From the Book of Sand

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe sink their toes into a couple of sand-related science and culture topics, recorded in The Studio at Baha Mar in the Bahamas.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, if you're watching
on video, obviously we are not in our normal places,
not coming to you from the Gray Matt underworld or
the other world, I can't remember what we decided to
call it, the places we usually come from. Today we
are recording remotely at the studio at Baja Mar because
they are a sponsor of this episode.

Speaker 4 (00:37):
That's right, we're in the Bahamas. I made a point
of walking in the sand on the beach before I
came in here today because we are going to be
talking about sand. I kind of like to tie these
kind of things together when there's some travel involved. I'm
also you can't see it, but I am wearing flip flops.
It felt appropriate. It felt like Jimmy Buffett would want

(00:57):
me to wear flip flops for this recording, so I
honor his spirit in doing so.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Stuff on a pop top.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Yet fortunately not and you don't want to engineer that.
That's you know, it ruins the magic of it, of course. Yeah,
So yeah, we're going to talk about sand here today,
and I think sand is a great topicause in in general,
I think a lot of people have certain feelings about it,
you know, in the imagination, but also very personal opinions

(01:26):
about sand. I don't know about you, Joe. I enjoy
the sand. I don't like sand where it's not supposed
to be. But I like going into a region 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

(01:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
And it goes everywhere I feel about the sand the
way I feel about sweat, which is I like being
sweaty when you're supposed to be sweaty, and I hate
being sweaty when you're not supposed to be sweaty. There
you go, you know, working up a sweat when you're
exercising feels great. Working up a sweat when you're like
getting dressed ready to go out somewhere is like the

(02:21):
worst feeling. Yeah, and sand. Yeah, it's like when you're
at the beach, there's nothing better. Actually, I like, literally
I love the feeling. Most of what I do at
the beach when I go is just like walk around
and feel the sand.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
On my feet.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah that's you know. I'm not a huge swimmer, but
I do love that. But yeah, getting like sand in
your shoes or sand in your underwear when you're not
at the beach, that's not so great.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yeah, where the bed is one of the reasons I've
never even much of a sand camper. I've done a
little of it, but it's not really my cup of tea,
just because I have a harder time maintaining that that
line between the sand world and mine, a non sandy world.
But still I've had some great times camping on the
beach as well.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
You know, I was just thinking about how in Dune
there is so much about the absence and preciousness of water.
But I was struggling to remember, are there equivalent sentiments
the characters express about the abundance or over abundance of sand.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
Hmmm, well, I'm trying to remember you've been reading Herbert
more recently than I have.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, though, so now I'm reading Dune Messiah, which I've
actually never read before, So I'm finally getting into the sequels.
I'm enjoying it, though I'm aware there are diminishing returns
as you continue, but.

Speaker 4 (03:41):
It depends if you open your whole heart to it.
I'm of the opinion there there are gems to be
found in each of the books, but those the first
two books are special in my opinion. Well, I I've
enjoyed them all, but but yeah, there's it's it's different
once you get into the later books.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
The second book, I've noticed so far there is significantly
less ecology in it and it is more politics and conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
Yeah, and it's a dark read in its own right. Yeah,
we will be talking a little bit about done as
we proceed here. We'll talk a little bit about some technology,
some FRIM and technology from the frimkit. But yeah, this
is where I guess we get more into the imagination
sphere for sand because it does bring up a lot

(04:26):
of ideas, and so I was thinking, like, what are
some of the core ideas I keep coming back to
and I keep seeing and in my readings and things
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

(04:48):
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,

(05:09):
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,

(05:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
I read this story last night. Actually, oh you were
telling me about Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
It's like three pages long, it's it's it's great. One
of the things I love about Borhees, He's deep, he's
often very brief.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
One thing I like about that story is that it begins,
as with so many Borhees stories, with a traveler arriving
strange traveler who has an artifact to share with you,
and then the protagonist greatly desires to acquire the artifact,
and so in this case, yeah, he becomes entranced because
he finds a page in the book that has a
tiny illustration of an anchor on it, and then he

(06:12):
like turns the pages and then can't ever find the
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.

(06:36):
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,

(06:59):
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.

Speaker 4 (07:13):
Yeah, yeah, some of you may be thinking of this.
We're not really going to get into this concept in
this episode, but Archimedes of course famously tried to figure
out what was the upper bound for the number of
sand grains in the universe, So it's you know, he
was of the mind it can be counted, or at
least estimated, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:32):
Which, you know, and whole like methods of estimation of
substances like that, I think are a really interesting topic.
We've talked about on the show before. Long ago we
did an episode on fermi estimation, remember that, which is
just like a sort of orders of magnitude based system
for estimating numbers of uncountable things.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:55):
Absolutely, And you mentioned sand falling through the fingers passing
through the fingers. The ephemeral nature of things made out
of sand, that is I think another major theme you
see over and over again. Of course, you see it
in things like sand mondolas or sand castles, you know,
where you can create this thing of beauty out of
the sand, but it will not last, and it's not

(08:16):
supposed to last, and of course neither do we. Let's
see other ideas. Sand is a varied substance. Of course,
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.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
It sand, is it soil? Is it soil?

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Is it really sand? And you kind of go back
and forth, and then sometimes people just call it sand.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
Am I correct in understanding that sand is not a
name for a substance. It's a name for a size
of particle. Sand is a grit size, right.

Speaker 4 (08:46):
But people can get a little particular, like, for instance,
we're not really going to get into the hourglass here.
We might come back and do a full episode in
the hour glass in the future, but some people will
point out, well, actually it's not sand in an hour glass,
it's this particular recipe of particles that works well with
an hour glass.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
And I guess there are things that might fit the
definition if you just go by grain size, but nobody
would call them sand, like would sugar be sand by
If you just go particles.

Speaker 4 (09:15):
You would get you would get weird looks. If you
ask for it's like, give me the sweet sand, the
sand that goes in my coffee. People would ask, who
is this space aly? But uh, yeah, I mean the
other thing is, yeah, you have different colors of sand,
different sistencies of sand, Like digging in the beach. I
know that like sometimes you have that sand it is
like a powder, or when it's compacted it's like a
it's almost like a clay that you can mold. And

(09:37):
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

(09:57):
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

(10:21):
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

(10:43):
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

(11:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
So the first before.

Speaker 4 (11:27):
I get to Doon, the one I want to mention
is a nineteen eighty four novel that fewer people have read,
but it still has quite a following.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
It's called Armor.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
It's by an author by the name of John Stakley
st A. K. L. E. Y. If you're looking him up.
This is the same guy who wrote Vampires with a
Dollar Sign, which John Carpenter. Well, John Carpenter directed the
adaptation of it. As we've discussed before, probably not at

(11:56):
anybody like the top of anybody's Carpenter list.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
Still has some great moments in it.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
Uh, they're seeing the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Actual, Oh you haven't.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
I was not able to finish it at the time
I tried to watch it. I can't remember a huge
Carpenter fan, but I just didn't love this one.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
It it has its moments, but the book, the book
was better in my memory.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
Arm the Dollar Sign.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
The dollar Sign was cool. Uh is it about money?

Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (12:21):
You know, the business of slaying vampires. I'm a little
foggy on that. The main thing that I that sticks
with me out of that book is just how scary
the vampires were, Like, they were just scary and nasty
in a way that they touched on a little bit
in the movie. But they're just really awful. You just
hate vampires in this book. Armor, however, is more in
keeping with like your Starship Troopers sort of world where

(12:44):
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.

(13:05):
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

(13:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
Okay, so it sucks in sand and it adheres it
into a solid substance.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:42):
Yeah, it creates like a solid sand brick wall, which
I always thought was pretty cool. And I'm kind of
surprised I haven't seen that used in media elsewhere, in
video games or something.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Maybe it is, but.

Speaker 4 (13:56):
This is this is really interesting because yes, we're talking
about sci fi far future warfare here, but of course
humans have been doing this in the real world for
quite a while, often in the form of sandbags.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yeah, funny story. So this podcast started a lot of
people who listen probably don't even know this. This podcast
started originally when we were writers and editors for the
website HowStuffWorks dot com many many years ago, which was
like a encyclopedic informational website that had articles like, you know,

(14:31):
how a car engine works and stuff. So I was
hired on you were a writer at that website when
I joined as an editor and I don't know what
in twenty ten.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Or something, and then be four times.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah, that long long ago, and one of the first
articles I edited for the website was how sand bags work. Now,
you wouldn't think that there's that much to say about
how a sandbag works, But I remember it being a
surprisingly rich and interesting topic. But all the things sandbags
can do and in fact to do better than other
more high tech solutions exactly.

Speaker 4 (15:05):
Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. Like I grew up in a
household my dad was always into a lot of like
World War II stuff and did models of tanks, and
so I was familiar with pictures of tanks, and in
reading about sandbags here, I had to go back and
remind myself, Oh, yeah, they would off. You see all
these images of World War two tanks with sandbags layered
on top of the metal armor of the tank to

(15:28):
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

(15:49):
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,

(16:14):
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

(16:37):
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

(17:01):
and the friction of that. It's pretty fascinating like that
this could essentially destroy the projectile as it passes through.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Meanwhile, the same.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
Projectile, if it is powerful enough to pass through a
metal barrier, it will just pass through and can continue
to you know, decimate somebody or something on the other side.
So one of the things they end up arguing in
this paper is like we should be looking at more
ways to use sand, either in place of substances like

(17:31):
steel or figuring out how the best layer them with
steel or other materials. Like I guess it's it's just
fascinating to think. You know, we think about the armor
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

(17:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
Well, I know you were already talking about this. I
think maybe this came up when we were talking last night,
But you know, I recall seeing plenty of examples through
you know, world history, military history of like metal, plate,
armor and sand used in combination, like one one against
the other.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, certainly you see a
lot of like makeshift you can pack up the sand
bags and you create a little wall. And then there's
the example of the tanks. But I don't know, there's
something about like I don't recall ever really putting it
together too much that oh yeah, I'm looking at sandbags
on those tanks. You know, it's one of those things
that's so mundane. You know, you see sand bags a lot,

(18:46):
you can kind of become blind to what's going on.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
There, to the beauty of the sand bag.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
Yeah yeah, all right, Now, moving from the sandbag back
into the science fiction future, let's come at last to done. Okay,
Frank Herbert's nineteen sixty five novel, and then the same

(19:12):
technology does come up a little bit at least in
one of the other books, but it does make it.
It does hit in the first one as well. So
the Friemen make use of a sand compactor as part
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.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
So that's also going to have still suit yep, still suit.
It goes on your body, it protects you it keeps
you from losing moisture to the environment. Does it have
a thumper the thumper, yeah, around kit it either is
it either a tract or it distracts the worm? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, both.

Speaker 4 (19:49):
Yeah, there's a yeah, depending on how you're using it.
There's the tent, I believe, and then there are probably
some things that aren't mentioned. There's probably I'm thinking there's
a mint in there, maybe a piece of gum.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
I don't know why not.

Speaker 4 (19:59):
But the sand compact, Yeah, you want a little moisturizer,
you know, maybe a nice note. Oh there was a note,
but I don't know how nice it was. It's like, hey, sorry,
but I had to do this. But yeah, the sand
compactor is probably one of the weirder ones. And I
remember like thinking it was really cool when I first

(20:20):
read Dune, because it is described as a sand compaction
tool that realigns sand grains and allows you allows you
to effortlessly burrow out of a sand buried tint, and
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,

(20:41):
And it seemingly involves binding sand grains together with an
electromagnetic charge.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Oh okay, yeah.

Speaker 4 (20:48):
Now, as I understand it, the cool thing about this
is that this particular gadget, of course, remains a tool
of the far future imperium we see in dune, but
we do have electrostatic gadgets that can clean up sand.
There's something called an EDS electrodynamic screen, which is kind
of an electrostatic cleaning system for removal of sand particles

(21:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Like an electromagnetic vacuum.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (21:35):
Yeah, But again, this is the kind of thing I
feel like would make me more of a beach camper
if I could like point a flashlight sort of shaped
object at my feet and just kind of like hose
them off with pure dry electrostatic charge or something. Now,
coming back to the idea of sand constructions on other worlds,

(21:56):
So kind of coming back to that armor example of
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

(22:18):
sometimes referred to as such, and sometimes it's called soil,
though plenty of people will point out, well, it's not soil.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Earth. Soil is of.

Speaker 4 (22:24):
Course essentially a living, thriving, organically active thing, and that.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Is not what you get on the moon.

Speaker 4 (22:30):
Yeah, we've gone into more depth than this sort of
thing before when we talked about like like what is
like lunar dust, and often dust is a is a
is good or a better descriptor as well. But there
is the idea that we could create various sort of
sometimes called lunar crets or astrocrets, that are essentially there

(22:51):
are a lot basically there are a lot like terrestrial concretes.
They would they would still be complicated to carry out.
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,

(23:13):
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

(23:35):
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

(23:58):
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

(24:20):
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

(24:41):
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

(25:02):
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

(25:23):
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.

(25:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
So I think that's they're not going to be under
any stress or anything.

Speaker 4 (26:10):
Yeah, but the authors here do make a point of
saying you would need to figure out exactly what the
right regiment for this would be, you know, because I
guess on the way over, maybe they were to a
certain extent more be more downtalent downtime, and you could
kind of like put your astronauts on drip and get

(26:31):
some fluids from them. But we know that journeys between
planets and journeys between our world and its moon, these
are not stress free environments either, so you can't you
have to. Basically, their point is like you don't want
to in any way incapacitate or decrease the effectiveness of

(26:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Okay, yeah, so I don't know, I really really like
this idea.

Speaker 4 (27:04):
It's been out for a few years, so I can
only imagine that somebody's latched onto it. In science fiction,
certainly some of the more recent Mars colony Lunar colony visions, well,
you know.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
You could imagine that if if the stress on the
astronaut's body is too much, you could have a kind
of separate classes of people going to other planets. So
you'd have you'd have the astronauts who were there to work,
and then the ones who were there to be a
to be a blood and peepye bag. Oh you know.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah, that that's interesting.

Speaker 4 (27:34):
That certainly, that's the kind of idea you could explore
in some of these and some of them have talking
about different caste systems for far future humans on other worlds.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
But a Mars blood boy.

Speaker 4 (27:43):
Yeah, Mary, yeah, I ad read it all right. I
have one more one last spacesand topic I want to
discuss here, and it involves the electric sand of Titan,
which I have to admit, so it's pretty metal. It
is ultimately pretty metal.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
So we've covered tight song by Sleep I think.

Speaker 4 (28:07):
It could very much be a sleep song or an
early electric Wizard song from some of their spacier material. Yeah,
basically could fit just about any like seventies dim sound.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
Drop out of Life on a rope of sand.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
Yeah, yeah, that kind of vibe. Yeah, So we're going
to tighten for this topic. We've covered Titan on the
show before. This is Saturn's largest moon. It has a
thick atmosphere and earth like systems of flowing liquid only
instead of water. It has liquid hydrocarbons such as methane
and ethane. However, it may have a subsurface ocean of water,

(28:43):
and in many ways it is very earth like. But
with that caveat caveat of don't go anywhere beyond Earth
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

(29:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
I think that comes with an asterisk though.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:22):
Yeah, anytime we're talking about sand in other worlds, we
have to add the caveat that we scientists will disagree
on terminology from time to time, but scientists will often
use the term sand when talking about it, at least,
you know, with the public. So, as described on the
NASA fact sheet for Titan, dark earth like sand dunes

(29:43):
stretch across the cross parts of Titan, and the sand
is composed of dark hydrocarbon grains, often described as probably
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,

(30:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
So like just long, long, parallel dunes like you might
see in some deserts on Earth.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 4 (30:29):
So it's frequently compared to deserts on Earth and people
pointing out, yeah, yeah, this is kind of like an
Earth desert, except very different in other ways. But where
this gets really cool? I thought, I mean, it's already
really cool. But in twenty seventeen, Joshua Mendez, a granular
dynamicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, proposed

(30:52):
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

(31:16):
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

(31:36):
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

(31:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:05):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
Okay, so I'm imagining not.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
Sand castle's, but like weird, like Wayne Barlow esque alien
sculptures on Titan out of this stuff. The deeper application
here is that, you know, beyond the flashy headlines, is
that it might explain the shape and formation of these
sand dunes we just explained that can't as easily be

(32:28):
accounted for by the wind. So, you know, we look
at the way sand dunes form on Earth and then
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.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
That's really interesting. Yeah, reminds me of something we've talked
about on the surface of Jupiter's moon Io, where there
was a similar question about has shifting sand dunes sand
dunes that move over time and we can see that
through like orbit imagery, and so the question is how
do they move because Io basically has no appreciable atmosphere.

(33:07):
You know, it's not going to have winds like our
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,

(33:28):
right right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 4 (33:41):
All right, we're going to move on to another section
here and this this is your angle. And I think
this is a great selection, in part because it gets
into some other like major things that come to our mind.
When we think about sand, things that sand can be
turned into. They go well beyond just making it into
a brick or a.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
Bag of sand.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
It's not just for sand bags. So yeah, we've talked
about sand in its loose form, and of course I
think everybody knows that melting sand is how you make glass,
but when it comes to making glass, not all sand
is the same. To make industrial glass with a high
level of transparency, modern glass makers usually select high purity

(34:23):
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

(34:46):
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.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
Cold, ooh maybe I haven't.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
Well you're lucky.

Speaker 4 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, generally it's just the fingers to blame. Yeah, poor,
poor guesswork on how much of the table I have
set the glass on.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
That sort of thing that can do it too.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
But so, yeah, normal glass expands and contracts a lot,
relatively a lot. You know, it expands and contracts due
to changes in temperature. And so if you've got you know,
a glass or a glass baking you know, a glass container,
and you you change the temperatures on it too rapidly.

(35:42):
It creates stress on the brittle structure of the glass
because like in one part of it, it's getting hotter
faster than the other part and expanding faster or vice versa,
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

(36:06):
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

(36:27):
of cold water or oh, kettle or something that'll that's dangerous.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
Okay, that's that's good to know, because that is the
sort of thing I could conceivably do, and I will
I will make a point of not doing.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Don't don't do that. Yeah, that's how to make your
your baking dish explode anyway, that's industrial glass. But of
course there are also natural forms of glass made from
melted sand, and I want to talk about one type
of naturally occurring sand based glass called folgurite. So fulgurite
is a mineral made of silica or elicon dioxide that

(37:01):
has been fused by the heat of a bolt of lightning.
I thought that's pretty cool. So the name comes from
the Latin word for lightning, and it can be formed
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,

(37:24):
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

(37:44):
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

(38:07):
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

(38:28):
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

(38:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (39:00):
Like I'm thinking, I mean, it's kind of like the
lightning has just cooked the sand, and so you could
imagine something like I don't know a cake that is,
the cake is on the whole not all that well cooked,
but you have like this thread going through it that
is really cooked.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
Through thread going through the middle where part of the
cake has been vaporized and left as a hollow, and
then a section around that has been liquefied and then
re solidified, and this glassy, smooth inner channel, and then
a rougher surface around the outside. There are other types
of fulgarite, though it's not just sand. There are rock fulgarites.

(39:36):
These are a bit different. They usually appear as glassy
layers or glassy crusts on top of a rock, often
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

(39:57):
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

(40:21):
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

(40:43):
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,

(41:07):
but the potatoes won't cook.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
Oh yes, yes, they're at very.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
High altitude, so the boiling point of water is lowered,
so the potatoes won't get hot enough moman boiling them.
But that's also the episode where he found the upside
down frozen horse in the Pinnacles of Ice yes, but anyway,
the part where he talks about finding Folgierites is in
chapter three of the Voyage of the Beagle called Maldonado,

(41:31):
where Darwin is traveling in what is I think modern
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

(41:52):
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,

(42:14):
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

(42:34):
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

(42:55):
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

(43:19):
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

(43:40):
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,

(44:02):
of full an inch and a half. And this in
a material so extraordinarily refractory as quartz.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
So Darwin was not confused about what these things were.
He already knew what they are, that they're made by lightning.
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

(44:33):
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?

Speaker 1 (44:44):
Wow?

Speaker 4 (44:44):
Yeah, just like alien formations growing up out of the sand.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah, And I guess they eventually get broken off by
the weather, but sometimes they're just just having a good
old poke up there.

Speaker 2 (44:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
So I wanted to also mention one scientific paper I
came across because the authors of this paper did an
interesting bit of calculation in their background section to estimate
the rate of Fulgiar right formation on Earth. So this
was a paper called a Fossilized Energy Distribution of Lightning.
This is by Matthew Passick and Mark Hurst, published in
Scientific Reports in twenty sixteen. I looked up the author

(45:20):
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

(45:42):
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,

(46:05):
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

(46:27):
with this place, best not mess with it.

Speaker 4 (46:29):
Yeah, I mean, when we think of putting it to use,
it's generally going to be bringing of Frankenstein's monster to
life or powering a time traveling glorean, and that that's
pretty much it. Those are the only applications.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Bold of lightning. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
But yeah, so it can do that. We know also
it can start fires, natural forest fires, and it causes
destruction and damage to buildings. But the authors here just
mentioned briefly a couple of things people might not appreciate
about how lightning is also somewhat ecologically important, like it
does good things for us. This is a detour, but

(47:01):
I thought it was interesting, so I just wanted to
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

(47:22):
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

(47:46):
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,

(48:09):
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,

(48:30):
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

(48:50):
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

(49:11):
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

(49:34):
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

(49:54):
by rain and then they can be absorbed and used
by plants in the form of nitrate. So lightning helps.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
Yeah, something to keep in mind the next time we
see some electrical activity in the storms, like we're looking
at a factory of sorts.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Yeah. So anyway, coming to the part about fulgurites, the
authors do some interesting mass to calculate how often folgiarites
around the world might be formed, and they I just
want to read this section. They say, quote, lightning is
a ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, with a global flash rate
of about forty five times per second, a majority seventy

(50:30):
five to ninety percent of which occur over continental land mass.
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.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
WHOA.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
This estimate depends on the efficiency of fulgarite formation by lightning,
which is highest when striking barren sand, soil or rock.
So obviously there's going to be less formation when it's
striking like a forested area.

Speaker 4 (51:00):
Still that is significantly more than I would have guessed.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Yeah. Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about
folgier ites is actually not about folgiar rights in sand.
This is about rock fulgiarites. But I thought this was
interesting too, so I wanted to get into it. Robin
the outline. I've got a picture you can look at
of the peak of Mount Shasta in California, and you
can see these dark scars in the rock. What's going

(51:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:33):
To the untrained eye, you might just think it's like
deposits of something some sort of like mineral vein in
the rock.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
But wow, that's fulgrit. Wow.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
So the last thing I want to talk about here
is This news article in the journal Science from December
twenty twenty by Nick Ogassa called fossilized lightning to reveal
when ancient storms struck. So, when lightning strikes a mountaintop
like this, like when it hits the peak of Mount Shasta,
it leaves this glassy residue, And you can think of

(52:11):
this in a way as fossilized lightning. It is a
record in the rock of lightning hitting. So in a
way it is a record of weather projected into the
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.

(52:36):
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

(52:56):
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

(53:17):
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

(53:42):
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

(54:02):
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

(54:24):
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

(54:46):
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.

(55:10):
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

(55:34):
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

(55:56):
degree of precision.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Fascinating. Yeah, huh.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
I'm not a crystal guy. And if you start googling
Fulgar rightes, a lot of the people who want to
talk about these things have thoughts about the powers of crystals.

Speaker 4 (56:08):
Oh, okay, there are certain powers attributed to Folgar rights
in particular.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
I think some people I don't know. I didn't go
deep in that world. I just saw a bunch of
Google hits and I'm like, Okay, I don't have time
for that.

Speaker 4 (56:18):
I'll research it the next time I'm in Asheville going
to the various crystal stores.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
Yeah, so I'm not that kind of crystal guy. But
now I'm kind of like I want some vulgarite very
interested in this it.

Speaker 4 (56:31):
You know, I didn't get a chance to reread Armor
in full for this episode. It's just like zeroing in
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,

(56:56):
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

(57:18):
rest of the sand blew away.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
There are whole passages in Doing Messiah where Paul is
like looking out over the planes where Fremen fought the
Sarto car and he talks about the landscape and even
the rocks and the scarps and all that. But I
don't think he ever mentions anything like that.

Speaker 4 (57:35):
I mean, it would be temporary, you know, because the
elements would be we was over. Yeah, and you know,
you can also imagine a scenario where things like this
might be collected because they're essentially you know, the mentos
of the battle, that sort of thing. But it's one
of those things I kind of want to look out
for now, and certainly listeners if you were like, oh, yeah,

(57:57):
there's a you know place in Game of Thrones where
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.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
I like it, are there energy weapons in Game of Thrones?

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Well, you have dragons, Oh okay, I'm thinking of breath
weapon or.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
You know, some sort of magical effects or or you know,
you know, other like high potency explosives. I don't know,
but certainly dragon fire it seems like that might be
the kind of thing that could produce fulgar rides in
some cases.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
In D and D what level of electricity spells like
lightning or thunderbolt spells you have to get to to
make fulgar ride.

Speaker 4 (58:45):
I think it would happen right away. I mean, just
your as soon as you're able to forget off the
top of my head, I don't have make character sheet
in front of me.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
I can't remember.

Speaker 4 (58:52):
You know, you get the lightning bolt spell and then
you can like really ramp it up depending on what
what spell over you're casting at. But right out the gate,
it's pretty strong spell, especially if you can get your
enemies to line up.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
That's my favorite part.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
Get them wet right.

Speaker 4 (59:06):
Yeah, but sometimes that's where you have to like make
a case for it with your dungeon master. But if
your dungeon master makes a mistake of lining up all
of the villains, all of the bad guys, all the
monsters in us in a row, and you're able to
move your your player to the side of them, you're
able to flank them, then you can just like shoot
that lightning bolt straight down the middle. And if they're

(59:27):
you know, made up of land, you create fulgar rides.

Speaker 3 (59:30):
Oh yeah based enemies.

Speaker 4 (59:31):
Oh yeah, yeah, there's some sand based creatures. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
There's some sort of lightning spells on like a rock elemental.

Speaker 4 (59:39):
Yeah, have some sort of sand golm that sort of thing. Yeah,
then you have a fulgar ride golum and that's a
whole new thing you have to contend with.

Speaker 3 (59:46):
Okay, does that do it for today?

Speaker 2 (59:49):
I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (59:50):
This has been a blast. You know, this is not
our normal recording scenario, but I had a lot of
fun doing it. Thanks to the studio here at Baja Mar,
great staff, great facilities. This has been a lot of fun, totally. Yeah,
it's good seeing you in person, Rob.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:00:07):
Yeah, Normally we're still doing the zoom thing, so we
were not in the same space when we do it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
So yeah, this has been a lot of fun.

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
As always, we put the call out to listeners though
if you have things you want to add to the
topics we discussed here, certainly you know, getting into the
sci fi visions, but also your own experience with sand
and even just where you fall on the whole love
hate relationship with beach Sand.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
Write in. We would love to hear from you.

Speaker 4 (01:00:33):
Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast.
We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form
episodes on Wednesdays and then on Fridays we set aside
most serious concerns, so just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema. We've been doing this for a
long time. At this point, you can find a pretty
deep archive of Stuff to Blow Your Mind wherever you

(01:00:55):
get your audio podcasts, and some of you out there
are watching this in video from on.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Netflix and you can find more recent.

Speaker 4 (01:01:04):
Episodes there, and we're going to continue to roll out
that video content moving forward for the foreseeable future.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway,
and big thanks to our guest producer today, Carlisle.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yes, Carlisle.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
The BacT