sun probe? And I thought, oh wow, yeah,
by that, I assumed this person meant a solar probe, like,
you know, you're going to shoot into the body of
the Sun and send information back. Um, so that could
be really interesting. Now, that would be a certain specific
(06:54):
type of material resilience. It would need to survive super
high temperatures and gravity core, So I do want to
raise a question there. If we sent a probe straight
into the Sun, and that probe were built out of
some kind of magic material that meant it weren't destroyed,
I wonder if it would be able to transmit information
back to US UM because the Sun provides a lot
(07:16):
of radiation interference. Like even when you have a satellite
that's crossing across the sky, if when it's in transit
across the Sun, meaning you know, the Sun is right
behind it, we often have satellite outages because of the
interference caused by the Sun's radiation. So if something were
like going all the way into the Sun, I would
think that level of interference would be so strong it
(07:38):
would be hard to get any information back from it
at all. But sure, also I'm wondering, I'm wondering if
you could um broadcast out from inside a material that's indestructible.
That sounds like maybe you would run into problems. I
don't know, maybe, but still it's a cool idea, and
I like the way the person that Yeah, but let's
(07:59):
talk about some super strong or super hard or super
tough materials. What's out there, what's the best we got
Diamonds diamonds. Yeah, you always hear that, right, Diamonds they're
the strongest material, um, are they are? They not? Diamonds
are hard, meaning they they resist they have strong resistance
(08:23):
to indentation like we're talking about, so it's hard to
like scratch them. And so this is true that they're
very strong. I think for a long time people thought
they were the strongest material. Uh, turns out they're not.
Actually they're not even the hardest naturally occurring substance. Um
they once thought that. But I mean they're still pretty good.
We can use them for abrasive purposes, like diamond drill bits, right,
(08:49):
which are not made of pure diamond the way that's
a James Bond movie drill bit would would be made.
It just got diamond dust and an extremely extravagant drill.
I kind of kind of want that drill. I'm not
gonna lie the most lavish tool bench every Yeah it's
made of gold and you're just like drilling gold on
a Saturday for fun. Um No, So, but yeah, you
(09:11):
would have incorporated little pieces of diamonds to help make
it harder. Right, Because because although they may not be
the hardest naturally occurring substance. They're harder than many other things.
They had pretty much everything else. Yeah. So yeah, and
also you can you can like grind up diamond dust
and use that as like an abrasive paste. It's really powerful.
(09:33):
UM And actually funny little tidbit isn't totally related, but
I just couldn't resist. In case you all have never
heard of this, UM, there's at least one known exo
planet out there that may be made of diamond entirely
of diamond entirely. Not entirely, no, but but still a
significant significant portion of the planet may be made of diamonds.
(09:56):
It's can cree E. It's planet's about forty light years
away from this solar system and it's in the constellation
Cancer UM. And we don't know it's composition for sure,
but basically last year UM they looked at its transit
signature across the star in that solar system out there,
and based on that information, they deduced that it might
(10:18):
be a hard carbon planet, that it might a significant
amount of its structure might be pure diamond. Sweet, there's
the I. I just that just reminds me of this
Doctor Who episode where wherein they were stuck on a
diamond planet, and really terrifying things happened. It was very upsetting.
If they were on this planet would be terrifying because
it's like it's the hottest place ever just that there
(10:41):
ever was. I think, well that that would also not
be good uh less less good for resort stays. But
actually so that wouldn't Even if this planet were made
entirely of diamonds, it wouldn't be the hardest planet possible. Um. No,
you could make harder planets out of a couple of
other naturally occurring materials. Um. I'm going to refer to
the findings reported in a two thousand nine Physical Review
(11:04):
Letters paper called Harder than Diamond Superior indentation strength of
word site, boron nitride and lawnsdale light by Pan Sung
Jiang and Chin uh And that, yeah, that named a
couple of things that have been found in nature that
are actually harder than a diamond. And so word site
(11:25):
boron nitride and the molecule is born nitride. Word site
refers to the crystal structure of it, and that's formed
in volcanic eruptions. And apparently this stuff they found could
withstand eighteen percent more indentation stress than a diamond lawnsdale light.
Note how it just horribly Yeah, it doesn't unpleasant. These
(11:45):
names are tongue the way that diamond does. I mean. Also,
I guess there hasn't been entire industry selling me um
lawnsdalelight since I was a tiny child as a symbol
of hope for my romantic future. Yeah, Lonsdale eight is
basically it's a different form of diamond kind of it's
a hexagonally configured diamond. These hexagonal structures you're gonna see
(12:06):
are really important. But it's uh, it's found in tiny quantities,
I like in some meteorites sometimes, and it could withstand
fifty eight percent condentations dressed in diamonds. So these are
things you can find in nature, though admittedly in pretty
tiny quantities. All Right, you're not gonna just just stumble
across the whole rock of that. What if if you're
(12:27):
out for a walk or something. Yeah, Now, something you're
probably not going to find in nature is aggregated diamond
nano rods. Aggregated diamond nano rod sounds like an eighties
insult exact nano rod. Yeah, we're well, we're all nano
rods around here. But basically it's a It comes from carbon,
(12:48):
and a lot of these very resilient materials are made
of carbon um. But basically it's a way of processing
carbon high heat and pressure into this higher density diamond
form um and based. These things could also be really
useful in industrial settings like diamonds. Uh, they're a little
stronger and they could be used for machine ing or abrasives. Um.
(13:09):
They're basically like beefed up diamonds stuff. No, no, no,
that's that's cool, and that makes sense a lot of
what we're talking about because because carbon is is a
type of atom that can bond really easily with other stuff,
including itself, it can form into all different um allotropes
of of carbon, which is where you get you know,
(13:29):
the fact that that graphite is one of the softest
naturally occurring substances that we know and diamond is one
of the hardest, and they're both made of the same stuff,
just arranged slightly differently. So so that's so that's fascinating.
This is this is all good. Well, I wanted to
give one more shout out something that occurs in the
natural world, again, not indestructible, but spider silk, right, yeah,
(13:51):
i'd i'd read about that. Um it's being ridiculously tensile. Yeah,
it's it's got a high tensile strength, which is different. Um. Basically,
what that means is you can pull it like a
rope without it snapping, and you can even know it's
a thread thread thin. Yeah, incredibly high weight load bearing
on that. So and that just comes out of a
(14:12):
spider's butt. So that's pretty impressive, right. Yeah. Not many
things that are that strong are made that easily. UM.
For for example, graphing is another one of these allotropes
of well, okay, it's it's graphing is a is a
single layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in this
hexagonal matrix. Um. So, so it's a single atom thick
(14:32):
sheet of graphite. UM. I'm not buying it. That's super
hard right now, It's really it's really, it's really quite hard. Um. Uh.
You know, graphites a crystal form of carbon, and so
when you get this this atom thick sheet, um, it
can be six times lighter and a hundred times stronger
than steel of the same thickness. Um. It's it's just
(14:54):
the way that it does. UM. I mean, basically, since
it's a technically a two dimensional object, or as close
as we can get to to a two dimensional object
that we can still perceive. Since it's an atom thick um,
you would have to bust apart the atoms to really
get it to break, which is not that easy to do. Unfortunately,
it also comes I mean by by the time that
(15:16):
you've got graphine um. This this is what carbon nanotubes
are made of. Most of the time you're going to
roll it up into these into these couple atom thick
tubes of of awesome um that you can use to
do a lot of different stuff. I think carbon nanotubes
for me, they fit into the category of science magic
where it's like there are two main things. There's nanotechnology
(15:38):
and carbon nanotubes, and anytime you need magic to happen,
you just say, yeah, just put some carbon nanotubes in there.
It's one or the other. But but there may be
a good reason for that, because these things are pretty
dern magical. Yeah. And in addition to being that strong,
it's more conducive than copper. They can either emit or
absorb light depending on what you're having them do. Um.
(16:02):
One of my h they were okay, so so Graphing
was known about in theory for decades, but it was
never created in practice until around two thousand four. Assists
and researchers in a laboratory. Um, we're using scotch tape
like sellotape to to clean the surface of blocks of graphite.
And then all of a sudden they noticed they they
(16:23):
like pulled. They wanted to get it cleaner, and so
they were using the sticky stuff and then they pulled
it up and kind of noted that there was this
near translucent, very thin layers of graphite stuck to the
scotch tape. And they were like, oh, that's interesting. That's
the interesting parts. We were just throwing that away. You
put on your face to clean your pores. You've seen
(16:44):
those commercials, right, except it for graphic creates the hardest
substance on earth, right. Yeah, no, And this is a
legit scientific way of making sheets of graphing. Well, it's
a little bit thicker at that point. These days they're
using pretty precise, like heat scraping methods. I don't entirely
understand without looking at that a whole lot, but um,
(17:05):
but so okay, So, so you can use this kind
of stuff for I mean, the big one that everyone
is always excited about with graphine and carbon nanotubes is
space elevators, right, because you've you've got to make that
tether that so strong and so thin. Just a refresher
if you haven't listened to our space elevator episode. And
the idea is that you have a base on Earth
(17:27):
with a flexible tether running out into space to a
place in geo stationary orbit, and basically, um the two
forces are pulling, so gravity is pulling down on the tether,
and then the centrifugal force of spinning around with the
Earth is pulling up on the tether, getting it tout right,
and by both those forces pulling in the opposite directions,
it stays so that you can climb it with a
(17:49):
climbing vehicle. The problem is to make a tether like this,
it would have to be so strong it's just unthinkable,
all right, and the way that steel works, it would
have to be you know, like a you miles wide,
I think, in order to make it strong enough to
go that high. It's like something completely ridiculous, right, that
is just not practical in any way, um on on
(18:09):
a smaller scale, alright, So uh, typically speaking, your carbon nantitubes,
even in a really ideal lab environment, are only going
to be a few centimeters long. I think that researchers
just have made one that was like half a meter long,
and everyone is incredibly impressed by this. But researchers at
Rice University have created a UM a process called wet spinning,
(18:34):
which which kind of which kind of smooshes them together
and like like sort of dissolves them and then re
smoshes them in a very specific way that can form
this thread UM and then you can spin this threat
into spools and you can use it to for example,
both hang and power and LED lamp at the same time,
because because it's conducive and it's super strong and so
(18:56):
and so this is you know, that kind of process
I think is going to may be some day hopefully
lead us up to space elevators. But right now I'm
pretty impressed that they're hanging a lamp. That's pretty awesome, UM,
and elevators kind of like hanging lamp, a very large
geostationary lamp. Yeah yeah, sorry, please go ahead, no no, UM.
(19:17):
I was also going to say that, you know, people
talk about incorporating carbonana tubes into other materials like uh,
like like again the body of planes or cars. This
is going to It would make something that's very lightweight
but hypothetically very strong, which is good for for fuel
efficiency and all kinds of fancy stuff like that. Also,
(19:37):
since they're conducive, you could put them into stuff like
a like computer chips hypothetically and uh and make some
some really fancy stuff like that. Awesome. Yeah, I've actually
read about that being used in h microprocessors. But what's
the deal with carbine? Jonathan talked about it in the
video and he's not here to explain it to me,
(19:58):
all right. Carbine. Carbine is another allotrope of carbon more carbon. Specifically,
it is linear act alnic carbon I'm gonna go with
that pronunciation u uh, and it forms in a single
chain of atoms, the most successful form so far as pollens,
which are alternating single and triple atomic bonds in the
(20:21):
single chain. And since it's a single chain, it's sometimes
referred to as being a one dimensional object, as opposed
to the kind of two dimensional graphing plane, which is
not really um but it also doesn't I mean, okay,
so so people have kind of almost made it happen
in labs, but most of the time when they try
to create it in labs, it's sort of this black
(20:42):
goo at the bottom of a test tube that no
one can really do anything with. It mostly exists in
theory and as computer models because these things are just
just really hard to make and not superstable as of yet. Um.
But hypothetically the stuff could be twice as strong as
graphing in terms of tensile strength, and um three times stiffer,
like harder than diamond. So yeah, that's pretty good. Also,
(21:06):
when you twist it like ninety degrees from its normal state,
it could act as a magnetic semiconductor, so important stuff.
You know, it could be really lightweight and have a
huge surface area if you could, you know, create threads
of this and use those to create some kind of
three dimensional object, and therefore it could be amazing for
(21:26):
making like battery electrodes or chemical sensors, anything that you want.
Those those properties in space elevators. Again, space elevators, Yeah,
it's nice. The future is carbon related space elevators of
some kind. Well, so pretty much everything we've talked about
so far is carbon based. But I do you want
to talk about something with special properties that's not heard of,
(21:47):
super alloys. I have not to tell me about them,
super alloys, Okay. So basically they're they're alloy metals that
have good performance in extreme conditions. So you can think
about like nickel alloys and what they do. As they say,
it's strong at really really high heat, whereas something like steel, say,
might be weakened structurally by high heat. Yeah. These nickel
(22:10):
super alloys, you can heat them way up and they
still stay strong, and they also resist corrosion, and this
makes them ideal for stuff like gas turbine parts. So
it's really hot in there, they're not going to get
distorted or be more prone to breaking over time than
become brittle the way that right, normal metal might. Right,
So this would make them great, say in jet jet
(22:31):
engines for airplanes, or in like power generator hardware. Yeah. Um.
Also an interesting thing is that it was a nickel
alloy that Jonathan was talking about in the video when
he referred to the m I T scientists discovering the
self healing materials. Yeah yeah, yeah. So this was another
(22:52):
paper in Physical Review Letters published October. It was called
Healing Nano Cracks by disclinations but zoo and dim cowits.
And essentially what this showed was that nano cracks, so
really tiny fractures in the in the plane of the
metal would repair themselves without being compressed together. Um. And
(23:14):
so these like these little tiny crystal in structures within
the metal would would gloop back together without having to
be pushed into each other. And so so we're basically
talking about yeah kind of yeah Patrick nano scale. Yeah. Um,
hopefully less grumpy than him, because you know, he never
had that sense of humor like the the original Terminator
(23:37):
did he really he really never He never made any jokes.
He had just dour about everything killing all the time. Yeah.
Hopefully these crystal defects have you know, less interest in
the total destruction of the human race. Yeah, yeah, okay,
fingers crossed, Yeah, okay, So I want to I want
to talk about one more thing that. Um, the funny
(23:59):
thing you'll know this is that none of these that
we've talked about are actually indestructible, uh spoiler. We don't
know of any material that's actually indestructible in the way
that we talked about at the beginning, and that it's
impossible to cause it to fail structurally, right, But aren't
there basically a lot of of elements that we don't
(24:20):
really know the full scope of properties of. Yeah, this
is another thing I wanted to talk about. When we're
speaking about materials with special properties, you can pull up
the periodic table and you can look at it and say, hmm, okay,
well we're focusing a lot on this one square of it,
which is carbon. Or you can make molecules out of,
(24:40):
you know, combining different combining different stuff, and we're getting
pretty good at creating computer models of what that would
look like without ever having to actually smooth atoms together. Yeah,
but we've got nothing indestructible yet. But um, there's if
you go down to the bottom of the periodic table,
all these weird symbols like you you p U T
(25:03):
you know what is all that about. I have never
had any idea at all. After like Boron, I'm just like, yeah,
it gets boring after Boron. No, actually it doesn't. It
gets really interestingly Yeah, Okay, So I wanted to talk
about a little bit earlier this year, something that happened,
um was that a group of scientists confirmed the synthesis
(25:26):
of element one fifteen otherwise known as unnpenti um um.
That just that again pentium. Either way, it rolls off
the tongue much like those. It's a horrible name and
it's a temporary name. The way they come up with
names for what these are called are transuranic elements. There
are there are all these elements that are way up
(25:46):
higher than uranium, because uranium is the biggest element that
you're likely to find in nature. So yeah, you can
find hunks of uranium in the desert. You're never going
to find a hunk of unupenti um in the desert.
And and that's because of the the molecular are not molecular,
but the atomic structure, because because it's such a heavy
(26:07):
I mean that's that's a dred and fifteen protons and
in a single nucleus. Yeah, yeah, exactly um. And so
the bigger these nucle i get when you're making these
bigger elements, they tend to split apart really fast um.
And that's why you don't find them in nature. Obviously,
even if they'd been fused in nature, they wouldn't hang
around for very long. And by not very long, we're
(26:29):
talking about like like fractions of a second right. Um,
so how do we discover these new things? Well, we
actually create them. We create these higher level elements in
the lab by smashing together elements with lower atomic numbers
and hoping that they combine to produce this bigger atom.
(26:51):
So so like in a in a particle accelerator, this
kind of thing would be going on exactly right. Um. Yeah,
So they recently confirmed earlier scientists us in dubbed No
Russia and Lawrence Livermore had created element one um and
that was I think in two thousand three, but they
just now confirmed it that they recreated it and so
(27:11):
hopefully it's going to get a permanent name. Some of
these other ones don't have those weird like systematic names,
liken pentium, which actually just means one one five e
m um um, pretty clever. Yeah. But the cool thing
about all these is that, um, we don't know for
sure all of the properties of these elements until we
(27:32):
synthesize them. So if we could we we could create
some and get it to stabilize enough to hang out
for more than a few fractions of a second, then um,
then yeah, it might it might be able to do.
Who knows, Yeah, it might work, might have a technological application. Um,
this shows up in science fiction and there's actually there
(27:52):
was a UFO conspiracy theorist named Bob Lasar, and if
you read about him, I don't think so. Now. Yeah,
he claimed that he worked at air A fifty one
and that he worked on alien spacecraft. What he said
was that they used that their anti gravity fuel was
made of elopment one ff of on unpentium. Well that
(28:12):
seems unlikely. No, it's not true at all. Um, It's
obviously he's not telling the truth about that. But what
it highlights, what I said in my blog, is that
he couldn't say that about lead, I mean, just because
we know. But it does highlight the unknown potential of
these as yet undiscovered atoms. And so uh, if you
(28:36):
could find atoms that were really big and actually did
stay around for a long time before breaking apart at
the nucleus, that could be cool. Maybe they actually would
be useful in some technological sense. Um, So are we
ever going to find atoms like that? Well, we don't know.
But there is this idea. It's called the island of stability,
(28:57):
and it's been theorized by people like in Seaborg, who
was a chemist who won the Nobel Prize he discovered
plutonium um and uh, what he said is that, look,
you know, it could be that we get up to
a certain point on the periodic table and we actually
find some really really big atoms that, because of the
(29:17):
you know, the structure of the nucleus and the ratio
of neutrons to protons within the nucleus, don't fly apart immediately.
They're more stable than all of the ones around them.
So they're in this sea of instability, but they're the
island of stability. I haven't found anything like that yet.
The really high numbers we've found so far are short lived,
(29:39):
but uh, it's cool to keep looking. Yeah, I mean,
if there is an entire planet mostly made of diamond
out there, then I think that probably the universe is
a very strange and wonderful place we should continue exploring. Yet. Yeah, Okay,
well I think that's enough for today. Um, now that
we've talked about some very very special material. Yes, um,
(30:00):
we we hope that you have enjoyed this kind of
addendum to two Johnson's video. If you didn't check that out,
then going over to you Forward thinking dot com. That's
FW Thinking dot com and you can. You can also
find all of our podcasts and blog posts over there
and get in touch with us and we'll talk to
you again really soon. For more on this topic and
(30:25):
the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
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