Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  Not to rush things, but Earth will be destroyed within a couple billion years anyways, either 1) when the Sun grows large enough to consume our planet; 2) when Andromeda, a galaxy twice as large than our own, crashes into the Milky Way at one million kilometers per hour (creating the Milkymeda or the Andromeda Way); or 3) when the Milky Way, which is part of a galactic club dubbed the Local Group, slams into the Virgo Cluster. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe bound by gravity (well, technically, super-clusters are), some containing 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way. Each galaxy has millions of black holes, so a galaxy cluster could have billions of black holes, all heading our way. Talk about a cluster-fuck.

  Our Milky Way galaxy itself has shredded hundreds of smaller galaxies, and even now is devouring the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius, a la Borg. (A “dwarf” galaxy has less than a billion stars, compared to one trillion for the big boys). 15-20 mini-galaxies orbit the Milky Way like moons around a planet.

  And just when one thought it couldn’t get any worse, astronomers using radio telescopes discovered an invisible galaxy, presumably made of either dark matter or antimatter, in the Virgo Cluster, 50 million light-years away, but closing quickly. The entire galaxy, called VIRGOHI21 (because Holy Fucking Shit was already taken), has no visible stars, even though it had enough mass to qualify as a galaxy. Invisible galaxies may not be pretty, but, in astronomy terms, they are still rather attractive.

  Since matter and antimatter explode on contact, and since that explosion is the most powerful known to science, it will be interesting for our doomed descendants to watch an entire invisible galaxy full of the stuff crash into our neighborhood at a million kilometers per hour.

  The professor obsessed over space-related philosophy.

  Will the universe expand forever, each galaxy hundreds of millions of light years from each other, such that one dominant intelligent life form expands throughout one galaxy but no more? Or will each galaxy have thousands of intelligent life forms living in peace or battling to the death? Will the empires of technologically superior life forms resemble the relationships between nations on Earth? Each galaxy could end up with just one dominant intelligent life form, unable to detect, meet or communicate with those in other galaxies, hundreds of millions of light years away.

  Or will the universe one day begin to contract and collapse back onto itself in a “Big Crunch”, a karmic version of the Big Bang? If everything else has a life cycle, then why not the universe itself? Since it is 13.7 billion years old and still growing, and assuming it will contract no faster than it expanded, then its life span could be 30 billion years. Or eternity. We just didn’t know, and the professor desperately wanted to know. Although he was dying of curiosity, it pained him to die just to find out the question to the big, “What If.”

  Is the universe infinite, or just really, really big? Is it eternal, or just really, really old? Einstein believed that only the universe and human stupidity were potentially infinite. The “universe”, by definition, means everything in its totality, so if the universe is expanding, then just what the hell is it expanding into? If you sat at the very edge of the universe, what would you see? Besides the restaurant from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. By expanding, is the universe turning nothingness into empty space? How would you tell the difference? How can the universe be the totality of all things that exist if it gets bigger?

  And if God made us, then why the hell did he wait 13 billion years after the first planets formed? Are we that unimportant, or is he that patient? As Nietzsche put it, is God a blunder of man, or man a blunder of God? Humans separated from chimps several million years ago, so why wait millions of years before sending Jesus? Why bother making quadrillions of planets if we are so unique? He could have made Earth and taken the rest of the week off.

  And some things just freaked him out. Like voids.

  A void is not a lot of room with almost nothing in it, like interstellar space. Even tiny amounts of dust and gas exist between star systems and the millions of light years between galaxies. Even rogue planets are occasionally thrown between star systems and galaxies. Those are not voids, but lots of space with little in them.

  Voids are totally different. Voids have absolutely no matter, antimatter, dark matter or dark energy because they give off absolutely no heat or variance in heat. A void is devoid of all thermal radiation. Their temperature is always absolute zero.

  Nobody believed they could exist until they found one in 2007 that was ten million billion kilometers in diameter. That void, called the Big Fucking Void to not confuse it with the Bush Administration, was one billion light years across. 10 million billion kilometers without anything in it. No dirt, no bacteria, no water. No shit. Even Nirvana has a Buddha or two.

  The professor somehow found it easier to accept that God can make Something out of Nothing than he can make Nothing out of Something. No matter how lost you have ever been using Yahoo Maps, you have never been ten million billion kilometers from the nearest sunlight.

  Did it become this big, or was it always this big? How big must Nothing grow until it becomes Something? How can nothing exist? If it’s nothing, then by definition it does not exist. Yet, Zen-like, it does.

  The Milky Way galaxy has 300 billion stars, yet this void is 10,000 times bigger than the Milky Way. That’s a lot of nothing. Some things are better than nothing. Voids, apparently, are not.

  It would be convenient to write this off as a freak accident, a unique anomaly, except there were lots of voids. Millions, probably, although it’s hard to see something that isn’t really there. Unless it stars on reality TV.

  Maybe astronomers should specialize in studying absolutely fucking nothing. We can’t all be slackers. You can’t have a map of the universe, much less a Hitchhiker’s Guide, without noting the billion-light-year holes where time and freaking space literally do not exist. It is difficult to even imagine a place where Father Time and Mother Nature have not hooked up.

  After Paris Hilton, it was the biggest nothing in the universe. Maybe the Big Fucking Void is the undisclosed location where Vice President Cheney hid all those years. Even Hell had stuff -- fire, brimstone, self-righteous sanctimonious hypocritical Republicans.

  The professor wanted to study what was immediately around the BFV – galaxies, dust clouds, freaked out astronomy professors on one-way trips. Where else can you watch Something stop and Nothing begin? He wanted to see the space-time continuum just stop continuing.

  Maybe this void is Heaven, since Heaven is where you go when you have nothing to do and eternity to do it in.

  Lost in thought, it took him a long moment to realize that someone was instant messaging him. He clicked to accept a video link, and saw the scared face of the director of Kitt Peak, Dr. Dennis Kowalski.

  “Professor! Something happened to Gabrielle.”

  He instinctively looked at his wife’s urn on a mantle, then at the spaceship on his computer screen, before realizing that Dennis was talking about the new asteroid that the local astronomy community named in his wife’s honor. Strange, the professor thought. Dennis was not the easily excitable type.

  Yet Dr. Kowalski was practically screaming:

  “And it looks likes it’s coming straight for us!”

  5

  Cooper put the Google map away and turned off the dome light as he finally found the long driveway. His headlights led him in the open gates between the 12-foot tall red brick walls. The place looked as deserted as the desert around it.

  In his rearview mirror Cooper saw sunlight stretch over the eastern mountains as the Sun finally began showing up, diminished by the asteroid slowly eclipsing it. It would be hot in a few hours. Fucking desert. From west Texas to Hesperia, nothing but dirt, dust, and tumbleweeds.

  Jackson placed his custom-built, 10,000 square foot home against a ring of hills for natural protection. The tall wrought-iron gate had “Guarded by Smith & Wesson” and “Beware of Owner” signs. Which was bullshi
t. Jackson preferred a Glock and traveled frequently. Ever since his family was attacked in their Phoenix home a decade ago, he kept enough weapons to qualify for an armory. Cooper himself owned guns he never used (which is Texan for “pussy”), but even he thought Jackson a bit paranoid.

  Cooper turned his headlights off as motion detectors turned on lights, illuminating the driveway and the path to the front door. He parked his borrowed green Hummer to the left to what looked like a sky blue spaceship from the Jetsons. The white concrete path to the porch sat to his left and the odd car to his right. The shadows from the house lights danced like demons on the alien-looking car, giving Cooper the creeps.

  Cooper stared at the strange car, lost in thought. He had to get into the right mindset before tackling Henry Fucking Jackson. Jackson sometimes came across as a Neanderthal, but one doesn’t build several multi-billion dollar businesses by being stupid. Besides, he arrived early, so he might as well enjoy the Sun coming up before fighting his greatest battle against his biggest supporter.

  Cooper had been to Jackson’s house before, but the four frictionless residential windmills rotating at all four corners still surprised him. The white, three-fingered turbines made it look like the house was about to fly away. It still seemed strange that he couldn’t hear them. Because they use maglev instead of ball bearings, weaker winds could still turn the blades, increasing total electricity output. Gearboxes in conventional wind turbines require high maintenance from constant stress due to wind turbulence, whereas these connect the rotor shaft directly to the generator. Slower rotational speed is offset by magnets spinning around a larger diameter, and thus higher speed, which produces more current in the generator coil. Maglev thus costs less to maintain while generating greater overall electricity by taking advantage of slower winds.

  Jackson made both the body and the blades from amorphous metal, a new material several times stronger and lighter than steel. Weaker winds can turn lighter blades, while stronger winds spin them more than heavier blades.

  The residential frictionless windmills had three 12-foot blades and contour edges to keep noise below 45 decibels, the level of background noise. Sound isolators made of hardened neoprene rubber absorbed the vibrations before they reach the roof. The easy-to-install, plug-and-play windmills also rotate automatically, both vertically and horizontally, to catch the strongest breezes, so all four of them turned together like dancers when the wind changed direction. They were easy to install because they integrated once-separate components into one turbine body and connected four simple wires directly to the circuit breaker box. Incorporating them into the design of homes reduced the cost even more. Most homes only needed one, but Henry Jackson naturally had four installed to help split waste water into hydrogen gas.

  Cooper envied Jackson’s wealth. Growing up poor made Cooper determined to die rich. And Jackson being such a rich bastard was one of the reasons Cooper didn’t want to help him become richer.

  Democrats taking the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections convinced Jackson that Democrats would also win the presidency in 2008. If so, Democrats would probably take the $17 billions in annual federal tax breaks and subsidies that Republicans on average gave dirty energy companies every fucking year and give them instead to clean energy companies. For example, Bush unilaterally reduced offshore royalties for oil companies by $60 billion over several years. Democrats could give clean energy $60 billion just by reversing that one action. If a Democratic president and Congress simply gave dirty energy tax breaks to the clean energy industry, production would explode.

  So Jackson doubled down on clean energy, pouring billions into new projects, factories, and research. He soon had the world’s best organic solar, wind turbines, and ultracapacitors.

  Jackson also wanted to get into deep geothermal, drilling a couple miles deep until hitting extremely hot steam. They did this in Iceland, but it cost a lot to go through so many expensive diamond bits. So Jackson partnered with a drill bit company to set their best diamonds into his amorphous metal drill bits, which could withstand several times the heat and stress. Contrary to common assumptions, it was not the diamonds that break down, but the steel bit that encases them. High temperatures combined with constant friction inevitably weakens steel. Jackson’s solution promised to make deep thermal far more economical.

  Then Barack Obama lost to John McCain, and a pissed-off Jackson decided to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee to recoup his investments.

  Cooper secretly hoped that Jackson fell flat on his ass.

  Instead, Jackson started making buildings out of amorphous metal to use his excess clean energy products.

  Because of its resistance to fatigue, creeping, impact, buckling, corrosion, overload, rupture, thermal shock, wear and yielding, amorphous metal is widely considered the structural material of the future. It can form like a plastic and be injection-molded in one piece, instead of weakening it by taking sheet metal and cutting, drilling, and machining it to death. Not having to machine it after casting saves time, machinery, and expensive expertise, yet also makes it inherently stronger structurally.

  Unlike most metals, metallic glass doesn’t dent, tear, or rust, and is imperious to bugs, humidity, and common fires. It is also light, strong, and ten times more “springy” than steel. When molted into a foam that is 99% air, it is still 100% stronger than polystyrene. Amorphous foam sandwiched between thin sheets of amorphous sheet metal would dampen sound, be bomb and bullet resistant, fireproof, corrosion-proof, and bug-proof. It is so tough that a dime-thin sheet cannot be cut with heavy bolt cutters, making it great for fences, safes, and locks. Made from ultra-pure boron, silicon, and phosphorus, it is tougher than ceramics and has twice the tensile strength of the highest-grade titanium. Amorphous metal is the only material with a better strength-to-weight ratio than titanium.

  Several times stronger yet several times lighter than steel, metallic glass would be the perfect material if it weren’t so expensive. Which was why Jackson invested billions to get huge economies of scale.

  Metals are crystalline, with highly ordered atom arrangements, whereas amorphous metals are non-crystalline. Although strictly speaking a “glass”, in that it has a disordered structure produced from a liquid state during cooling, it doesn’t have grain boundaries, the weak defects in crystalline materials, which gives metallic glass much better resistance to wear, tear, and corrosion. As true glasses, they soften and flow when heated, which allows for easy injection molding like polymers without abrasion powder or shrinkage when solidified. Hammering a crystalline metal will bend or dent it because the blow’s kinetic energy flows along the grain boundaries. Because atoms in amorphous metal are tightly packed and without grain boundaries, they bounce back to their original form.

  Perhaps inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Jackson started making pre-fab homes made out of amorphous metal. Like modular homes, Jackson completed them in mass-production factories with cheap Chinese labor, then stacked them on ships like standard containers. From the port, helicopters airlifted them directly from the ship.

  The homes were shipped complete: doors, wiring, plumbing, fixtures, etc, which saved thousands of dollars not employing expensive local tradesmen like electricians, plumbers, and roofers. Only the window glass was made locally. The entire house, from the floor, walls, and roof, were built with amorphous metal with an expanded polystyrene insulating core that eliminated thermal bridging. They were moisture, fire, insect, and sound resistant, never rusted, and allowed virtually no air infiltration for lower heating and cooling costs. Amorphous steel was lighter than aluminum, yet stronger than titanium, so it did not need structural supports to bear the weight of the light amorphous metal roof. That not only saved a lot of rebar to support the structure, but also allowed for a thinner concrete foundation that was easier, faster, and cheaper to build.

  Although it cost several thousand to ship from China to Los Angeles, he saved many times that using cheap Chinese labor a
nd materials. To reduce shipping costs, he often contracted out an entire ship to carry thousands of his homes at once.

  He coated every roof with white organic solar. White reflective roofing absorbs roughly 10% of the sun’s energy versus up to 90% for black tops. Organic solar was only a quarter as energy efficient as solar panels, but cost ten times less, and yielded the same electricity by covering the entire roof. Better yet, Jackson saved several thousand dollars per home in state and federal tax breaks by qualifying for the EPA’s Energy Star program because it lowered air conditioning costs in sunny climates by 25%. Which really pissed Cooper off when he praised them in speeches.

  And it helped slow global warming. If every roof in the world was white, it would save 25 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or what the entire world produces every year. Wal-Mart had white roofs so far on 75% of its 4300 stores.

  Jackson loved these homes because they incorporated his organic solar, residential windmills, tankless solar water heaters, and ultracapacitors. He eliminated natural gas pipelines by using only electric appliances and a hydrogen gas tank for the clothes dryer. During the housing boom, he built entire communities in California deserts from Palm Dale to Hesperia to Sun City because California has tax breaks that made Jackson several thousand extra dollars per home. Thousands of his homes sat where the 10 and 15 freeways meet in San Bernardino going up the El Cajon pass.

  Jackson built his clean energy communities in the desert because land was cheap, sunshine plentiful, and wind abundant. But it also required minimizing water usage and maximizing water conservation and recycling. So the homes used synthetic grass lawns, chemical toilets, and powered their water treatment with excess solar. Separating the piss and shit out with chemical toilets dramatically cut the cost of treating waste water. This multiplied the carrying capacity of desert living -- vital since global warming caused several years of extreme drought in the Southwest.