Gaussling is a senior scientist in the chemical business. He occasionally breaks glassware, spreads confusion and has been known to generate new forms of hazardous waste. Gaussling also digs aerospace, geology, and community theatre.
In a YouTube interview recently, Roger Penrose commented that one of his beefs with quantum mechanics (QM) was that it depends on consciousness collapsing a wave function. He said much more, but this struck me deeply. I have been struggling for years trying to verbalize my own brain-stem level suspicions. (To be clear, a Venn diagram with Penrose and myself overlap only insofar as we are both English speaking bipedal mammals.)
He also commented that by “wrong” he means “incomplete” and recalled that both Einstein and Schrodinger agreed on this. He noted that “incomplete” constitutes “wrong”. In another interview he comments that Schrodinger’s Cat was meant to illustrate that the superposition of a cat being both dead and alive was a problem that Schrodinger recognized. A cat cannot really be dead and alive simultaneously.
He said that while QM was about more than the evolution of a quantum state, it is also about measurement, but the measurement problem violates the quantum equation. QM gives the probability of a given state which is a superposition of probabilities.
QM is not my specialty, however, I have coursework in it like all chemists have had. In grad school I had quantum chemistry, again like all chem grad students have had, but it nearly did me in. Not having had a semester of diff eq, I was at a distinct disadvantage. Grad school QM goes well beyond the particle in a 1-dimensional box. The course consisted of mathematical derivations of the theory, but not much about the meaning in English. We were supposed to see the equations in their abstract purity and extrapolate to some kind of comfort level with notions our brains could grasp. It was based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM. Philosophically, the notion that the wave function would collapse on inspection by a brain was an idea that even today I cannot get past.
Penrose had a similar beef except that he is Roger Penrose and I’m some lesser ape gawping in from up the holler. Still, though I’m doomed to go to my grave with only very rudimentary understanding of QM, the concept of probability density all by itself as well as the spherical harmonics defining atomic orbitals has been a major benefit for my thinking. And for that I’m grateful.
Below is a cut & paste copy of text from Wikipedia outlining Penrose’s ideas-
Penrose’s idea is a type of objective collapse theory. For these theories, the wavefunction is a physical wave, which experiences wave function collapse as a physical process, with observers not having any special role. Penrose theorises that the wave function cannot be sustained in superposition beyond a certain energy difference between the quantum states. He gives an approximate value for this difference: a Planck mass worth of matter, which he calls the “‘one-graviton’ level”.[1] He then hypothesizes that this energy difference causes the wave function to collapse to a single state, with a probability based on its amplitude in the original wave function, a procedure derived from standard quantum mechanics. Penrose’s “‘one-graviton’ level” criterion forms the basis of his prediction, providing an objective criterion for wave function collapse.[1] Despite the difficulties of specifying this in a rigorous way, he proposes that the basis states into which the collapse takes place are mathematically described by the stationary solutions of the Schrödinger–Newton equation.[4][5] Recent theoretical work indicates an increasingly deep inter-relation between quantum mechanics and gravitation.[6][7]Wikipedia.
I just donated to Wikipedia so I don’t feel too bad about this cut & paste. Please donate to Wikipedia. We want to avoid a paywall being put up in front of it.
Note: This essay is written to explore an idea theoretically. It is not a call to arms.
It’s funny that conservatives in the US have always clung to the Second Amendment to the Constitution as a lifeline against government tyranny. Maybe a liberally inflected approach should be constructed for the left? I own an antique Ruger revolver sitting in storage somewhere. Perhaps it is time to upgrade to a 9 mm pistol? Afterall, if conservatives are free to parade around with firearms as a means of intimidation, why shouldn’t a liberal such as myself.
Rednecks and incels enjoy dressing up in tactical gear with weapons bristling from their portly, scraggly bearded, tattooed torsos, claiming only to be expressing their right to carry guns in a peaceful democratic nation. If they can give a show of force, why couldn’t a liberal militia? A liberal militia would tell the MAGA militias to expect return fire.
The true utility of a firearm is the ability to commit violence accurately from a safe distance. An arrow from the bow of a skilled archer is also capable of this, but at a lower magnitude. Slings and spears can deliver hazardous energy from a distance, but at an even lower magnitude. Body armor and shields were developed to protect the wearer from arrows, spears, axes, clubs, and stones. The lethality of a ball from an early flintlock musket or pistol might be less effective than guns from today, but they still inflicted considerable damage to people. The utility of using gunpowder to propel an object for impact was realized maybe within a century after the invention of gunpowder.
How would MAGA-types respond to a liberal militia? Having known numerous gun totin’ MAGA guys and actually being related to a few, I can say that this would stimulate gales of laughter and howls of derision. So confident are they in their legitimate sense of superiority with weapons that they would automatically reject the notion of a ‘liberal militia’. Many MAGAs are ex-military and have genuine expertise in the military arts. Their abilities are not to be underestimated.
/* Begin Anecdote */
I once had a sales assistant who was ex-army. His hobby was breeding green tree pythons and always kept a plastic shoe box with snake hatchlings in his office desk for show & tell. He would get in these moods where he would ‘joke’ that he could kill me before I even knew it was possible through stealth and excellent marksmanship. All I could say was “for your sake, I hope you don’t miss”. It was inconceivable to him that I, a non-military dude, could be a threat of any kind. Afterall, the US Army had trained him to kill efficiently. He eventually left to manage a Wal-Mart in Oregon.
/* End Anecdote */
A liberal militia. What an idea. It would have to have a secretive cache and be open only to those wiling to hold a concealed weapon permit and agree to training. But instead of hiding deep in the woods up the holler, liberals could limit their activities to the public gun range. I do not believe for a second that a ‘liberal militia’ could out gun a MAGA militia, ever. In fact, the very idea of return fire would stir their juices and make them eager for a fire fight.
But a liberal militia would not initiate a gun battle. There would be a strict policy of no first use. The idea would be that either side would know that bloodletting would happen on both sides. Sort of a mutual assured destruction.
Of greater impact could be the political effect. The presence of two opposing civilian armed forces, both resting on the same 2nd Amendment could have enough of a chilling effect on congress as to cause them to take some sort of legislative action to tamp down hostilities. Or not. The current congress could make hostilities worse.
Let’s say that violence between MAGA and liberal militias happens. it would be interesting to see if the current administration stepped in as a neutral party. My guess today is that favoritism would be shown to the MAGA side.
Why this idea? It has become apparent to me that the current political hostility fulminating in the right wing will not be lessened by expressions of respect by liberals. The Charlie Kirk fiasco has increased magnitude and urgency of right wing hostility, regardless of any empathy from the left. This matter could well take a decade or more of chaos before it quells and settles into some kind of quasi-peaceful equilibrium if left on its own.
The central bad guy in the White House is Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff. The putrid and fulminating stream of urine issuing from the White House seems to be devised by him. This guy is refractory to anything resembling compromise. He sees non-MAGA thinking as evil- his words. Question is, how to bring him down legally.
First let me say that I have never been a smoker, drug user or sun bather. As a chemist I have always been cautious about chemical exposure. I have numerous cancers now with the two serious ones in remission. The new ones- who knows.
I use a university hospital and have been visited by flocks of med students looking at me in wonder, sometimes looking down my throat. I get a kick out of it. I always try to joke with them. All cancer diagnoses go before a faculty tumor board for collective assessment. That in particular drew me to this hospital.
My experience with numerous radiation, medical, ENT, and head & neck oncologists is that they absolutely do not want to discuss end of life issues. Maybe that is because I’m not near the end yet, though. But more likely they have production quotas and need to stick to the timeline. My head and neck oncologist did say that they were trying to keep me above the grass, though. That was cheerful.
Since July 22 of this year, I’ve had a partial glossectomy to remove a tumor resulting in a nickel-sized piece of the left edge of my tongue being removed, my first colonoscopy, a neck dissection looking for more cancer, and tomorrow is a root canal. Sonofabitch!
The glossectomy resulted in giving me slurred speech and then the neck dissection made it much worse with the added joy of serious swallowing difficulty. Liquids must be thickened with carrageenan gum to mostly avoid inhalation of food and drink. I’ve already been hospitalized with pneumonia resulting from inhaled food.
My 68th birthday was last week and while I received my well wishes, not a single person was moved to suggest a gerontologist, elder care facility or even as little as when the word “elderly” is used. I’m left up in the air …
It never occurred to me earlier in life that a piece of my tongue could be sliced out. What part of your body is more intimate in your daily consciousness than your mouth? I’ve had surgeons say “give me control of your tongue”. A fella doesn’t hear that very often.
The colonoscopy revealed 2 polyps suspected of being cancerous. So, to tally up the score, I have stage 4 prostate cancer, stage 4 throat cancer, tongue cancer, basil cell skin cancer, and possible colon cancer. Jesus H. Christ!! What next?.
The radiation of my throat resulted in the loss of about 1/2 of my salivary glands and taste buds. I’ve had dry mouth since radiation treatment in 2013, resulting in the loss of numerous teeth.
I was given radiation treatment of my prostate in 2014 and again last summer when the PSA score breached the 4.0 level. Since the 2014 treatment the thinking has changed on radiation dosage. Previously I was given about 1.8 Gray per dose. This time it was 5.0 Gray per dose over fewer doses. The thinking is that it is better to try to break the cancer cell DNA in 2 places at once rather than in just one place. In two rounds of x-radiation treatment of my prostate, I have experienced no pain or discomfort. I’ve had two rounds of 18F-Glucose injections for PET/CT scans.
The throat radiation was a different story. It gave me the world’s worst sore throat. I was fed through a stomach tube and was on opioids for an extended period. Let me say that I detest opioids and the constipation they bring. How do opioid addicts deal with this??
The throat cancer was from the HPV virus and that form is quite treatable, fortunately for me. The tongue cancer was also a squamous cell carcinoma but not of HPV origin.
Life on our lonely pale blue dot is strange. I’ll never get a full grasp of it. I’ll be on the top side of the grass for a while yet and until that changes, I’ll still be a student of the sciences and will continue to write about it.
Today I have a slightly different demographic of readers of this blog than in the past, so I’ve been dredging up old posts into the light of day. This is a renamed post from September 3, 2011. I’ve changed some wording to be a bit more mellifluous if that’s even possible.
==========
I’ve had this notion (a conceit, really) that as someone from both academia and industry, I should reach out to my colleagues in academia in order to bring some awareness of how chemistry is conducted off-campus. After many, many conversations, an accumulating pile of work in local ACS section activities, and visits to schools, what I’ve found is not what I expected. I expected a bit more academic curiosity about how large-scale chemical manufacturing and commerce works and perhaps what life is like at a chemical plant. I’d guessed that my academic associates might be intrigued by the marvels of the global chemical manufacturing complex and product process development. Many academics would rather not get all grubby with filthy lucre. Not surprisingly, though, they already have enough to stay on top of.
What I’ve found is more along the lines of polite disinterest. I’ve sensed this all along, but I’d been trying to sustain the hope that if only I could use the right words, I might elicit some interest in how manufacturing works- that I could strike some kind of spark. But what I’ve found is just how insular the magisterium of academia really is. The walls of the fortress are very thick. I’m on a reductionist jsg right now so I’ll declare that chemistry curricula is firmly in place on the three pillars of chemistry- theory, synthesis, and analysis. In truth, textbooks often set the structure of courses. A four-year ACS certified chemistry curriculum spares only a tiny bit of room for applied science. I certainly cannot begrudge departments for structuring around that format. Professors who can include much outside the usual range of academic chemistry seem scarce.
It could easily be argued that the other magisteria of industry and government are the same way. Well, except for one niggling detail. Academia supplies educated people to the other great domains comprising society. We seem to be left with the standard academic image of what a chemical scientist should look like going deeply into the next 50 years. Professors are scholars and they produce what they best understand- more scholars in their own image. This is only natural. I’ve done a bit of it myself.
Here is my sweeping claim (imagine waving hands overhead)- on a number’s basis, chemists apparently aren’t that aware of industrial chemical synthesis as they come out of a BA/BS program. That is my conclusion based on interviewing many fresh chemistry graduates. I’ve interviewed BA/BS chemists who have had undergraduate research experience in nanomaterials and atomic force microscopy but could not draw a reaction scheme for the Fisher esterification to form ethyl acetate, much less identify the peaks on 1HNMR. As a former organic assistant prof, I find it sobering and a little unexpected.
A mechanistic understanding of carbon chemistry is one of the keepsakes of a year of sophomore organic chemistry. It is a window into the Ångstrom-scale machinations of nature. The good news is that the forgetful job candidate usually can be coached into remembering the chemistry. After a year of sophomore Orgo, most students are just glad the ordeal is over and they still may not be out of the running for medical school.
I think the apparent lack of interest in industry is because few have even the slightest idea of what is done in a chemical plant and how chemists are woven into operations.
To a large extent, the chemical industry is concerned with making stuff. So perhaps it is only natural that most academic chemists (in my limited sample set) aren’t that keen on anything greater than a superficial view of the manufacturing world. I understand this and acknowledge reality. But it is a shame that institutional inertia is so large in magnitude in this. Chemical industry needs chemists of all sorts who are willing to help rebuild and sustain manufacturing in North America. We need startups with cutting edge technology, but we also need companies who are able to produce the fine chemical items of commerce. Have you tried to find a company willing and able to do bromination in the USA lately? A great deal of small molecule manufacture has moved offshore.
Offshoring of chemical manufacturing was not led by chemists. It was conceived of by spreadsheeting MBAs, C-suite engineers and boards of directors. It has been a cost saving measure that mathematically made sense on spreadsheets and PowerPoint slide decks. The capital costs of expansion of capacity could be borne by others in exchange for supply contracts. There is nothing mathematically wrong with this idea. Afterall, corporate officers have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Allowing profit opportunities to pass by is not the way to climb the corporate ladder.
We have become dependent on foreign suppliers in key areas who have control over our raw material supply. Part of control is having manufacturing capacity and closer access to basic feedstocks.
The gap between academia and industry is mainly cultural. But it is a big gap that may not be surmountable, and I’m not sure that the parties want to mix. But, I’ll keep trying.
The United States Geological Survey, USGS, has released an interactive geological map that includes 4 layers of stratigraphy- Surface, Quaternary, Pre-Quaternary and Precambrian layers with color coded rock units displayed. A click of the cursor on the map reveals the type of rock unit chosen. The website is called The Cooperative National Geologic Map.
What is the deal with Russia? Why do the Russian people tolerate the lack of basic freedoms we in the West are accustomed to? Dissatisfaction with their government has been there since the beginning. Hundreds of millions have been deprived of liberty and prosperity following Russian revolution.
The history of early 20th century reveals the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). Later, after much blood and treasure was spilled after the revolution and then through the cold war, the Soviet Union collapsed after a brief attempt at openness. Many around the world saw the collapse as a positive thing and a sign of better times ahead, especially for the people of the former USSR. There was hope in the West for a transition to some variety of Russian-tinted democracy and for freedoms heretofore absent for the average citizens of the former USSR.
To Russians in power, the very idea of a democratic republic is alien and inconceivable. There is a baseline level of distrust and fear of the infectiousness of the democratic spirit among Russian/Soviet leadership. Even the population has been convinced that the moral collapse of the West would spread to their homeland without an iron-fisted leader.
For a part of the world that has been strangling under autocratic rule and economic stratification since before the time of the Tsars, there has not been a historical Russian-style power sharing agreement between the monarchy and the nobility or the serfs from which to build upon. After generations of polarization by Soviet propaganda focused on Western hegemony and the moral turpitude of the West, there was no likelihood of building upon a Western style democratic model. The Russian propaganda engine continues to this day as strong as ever but with the help of the internet, artificial intelligence and widespread political indifference or gullibility.
The decade of the 1990’s following the collapse of the former USSR was a time of redistribution of wealth for a lucky few. Large Soviet industrial sectors were absorbed by a few private interests, producing fabulously wealthy oligarchs. This did not go unnoticed by the populace, who simmered in anger over it because they expected a freedom and prosperity dividend from the collapse. Amidst the confusion and dissatisfaction with Russian President Yeltsin, there arose a growing sense that Russia needed a strongman leader. Many even spoke admiringly of Stalin.
The collapse of the USSR left an internal power vacuum that would soon be filled by former Soviet citizens. Boris Yeltsin was elected President of Russia in December 1991 and remained as President until 1999 when his selected successor Prime Minister and former FSB director Vlad Putin took over as acting president. Putin was elected president in May of 2000.
I’ve been trying to understand why present-day Russia seems so … belligerent. My focus to start with is Putin. Rather than being a one-of-a-kind freak of nature, Putin is rather ordinary as a dictator except that his regime has a nuclear triad. Until its invasion of Ukraine, Russia also had the benefit of whatever left-over respect it may have had from its Soviet military reputation. But that has changed dramatically.
Putin has long expressed the view that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy. He wants to rebuild the stature of Russia into a global superpower. Soviet leaders held the view that in order for Moscow to be safe from attack by the West, the Slavic eastern European countries bordering Western Russia had to be under the wing of the Kremlin. It was this deep boundary in combination with the Russian winter that helped to wear down the invasions of Napolean and Hitler. Both armies were substantially weakened by traversing the extensive farmlands and steppes of Ukraine and Poland. It is difficult to believe that this thinking has changed since the collapse.
When the USSR collapsed it left much more than empty senior positions and titles to fill. The Soviet governing apparatus was abandoned when the Kremlin finally conceded that the USSR was economically unsustainable. Even a culture built upon bribery and corruption needs an all-encompassing structural skeleton to manifest its national identity and sustain an economy, security and a global presence. Even a corrupt government needs some sustainability.
Unfortunately for present day Russia, extensive government bribery and corruption in all sectors was already baked in from Soviet times. On a practical level, getting things done involved bribery. Bribes were expected and paid as a matter of routine in the military and all other areas of government. Today there have been show trials with certain high-level officials being tried, convicted and imprisoned on bribery charges. It gives the population bread and circuses to consume and hopefully optimism for a brighter future.
The USSR and later the Russian Federation did not have the benefit of English common law which evolved from the Magna Carta. Born of earlier conquest by the Rus, the Bolsheviks had nothing to build upon for a more democratic legal system like the American colonists had. Overall, Bolsheviks forcibly switched from monarchy to an autocratic socialist empire. Conquest of the tsarist Russian empire by the Bolsheviks was difficult because there were numerous groups vying for power, leading to the Russian civil war following the 1917 revolution.
Although Putin and the cranky Dimitry Medvedev have done a bit of nuclear saber rattling, the West has been concerned about Russian nukes since their very first test in the late 1940’s, so not much new here. Putin’s stern public warnings about nuclear retaliation were not necessary for the Western experts to be on alert. This apparent “virtue signaling” in the form of a public warning by Putin is just a part of Russia’s overall hybrid warfare approach. They’ll use every word and inflection uttered by Russian and Western media as well as the Kremlin to fortify their propaganda with doubt, suspicion and existential threats. They are also actively injecting propaganda into every media stream in the West they can manage. Putin’s dire public warnings about lowering the threshold for a tactical nuclear release were meant to cause a great clenching of public sphincters with the usual fear and loathing leading to internal political pressure for its enemies.
/*begin anecdote/*
Russia’s triad of Soviet-era nuclear weapons have been aging in storage. Are Russian nuclear bomb designs immune to shelf-life issues? By comparison, American-style nuclear weapons have a relatively short shelf-life because of their boosted triggers. According to one source, the entire US nuclear arsenal of nuclear triggers are boosted. American nuclear trigger designs have a short shelf-life stemming from tritium’s 4500 +/- 8 day half-life or 12.32 years (NIST, 2000). US fission triggers have a hollow core which contains a 1 to 1 deuterium-tritium mixture. This booster gas undergoes fusion during ignition in the center of the core and increases the fission yield by the release of abundant 14 MeV neutrons into the surrounding fissile material. With the use of a booster to breed neutrons, the critical mass of fissile explosive is reduced because more neutrons are dispersed to initiate a runaway fission while under intense compression. The reduced mass of fissile material in a bomb is also resistant to unintended ignition by a nearby source of neutrons, like a nearby nuclear explosion.
Tritium is 3H, with 1 proton and 2 neutrons. It undergoes a beta decay where a neutron decays to a proton and an ejected electron, forming 3Helium with 2 protons and a neutron. So, wouldn’t you know, 3Helium is a poison with a very high neutron capture cross section. An aging booster gas loses its tritium potency as well as gaining an effective neutron poison.
But for this application to work, an ongoing supply of tritium is required. Tritium must be produced in a breeder reactor or accelerator. In addition to its short half-life, tritium decay is problematic to monitor because of its low 5.7 keV average beta radiation energy. Tritium atoms or molecules can be detected and measured by mass spectroscopy, but its beta decay radiation requires special equipment to detect. Tritium emits very low energy, low penetrating beta particles which are limited to 6 mm of travel in air and are blocked by the dead layer of skin cells on the surface of the skin. Getting through the window of a Geiger-Muller tube is a problem. So, measurement of tritium activity requires a liquid scintillation detector or an ionization chamber. A sample of radioactive material is dissolved in a vial of scintillation cocktail and run through a scintillation detector which detects faint flashes of light corresponding particle emissions. Perhaps detectors using scintillation crystals like cesium iodide are available for tritium detection.
/*end anecdote/*
A History of Conflict
The lands of Eurasia have, over time, been overprinted with layers upon of layers of conflict over thousands of years. While it may seem reasonable to assume that the current national borders of Europe have finally overcome the urge for military conquest, this seems over-optimistic. The ease with which Putin dashed in to grab large tracts of Ukraine in 2014 show that land-grab invasions are not just left to the past.
The more you learn about the last 4000 years of history of the lands covering the British Isles to Portugal to Mongolia to north Africa and the Levant, the more apparent it is that battles of conquest and defense have overwhelmingly been the norm.
There have been so many armies who have fought bloody battles and died or prevailed on the Eurasian landscape since before Roman times, it is a wonder that there aren’t still great heaps of bones wrapped in rotted battle gear. As always, much remains below the surface in history.
Putin’s Botched War
The Putin-Ukraine war is a war of conquest begun by a dictator who somehow didn’t understand or foresee the accurate weapons made available to Ukraine by the USA and Europe. He misunderstood the willingness of the West to come to Ukraine’s aid, but also and maybe more importantly, the magnitude of the relative sophistication of Western armaments and war materiel. This was a major blunder. While Russian military intelligence should have kept the Kremlin updated on Western weaponry, Putin should have asked more penetating questions. But perhaps most importantly, he underestimated the combative spirit of the Ukrainians and their president.
How did Russia manage to fall so far behind the West in the art of war? A high reliance was placed on its giant fleet of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. Much of this equipment was left over from WWII and the cold war. In contrast to its ground operations, Russia’s use of airpower in the early days of the war was weak and ineffective. Western military strategy has a high reliance on air power.
Russia was completely unprepared for the evolving drone tactics used against them. Drones were able to provide intelligence and pinpoint delivery of relatively small bombs at critical locations on launchers, vehicles, individual soldiers and in trenches. While Russian tanks were covered with reactive armor, the Ukrainian drones could place bombs in weak spots on the vehicles or even drop them through crew hatches to the interior where propellant and warheads could be ignited.
Post-War
To the discredit of both Russia and Ukraine, extensive use of land mines as well as cluster munitions has been made. The immorality of these munitions lies in what happens to the left-over mines and cluster bomblets remaining after the conflict. After the war, the lands are going to be recovered and farmed or rebuilt. Land mines and cluster munitions are well known to remain extremely dangerous for decades. Other conflict zones that have been so mined have left a legacy of death and mutilation for civilians.
At some point, the victor of the Putin-Ukraine war will want to salvage the scrap metal of the many thousands of vehicle carcasses left on the battlefields. One question relates to the explosive reactive armor (ERA) on the exterior of the destroyed tanks. ERA consists of a sandwich of a metal “flyer plate” facing the incoming projectile, a layer of high brisance explosive, and another metal flyer plate facing the tank armor. In order to respond to a high velocity kinetic or shaped charged projectile, a high shock-velocity, highly energetic explosive is needed for fast response to impact by a projectile. The ERA must be insensitive to small arms fire.
A great many videos of the destruction of tanks show that a tank can be destroyed and its crew killed by artillery or drones, but a large fraction of the reactive armor remains. The reactive armor contains enough high explosive to diffuse some of the incoming projectile’s energy release, yet seems to be rather insensitive to the shock of a hit a few feet away. This unexploded reactive armor will need collection and disposal.
Ukrainian farmers will need to level out the thousands of bomb craters in their fields so their equipment can traverse the ground. Obviously, Sappers or bomb disposal crews will need to de-mine the roads and pathways. Extensive trench systems will need to be filled in to recover the croplands. The environmental insult to the bombed-out battlefields is already substantial. The environmental toxicity of explosive residues may need evaluation.
Finally, in victory the brave people of Ukraine face the daunting prospect of rebuilding their homeland. Generations of children have been exposed to serious trauma and violence that no one should have to face. Their childhoods have been stolen from them and their educational prospects badly damaged.
If Russia prevails, the citizens of Ukraine face loss of their national identity and progressive Russification. All of the post-war issues given above will still be present, but the economic and social upheaval resulting from a vengeful Russian takeover will be traumatic. Many Ukrainian fighters and political leaders will no doubt be jailed, sent to gulags or perhaps defenestration.
A Russian victory in Ukraine signals bad times ahead for the rest of eastern Europe and the Baltic states. These countries, Poland in particular, already understand this and are preparing for this eventuality. Putin has previously expressed a kinship with the Slavic peoples of Eurasia and this may be part of his motivation for establishing a Russian empire.
The Fall of the American Empire
As bad luck would have it, this aggressive act of Putin’s Russia coincided with a political catastrophe in the United States. The Republican Party (GOP) in America has adopted the old Tea Party platform including libertarians and ultraconservative evangelical Christians to morph into a party of fanatical fascists, sometimes called Christo-Fascists. This is a reprehensible development that has taken decades to pull off. These Make America Great Again (MAGA) people have decided that American democracy doesn’t work. They favor a weak, authoritarian flavored democracy, similar to what Orban in Hungary has led.
The combination of the election of Donald Trump along with allowance of dark money OK’d by the US Supreme Court, the fanatical support of MAGA voters and a detailed coup strategy penned by the Heritage Foundation and funded by numerous billionaires has turned America around the corner towards an ultra-nationalist dictatorship. Trump ignores the courts, the legal role of the congress, and has lately taken a fancy to sending troops into US cities.
Some knowledgeable scholars have offered that American hegemony, in place since the end of WWII, is all but over. Some estimate that the American empire reached its peak influence perhaps 15 years ago and has been in decline since then but Americans haven’t paid attention. Trump, with his claims on Panama, Canada and Greenland as well as his manic desire to impose tariffs on globally has sent American credibility into the waste bin. The global economic upset caused by Trump has forced former friends to forge new alliances, leaving America behind.
Even if the stars lined up right and Trump and Vance disappeared tomorrow, a return to the previous status quo is unlikely to happen. The rapid trade disengagement by Canada suggests that they have had serious doubts with the USA already and this Trump fiasco was the last straw. There has been grumbling by other nations in the past that the American 4-year presidential cycle leads to excessive and frequent foreign policy changes that cause difficulties for them.
Trump’s “America First” declaration and radical disengagement with previous foreign policy has left an apparent power vacuum in the world. This has not gone unnoticed by anyone. Of course, the BRICS nations (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russian Federation, South Africa, and United Arab Emirates) are taking advantage of this sea change and are considering moving from the US dollar as the principal reserve currency. America is willingly abandoning its historical global stabilizing ability in exchange for a more libertarian internal structure.
[Note: This post is about replacing the hydrogen atoms along the carbon backbone of a polyolefin polymer with fluorine atoms to produce a fluorocarbon surface on a finished good. Here “finished good” refers to anything from polyolefin pellets, powders, components or blow molded articles such as HDPE bottles.]
Recent news has highlighted the use of fluorinated High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) packaging for pesticides and other products, bringing more attention to the issue of PFAS/PFOS contamination.
What we’re not talking about is a polymer made from fluorinated monomers or comonomers. This refers to a hydrocarbon HDPE bottle made from ethylene (H2C=CH2) monomer that is fluorinated after the bottle is manufactured.
What’s more, the HDPE fluorination process is said to produce PFAS/PFOS (how?) substances that can migrate. Although this technology is not new, and fluorinated hydrocarbon bottles have been around well before the widespread concern over PFAS/PFOS residues, the significance of such contamination was not fully anticipated. As a chemist, the extensive release of fluorinated low molecular weight alkyl derivatives like PFAS/PFOS came as a surprise to me despite knowing that an analogous situation with fluorinated pharmaceuticals that are getting through wastewater plants due to their resistance to microbiological decomposition. For myself only, very little concern for PFAS/PFOS pollution has been noted. You might suppose that chemists could have led the way to understanding. But, not to my knowledge.
The perfluorinated alkyl materials in question bear a close resemblance to TeflonTM which is known for its chemical inertness and lubricity. In chemistry, Teflon is usually ignored as unreactive with most chemicals, except perhaps molten alkali metals. Strategically placed fluorinated features on a molecule can lend the property of greater hydrophobicity or lipophobicity with increased electron withdrawing properties. The high electronegativity of fluorine pulls electron density towards the fluorine atoms through the sigma bonds of a molecular skeleton. Fluorinated organic acids very often have dramatically increased acidity like triflic acid, CF3SO3H, or increased alkylating reactivity like magic methyl, F-SO2(OCH3). By contrast, fluorinated carbon chains themselves are fairly unreactive and quite hydrophobic, as in water repellant. The water repellency of fluorinated hydrocarbons is a very attractive property commercially.
Below are images of the hydrocarbon hexane in ball and stick form and below in a space filling rendering. To the right is perfluorohexane and below that is its space filling rendering. Hexane is just an example of an “ordinary” hydrocarbon that could be perfluorinated.
Graphics by Sam Hill. Hexane (left) and perfluorohexane (right). As can be seen on the right, the green fluorine atoms are rendered larger than the corresponding white hydrogen atoms because fluorine atoms are larger than hydrogen atoms. In some rendering software, the space filling structures are adjusted to show where some percentage (i.e., 95 %) of the electron density is located. These renderings are by ChemSketch so God only knows how atoms are scaled.
A brief interlude on molecular polarity
Before we go on, there is the matter of polarity, dipolarity, dipolar chemical bonds and dipolar molecules. A dipolar polar chemical bond is one in which the distribution of electrons is lop-sided. That is, one atom of a chemical bond has a bit more negative charge than the other, which is thereby deficient in negative charge, or by default carrying a partial positive charge. Chemical bonds, functional groups and entire molecules can be dipolar.
But charge comes in whole numbers, so how can we talk about partial charge? A covalent chemical bond consisting of 2 atoms, same or different, will hold together because the two atoms share a pair of outer electrons. If one of the two atoms in the bond has a greater affinity for negative charge, then the cloud of 2 bonding electrons will spend a bit more time near the more electronegative atom. This shift leaves the other nucleus slightly deficient of negative charge averaged over time meaning that the positive charge of the nucleus is slightly more exposed to the world.
Graphics by Jed Klampett. Polar and nonpolar molecules.
In chemistry there is a saying- “likes dissolve likes”. This means that a polar solvent like water can more readily dissolve polar solids and may mix freely with other polar liquids. Nonpolar liquids like hydrocarbons can dissolve nonpolar solids and may mix freely with other nonpolar liquids. Amphiphilic substances have both polar and non-polar features allowing them to compatibilize polar and nonpolar molecules together. Soaps and detergents are in this category.
We should be careful here. The polar-polar and nonpolar-nonpolar solubility generalizations above are really just bookends across a vast open shelf of partial solubilities between them. Nonetheless, it is a useful rule of thumb.
So, if likes dissolve likes, and the fluorine atoms on a molecule accumulate a bit of negative charge, then why doesn’t a fully fluorinated organic molecule freely dissolve in water owing to fluorine’s negative polarity via hydrogen bonding with water’s positively polarized hydrogen atoms?
Carbon atoms can form bonds with itself or other atoms in several ways that give rise to different overall shapes.
Back to our regularly scheduled content
In situ fluorinated packaging, a niche within the packaging industry, was not something I was fully cognizant of until recently. I have come to understand that HDPE, along with numerous other polymers, can undergo treatment with elemental fluorine or fluorinated reagents to alter the hydrocarbon polymer’s C-H groups and convert them into C-F groups. This alteration gives the HDPE surface properties similar to a perfluorocarbon like Teflon™. For HDPE pesticide packaging, this fluorocarbon layer reduces the product’s permeability to the pesticide’s components. Package fluorination is all about reducing permeability of the container.
Definition: Hydrocarbon. A category of substances composed only of hydrogen (H) and carbon (C). There are 4 main sub-categories: Alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, and aromatics. A hydrocarbon can be composed of any combination of the 4. The principal mineral sources of hydrocarbons are coal, petroleum and natural gas. A hydrocarbon may also be called an organic substance, where organic refers to a carbon-based substance.
HDPE, high density polyethylene, is a hydrocarbon polymer of ethylene gas and often with various hydrocarbon comonomers. Hydrocarbon polymers, also called polyolefins, are notable for their considerably inert chemical properties. Inertness is the resistance to chemical change. However, contact with certain fluorinating agents like F2, ClF3, NF3, etc., diluted in an inert gas can, at relatively low temperatures, exchange the H atoms of HDPE with F atoms. Eventually, all or most of the H atoms on the polymer surface will be exchanged. A carbon molecule that has F atoms replacing all H atoms is said to be perfluorinated.
Pesticides are meant to be spread over selected parts of the environment to do their trick. A great many pesticides are synthetic organic chemicals so naturally there is the possibility of any given pesticide or solvent to diffuse through a hydrocarbon-based container. Migration of product molecules into the polyolefin packaging, in this case (HDPE), can result in the release of the hazardous contents and compromise the overall containment, possibly resulting in exposure to the public and the environment.
It should be possible to slow the rate of diffusion of any given hazardous material through a non-fluorinated container by simply making the container walls thicker. The polyolefin manufacturers would be in favor of this, but the converters who buy the plastic pellets to blow mold the containers may balk. Their raw material costs would rise and they would have to pass the costs to customers, who will resist the cost increase. Then with the increase in mass flow of polymer melt necessary, perhaps the throughput or required extruder torque might change unfavorably. Hard to say.
Some of the small-molecule bad actors
On March 5, 2021, EPA published the list below of PFAS/PFOS compounds found in the 20-50 ppb level in fluorinated HDPE containers used to store and transport a mosquito control pesticide product.
Abbreviated
Full Name
PFBA
Perfluoro-butanoic acid
PFPeA
Perfluoro-pentanoic acid
PFHxA
Perfluoro-hexanoic acid
PFHpA
Perfluoro-heptanoic acid
PFOA
Perfluoro-octanoic acid
PFNA
Perfluoro-nananoic acid
PFDA
Perfluoro-decanoic acid
PFUdA
Perfluoro-undecanoic acid
These are all perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids listed by increasing chain length. Notably the terminal carbon is fully oxidized to the carboxylic acid and is not fluorinated. This acidic end gives a chemically reactive handle for further manipulation of the PFAS/PFOS if desired.
PFOA, perfluorooctanoic acid, has been industrially produced by what is now 3M since the mid-1940s. It has been used to place TeflonTM coatings on frying pans. It was originally prepared by the electrochemical fluorination (ECF) of octanoyl (ock TAN oh ill) chloride, the hydrogen saturated 8-carbon acid chloride. ECF produces the perfluorooctanoyl fluoride which is then hydrolyzed to the acid chloride liberating HF.
Perfluorination of HDPE bottles relies on the most electronegative element, diatomic fluorine gas, F2, or other similarly reactive fluorinating reagents, and does chemistry on a solid polyolefin surface. Fluorine gas is diluted in a suitably noninterfering gas like nitrogen, argon or CO2 and then exposed to the polymer of interest at a prescribed pressure, temperature and exposure time. Fluorine atoms replace hydrogen atoms on the polymer chain. According to one source, the rate of fluorination is diffusion limited. This means that the fluorination reaction is very fast. The presence of molecular oxygen with molecular fluorine had a retarding effect on fluorination proportional to the concentration of oxygen gas. The presence of oxygen led to it being incorporated onto the polymer.
Given the advantage of impermeability provided by fluorinated polyolefin articles, it is clear that there are many excellent applications of in situ fluorinated polyolefins. The replacement of glass and metal with lighter fluorinated HDPE containers may save on transportation costs on a weight basis. Whether or not the economics favor fluorinated polyolefins over glass or metal manufacturing costs kg for kg is unclear.
The range of application categories listed above is quite large. Each entry in the list has many individual components that may be subject to fluorination as well. It is no wonder that PFAS contaminants are spread widely around the world. The US EPA has issued a letter (below) to companies fluorinating HDPE to beware of accidentally producing PFAS/PFOS in their operations. Specifically warning about the connection of PFAS formation caused by the inclusion of oxygen in the fluorination process. The letter specifically cites “EPA’s 2020 long-chain perfluoroalkyl carboxylate (LCPFAC) Significant New Use Rule (SNUR) (40CFR § 721.10536), that are found to be present in or on fluorinated polyolefins may be subject to TSCA regulations and enforcement.”
“It is during certain types of fluorination (e.g., the presence of oxygen) that the manufacture of PFAS has occurred. Manufacturers (including importers), processors, distributors, users, and those that dispose of fluorinated HDPE containers should be reminded of this potential for manufacturing PFAS and comply with any applicable regulations under TSCA, as described in the next section.“
“EPA is aware of alternative fluorination processes that use fluorine gas in the presence of gaseous inerting (e.g., nitrogen) without the presence of oxygen that could reduce the potential for unintentional manufacture of PFAS. These alternative processes for fluorination of polyethylene are highlighted in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) August 2021 letter on this issue as it relates to food contact articles.”
“Requirements under TSCA PFAS Significant New Use Rules. Certain PFAS, including long-chain PFAS as defined in EPA’s 2020 long-chain perfluoroalkyl carboxylate (LCPFAC) Significant New Use Rule (SNUR) (40 CFR § 721.10536), that are found to be present in or on fluorinated polyolefins may be subject to TSCA regulations and enforcement. EPA considers the manufacturing of certain PFAS from the fluorination of polyolefins to be a significant new use under TSCA. LCPFAC chemical substances present in polyolefins due to the fluorination process would be considered byproducts of the manufacturing process because they are produced during the manufacture of the fluorinated polyolefins and do not have a separate commercial intent (40 CFR § 720.3(d)). LCPFAC chemical substances that are byproducts of the manufacturing process for fluorinated polyolefins do not meet the requirements of the byproducts exemption at 40 CFR § 721.45(e)5 and are subject to significant new use notice requirements. Significant new use rules require industry to notify EPA at least 90 days before commencing the manufacturer including import or processing of subject chemical substances for a significant new use. The required significant new use notification (SNUN) initiates EPA’s evaluation of the conditions of use associated with the significant new use. Entities may not commence manufacturing (including import) or processing for the significant new use until EPA has conducted a review of the notice, made an appropriate determination on the notice, and taken such actions as are required in association with that determination. Tala R. Henry, Ph.D., Deputy Director Office of Pollution Prevention & Toxics 2022/03/24.”
Fluorination and fluoridation. What’s the difference?
So we do not make people worried about their fluoride toothpaste or their fluoridated drinking water, let’s sort this out. Toothpaste and drinking water have a soluble ionic fluoride salt like sodium fluoride, NaF, or sodium monofluorophosphate, sodium MFP or chemically Na2PO3F. Sodium MFP is water soluble but not stable in water. It hydrolyzes to release fluoride by displacement by water to form dibasic phosphate. The MFP hydrolysis reaction is: PO3F2− + HO– → HPO42− + F−. The fluoride anion, F–, is not nearly the same as fluorine gas, F2. The F– ion bumps into tooth enamel where it binds tightly with calcium in the tooth: Ca5(PO4)3+(aq) + F−(aq) → Ca5(PO4)3F(s). This is the context in which the word “fluoridation” is used. Fluoride ions bond tightly to calcium++ ions in general. Fluoridation is just a specialized variety of fluorination and is mostly confined to the area of water treatment and toothpaste.
Fluorination is a chemical process wherein fluorine atoms are added to chemical compounds. Contact between organic substances and pure elemental fluorine gas is extremely exothermic and sometimes explosive. The dilution of F2 gas with an inert gas like nitrogen, helium or argon has a thermal safety component as well.
Polymer fluorinationout in the world- Patents
One source of manufacturing information about proprietary articles and processes is the US Patent and Trademark Office, USPTO. In order to secure your legal right to a patent, the patent applicant must disclose the exact art that is being claimed. This is because the world must have a fair chance to avoid infringement. Google Patents provides the exact text of individual patents, US and others. It also provides a timeline showing the ownership of the patent and whether or not the patent is active, expired or abandoned. Google patents also provide links to patents cited in the patent and patents that have cited the instant example.
Being a Google product, Google Patents has extensive and flexible search capacity. Rather than attempt to make a list, it is a better use of the reader’s time to go to the site yourselves and explore. Note that a search will find patents from all over the world as well as patent applications. Google patent provides a English translated version of the patent.
In searching for patents claiming compositions and methods around the fluorination of polymers, more than a few patents can be found. One can search for patents using the USPTO website (obviously) or from Google Patents.
Another good place to look for relevant art is from a patent you have already pulled up in Google Patents. Near the bottom of the patent from Google Patents is a section labeled “Patent Citations.” This section list prior art patents disclosed by the assignee and those found by the patent examiner in the course of the examination process. Prior art is disclosed by the assignee in the granted patent as well, but in Google Patents there are hotlinks to patents to aid the convenience factor.
In situ fluorination
There are companies who will fluorinate the surface(s) of High-Density PolyEthylene (HDPE) and PolyPropylene (PP) containers. HDPE and PP are especially of interest owing to their utility in packaging liquids. These two polymer classes have great rigidity and strength and are in wide use. However, they share certain weaknesses such as air permeability and permeability of the contents. Air permeability is highly undesired in food packaging as it allows for reduced shelf life or customer satisfaction with the contents. Food and drugs may be susceptible to air degradation and possible reduction of shelf life.
Note: The expiration date on a product does not necessarily mean that the product will go bad when that date arrives. The day after the expiration date is that date at which the manufacturer/seller will no longer guarantee “freshness” or some other type of quality. For instance, normal pasteurized milk is not sterile. Pasteurized milk should be good up to 1 week past the code date as long as it has not been allowed to warm up or been contaminated. Once the milk has warmed to room temperature, the normal bacteria loading will enter log-phase growth and could spoil within 1 day.
In situ fluorination is process wherein hydrocarbon polymer containers are exposed to diluted fluorine gas at a specified temperature for a specified time. At the surface hydrogen atoms along the length of the polymer are replaced with fluorine atoms. The result is a polymer along the surface which resembles TeflonTM to some extent. Some of the desirable properties of TeflonTM are then taken on by the HDPE or PP surface. This H/F exchange at the surface does not affect the properties of the base polymer.
There is one caveat, however. The fluorination must be performed with the exclusion of oxygen. One source says that the vacuum chamber in which the fluorination will take place must be pumped down to 0.1 Torr of residual air prior to exposure to fluorene gas.
Fluorination patents
Below us from the description in US5274049A Filing date 1991-07-19, Application filed by SHAMBAN WILLIAM S, W S SHAMBAN AND Co.
A method for the direct fluorination of elastomers “in order to reduce the static and dynamic friction characteristics and to increase the wear life and abrasion resistance of the elastomers. The invention also relates to elastomeric articles modified by the fluorination method.”
“What is claimed is:
1. A method of producing fluorinated elastomeric articles, consisting essentially of the following steps:
providing an elastomeric article, said elastomeric article comprising an elastomeric polymer having a backbone chain having a plurality of hydrogen atoms attached thereto;and
exposing said elastomeric article to gaseous fluorine under conditions sufficient to reduce the friction coefficient of said article without promoting degradation of the tensile properties of said article.”
Claim 8 claims a method using a hydrogen fluoride scavenger …
“8. A method for producing a fluorinated elastomeric article having a reduced coefficient of friction, comprising the steps of:
placing a thermoset elastomeric article and a hydrogen fluoride scavenger in a closed reactor vessel, said thermoset elastomeric article comprising an elastomeric base polymer having a backbone chain, said backbone chain including sufficient carbon atoms having replaceable aliphatic carbon-hydrogen bonds so that a fluorinated matrix of said fluorinated elastomeric article reduces said coefficient of friction;”
In the description the patent cites sodium fluoride, NaF, as an HF scavenger wherein NaF + HF => Na[HF2], sodium bifluoride.
Inhance Technologies LLC filed application US20190040219A1, but it was later it was abandoned due to failure to respond to an office action. The application claimed a multistep method for fluorinating elastomeric workpieces with 20 % F2 in nitrogen and “altering certain mechanical properties such as tensile property [and] the elastic modulus, an impact property, a wear property, etc.“
Systems and methods for processing fluoropolymer materials and related workpieces, US11879025, filed 2021-04-23, Current Assignee: Inhance Technologies LLC. Claims method of removing perfluorinated compounds from fluoropolymers. The core of the art involves placing a fluoropolymer work piece in a thoroughly deoxygenated chamber, heated from 25 C to 300 C and exposed to a fluorinating atmosphere such as F2/N2 for specified time period. This treatment is claimed to remove fluorocarbons like PFOA to non-detectable levels. There is no mention of where the PFOA goes afterwards, but it looks promising if accurate. However, the granted patent is off-limits for 20 years unless a license is obtained or some other arrangement is made.
Fluorination is imbedded deeply into the design of a great many articles of commerce. The water repellency of perfluorinated polymers in fabrics is one of the chief applications of fluorinated organic materials. The inherent lubricity of PTFE, its built-in chemical inertness and its hydrophobicity have ingratiated millions of consumers and have met performance expectations world wide.
Perfluorinated foams for fire protection in aircraft hangers and industrial spaces are valuable for their ability to float on the surface of burning liquid fuels, blanketing the surface as a vapor and oxygen barrier. The suppression of flammable volatiles in a fire by a layer of protective foam can inhibit flashover of the fire, reducing the overall damage of a fire. The fire retardancy of perfluorinated substances inhibits their combustion and discourages continued burning when the flame source is removed. Halogens as a group have been used for fire retardancy and with bromine in particular.
The chemical origin of the fire retardancy properties of perfluorinated organic materials lies in the low reactivity of the -CF2– fluorine atoms with oxygen. In the combustion of hydrocarbons, hydrogen atoms are readily removed by oxygen or radical species to form water. The C-F bond is one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry and is slow to be removed by oxygen.
Drug molecules are frequently fluorinated in particular locations on the drug molecule. A C-F bond resists catabolic degradation and enhances the local hydrophobicity of the drug allowing for greater half-life and enhanced drug potency. The down side is the resistance to catabolic degradation and excretion. Many drug molecules are released intact into sewage treatment facilities where they also resist degradation, possibly due in part to the fluorinated features. The effect is that fish and other organisms are exposed to the drug. As with humans, fish and other creatures of the waterways and soil did not evolve with biochemical mechanisms to deal with fluorinated organics.
In the in situ fluorination process, PFAS/PFOS side products can form, especially when oxygen is present. This can be monitored by quality control but companies will comply with recommended PFAS/PFOS best practices only if there are regulations or the threat of them. Nations regulating PFAS/PFOS contamination will have to compete with nations who do not impose regulations. This is the usual scenario for nations with heavy reliance on imported articles but uneven regulation.
Colorado, 8/12/25. I find myself in the murky world of the Anti-Trump movement. Millions of voices cry out in opposition of this American President, yet he remains in office supported by the current House and Senate Republican majorities and the election cycle. America is stuck with this condition at least until the 2026 election. At that time the majority leadership of both houses could fall to the Democrats. or not.
The current plague of house and senate MAGA elected officials is with us at least until 2026. The present deconstruction of the US federal government was planned out by the American political group Heritage Foundation and published for all to see in the form of “Project 2025“. Musk’s DOGE may have been connected, but I do not know.
Some people trace the current political catastrophe to President Reagan in the 1980s. This is when he endorsed the trickle-down supply side Laffer Curve to press forward the view that returning tax dollars to the wealthy would in return result in greater general prosperity for all. Wealth would “trickle down” from the wealthy and onto the millions of pointy heads who believed it.
The world should know that a large liberal progressive population still exists in America and is getting stronger. The problem is that the liberal Democratic Party in America has failed to surface any charismatic leadership beyond a few individuals. There are no liberal rallies to attend in my part of the US. Democratic politicians seem to have their heads down trying to plow through endless political outrage.
America’s current president, #47, is a huge embarrassment for most Americans. I can say that we apologize to the western nations for letting this buffoon loose on the world. For America to fall apart because a greedy and precocious real estate developer is building an authoritarian state is just too much to comprehend.
I began to notice cracks in the political foundation around 1976. I stopped at a booth on the July 4th fair fairgrounds and listened to the people there. They were the John Birch Society and were supporting anti-communism, right wing populism and libertarianism. They were unrepentant in their focused anti-establishment views on how to carry out American civilization. What they described resembled anarchism but with close ties to conservative protestant evangelicalism. Never a churchy person or a fan of communism, I stood and listened for a while just to hear their screwy arguments. I found it unworkably utopian and their conspiracy arguments for their ideology too much of a stretch. Their interlocking diatribes match with what I see today.
To my European friends, there is hope for the USA yet in the coming few years. I have to believe that our culture is still strong enough to survive this orange monstrosity in the White House. We cannot allow this guy to convert a long term liberal democracy into an illiberal democracy.
The state of Nevada is quickly becoming the leading source of lithium in the USA and beyond. In the state there will soon be three major types of lithium ore beneficiation- Brine evaporation, hard rock extraction and lithium clay extraction. Nevada already has in excess of 180,000 active mining claims amounting to 49 % of the total BLM national inventory. In addition to this, Nevada has “198 authorized mining plans of operations, and 282 active exploration notices.” Nevada has a long history of fruitful gold and silver mining.
Nevada had earlier won the gold deposit lottery with the Carlin Trend occupying much of the northwestern section of the state. The Carlin Trend has become an archetype in gold mining. These deposits are often described as Carlin-type “invisible gold” ore deposits. Such a deposit is characterized as sediment hosted and disseminated [Editor: disseminated seems like a bummer]. Gold in such deposits are typically invisible and often only detected by lab analysis. According to Wikipedia, most of the gold mines in the Great Basin of the western US are of the Carlin-type.
But, enough about gold and on to lithium
After 6 years of regulatory scrutiny, a new lithium-boron open-pit mining operation in Nevada operated by Australian mining company ioneer has just been approved by the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, for Rhyolite Ridge. The mine is located in the Basin and Range Province near the southwest border of Nevada and California.
The old joke used to be that a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing at the top. With the independent economic evaluations available today as part of the disclosure to investors, the likelihood of being duped by fake or salted deposits has dropped considerably. However, the market value of the ore in the future is still subject rapid and unpredictable change.
If you find yourself flying over Nevada on a clear day, you can easily see the basin and range features of the terrain. Nevada occupies only a small part of the total area. The basin and range province extends north to the Columbia Plateau and south into the Central Mexican Plateau.
A very small part of Nevada’s basin and range landscape as viewed from above the Rhyolite Ridge area in Nevada. Image from Google Maps.
The Basin and Range Province of North America. Image from Wikipedia.
Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project
The BLM approval opened up $1.19 billion of potential funding of which $700 million is from a US government loan. According to Mining.com, Rhyolite Ridge is the first new lithium mine in 60 years and the first new boron mine in the last century in the US. [Note: I have to assume “new” means new hard rock mineas opposed to brines or evaporites] While the approval by BLM has opened some doors to funds, not everyone is convinced of the major investor’s liquidity.
So, what is rhyolite?
I can’t improve on the definition found in Wikipedia, so I’ll just quote it with the links intact-
If you have ever seen molten glass and noticed its high viscosity, this gives an idea of what high silica content does to lava. The higher viscosity provided by the silica component suppresses the release of gases until nearer the surface where they are released as bubbles with vigor. It is very much like a comparison between boiling pasta water and boiling marinara sauce. The marinara sauce spatters badly due to its viscosity but the pasta water just does a rolling boil.
Source: Mashed.com. Spattering is a universal behavior of hot, gassy fluids. In this case the gas is steam. Magma also contains steam.
The Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron (LiB) deposit is said by some to be the only known LiB deposit in the US and only one of two known in the world.
“The Rhyolite Ridge mine will run for 22 years. It will produce 22,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year. That’s enough to power 370,000 electric vehicles. It will also produce 170,000 tonnes of boric acid, according to the company. The boron contributes 30% to 40% of the mine’s revenue, providing a buffer against lithium market volatility.” –Mining.com
Around the world new economic lithium deposits are being discovered now and then, and a few are being readied for mining. It was announced recently that BLM has approved operations at the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project in southwestern Nevada.
What is interesting about this Rhyolite Ridge project is that it aims to produce both lithium and boron. I’m not an engineer so maybe I’m overly impressed, but the processing plant they propose seems very clever. They will produce their own sulfuric acid from sulfur and extract waste heat for use in generating steam for evaporation of the extracts and electricity. They are completely off the energy grid.
The extracted ore, now called ROM or run-of-mine, is transported to the plant straight from the mine and sized by crushing to 20 mm pieces. The crushed ROM is then taken to a series of sulfuric acid extraction vats and leached for ~ 7 days. The pregnant leach solution containing the lithium, boron and soluble impurities is then taken to evaporators with repeated crystallizations and, using differential solubility, separates the lithium component from the boric acid. In the end they produce lithium carbonate. The video does show a soda ash (sodium carbonate), Na2CO3, silo so I assume that is where the carbonate comes from to produce lithium carbonate, Li2CO3 and to neutralize residual sulfuric acid.
Silver Peak Lithium Brine
Of interest is the nearby Silver Peak lithium brine operation operated by Albemarle just a few miles to the north of Rhyolite Ridge. The Google Maps image below shows the evaporation ponds at the Silver Peak lithium operation. Silver Peak produces both technical grade lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide.
Image from the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on NASAs Landsat 9. A view from space of the Silver Peak lithium brine evaporation ponds in SW Nevada.
McDermitt Caldera: Thacker pass
Another large lithium deposit was discovered in the McDermitt Caldera along the Nevada-Oregon border. Within the caldera is the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. This lithium deposit was approved for open-pit mining by BLM on January 15, 2021, though it has been plagued by protests and an injunction. As with the rest of the McDermitt Caldera lithium, the Thacker Pass lithium is described as a lithium rich clay deposit. This is unique for lithium mines since brine extraction and hard rock mining of spodumene have been the norm. Thacker Pass’ lithium deposit is the largest known volcano sedimentary deposit in the US at an average grade of 0.22 %.
In 2023 GM invested $650 million in the Canadian Lithium Americas Corp. The Thacker pass operation is through its wholly owned subsidiary Nevada Lithium, LLC, which is responsible for production. Car giant GM’s investment gives them exclusive access through the first phase of production. Lithium Americans has received a conditional approval for a $2.2 billion loan from the US Department of Energy.
The Thacker Pass measured and indicated lithium resources are 13.7 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. Lithium Americas calculates that the recoverable lithium is worth $3.9 billion.
Interestingly, the McDermitt Caldera is possibly the oldest of a sequence of calderas produced by the Yellowstone Hotspot. The McDermitt Caldera amounts to a lava dome that collapsed ~16.4 million years ago forming a large caldera within which several smaller calderas have formed and in which later filled with water forming a lake over the tuffaceous ash. Over time the lake produced sediments that were deposited on the floor of the lake. The source rock is rhyolite which is usually the case in the state.
The Yellowstone hotspot stays relatively constant while the crust moves over it, leaving a trail of calderas and a record of volcanic activity on the surface behind. The McDermitt caldera is labeled ’16’. Source: National Park Service.
Briefly, the lithium clay is excavated, gravel and rocks are removed, and the clay is suspended in water to form a slurry. The slurry is leached by adding sulfuric acid that is produced on-site and the lithium in the ore is extracted into the acidic liquor. Finally, the dissolved lithium is recovered as lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide. Gangue material is deposited back into the excavated sections of the mine.
The McDermitt caldera contains many breccia and fracture zones and associated with these are deposits of other metal ores. Specifically, mercury from cinnabar ore bodies and uranium from autunite (uranyl, U6+) (Ca(UO2)2(PO4)2·10–12H2O) and pitchblende (uranate, UO2, U4+) ore bodies. Mercury reserves in the caldera, according to USGS, are estimated to be 400,000 flasks.
A Mercurial Rambling
Mercury has been packaged (and still is) at 76 pounds to the flask. This measure got its name from the mining and smelting of cinnabar in the mountains of Peru. One site was particularly rich- Huancavelica, Peru. The Spaniards had known prior to their arrival to the New World that liquid mercury could dissolve gold from ore to produce what we now know as a mercury amalgam. With very strong heating the mercury could be driven off as vapor to recover the precious metal.
Spain had its own cinnabar mine in what is now Almadén, Spain, which produced over 250,000 tonnes of mercury. The Spaniards had considerable experience with mining, refining and using mercury prior to discovery of it in the new world. Mercury was quite valuable to the Spaniards but they were faced with transporting it from, say, Huancavelica, Peru, to the Carribean coast where their ships could load the mercury and distribute elsewhere. Anecdotally, it has been estimated that for every ounce of gold produced in the new world, ten ounces of mercury were consumed.
Luckily for the 49er gold rush miners, cinnabar had previously been discovered in California. You can actually visit the old New Almaden mine museum south of the Bay Area. It is worth a trip if you are in the area.
The Spaniards figured that a man could carry what turned out to be as much as 76 lbs of mercury through difficult terrain to the Caribbean coast. Even better for the Spaniards, they knew how much gold could be extracted per pound (or whatever unit) of the mercury they dispensed. This gave them an idea of how much gold to expect and closer control of the mines. By controlling mercury, they controlled who could use it for mining and how much gold they could recover.
Back to lithium
As of this writing, Albemarle is the largest producer of lithium in the US. But the largest known deposit in the US is at Thacker Pass. The Albemarle Silver Peak lithium brine operation is legally defined as placer mining whereas the Thacker Pass operation is lode mining. The word ‘legally’ is used because any claims filed are restricted to placer or lode mining- one does not transfer to the other.
A Word or Two About Rhyolite
Rhyolite is a type of volcanic rock characterized as a ‘fine-grained extrusive igneous rock‘. Its color can vary from pale light grey to pinkish when composed of mainly quartz and feldspar or dark when of a mafic, low silicate composition was present. A quiet eruption of lava gives a solid, denser rhyolite whereas in an explosive eruption can produce the vesicular pumice. The lower density of pumice allows it to float on water. Erupting volcanic islands can produce floating rafts of pumice in the nearby waters. As magma rises in the throat of a volcano, the pressure drops and dissolved gases can form bubbles which, if they fail to disengage from the magma completely, can be ejected into the cooler air and freeze into ‘foamy’ structure. [Note: the word ‘foamy’ is my own and earth science people cannot be blamedfor this.]
A Bit More About McDermitt Caldera
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) published open-file report 76-535 in 1976 titled Geology and Ore Deposits of the McDermitt Caldera, Nevada-Oregon. A 1978 USGS open-file report by Newmont Exploration, Ltd., 78-926, James J. Rytuba and Richard K. Glanzman, Relation of Mercury, Uranium and Lithium Deposits to the McDermitt Caldera Complex, Nevada-Oregon, goes into greater detail on the three minerals.
What can a chemist possibly have to say that could be even marginally interesting about extraterrestrial life or evolution? Well, as far as extraterrestrial life and the search for it goes, I would say that all of the metallurgy, semiconductor fabrication, liquid hydrocarbon fuels, chemicals, transportation technology or polymers exploited in radio or optical astronomy, have some element of chemistry in their manufacture.
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The quest to discover life beyond Earth captivates many in the broad field of space science. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has played a significant role in astronomy and space science communities. However, the search extends beyond intelligent life; any form of life or even the essential components and conditions conducive to life, are of keen interest.
It is widely accepted that the physics governing our planet and solar system likely applies universally. While this is a hypothesis, it is a reasonable one. If the physics are consistent, then the chemistry should be as well. Consequently, the behavior and limitations associated with matter would be uniform across the cosmos. This reasoning suggests that life elsewhere in the universe would be governed by the same chemical and quantum mechanical principles familiar to us.
The “Anthropic Principle” has caused much debate, with Wikipedia noting that “Anthropic reasoning is often employed to address the notion that the universe appears to be precisely calibrated for life.” The mystery of why numerous physical constants and their ratios needed to be exactly as they are for life to emerge on Earth has intrigued many.
To say the Big Bang’s initial pressure and temperature were high is an understatement. As the universe expanded and cooled, energy barriers emerged that shaped the interactions of matter and of photons, placing boundaries on the spontaneous transformation behavior of matter. Pathways of interaction emerged, steering transformations towards increasingly specific outcomes. Essentially, it’s basic kinetics: the quickest transformations and their stable products start to prevail and fill the universe.
If physical constants are emergent at the moment of the Big Bang and become manifest down the timeline, could it be that another Big Bang could happen that is not conducive to life? There would be nobody there to ponder these questions. Life is here because it was possible and maybe even likely here and there.
The phrase “finely tuned for the existence of life” seems to leave open a crack for a creationist view. Absent the many spooky bronze and iron-age theories still in practice today, naturally a sentient being can look at her/his/its existence and marvel at how beautifully synchronized and proportioned the machinery of the universe is. Certainly, there must be a hidden message in this, right?
ET? What th’ …?
Animals like mammals, birds, fish, and even some invertebrates like octopi and crabs are considered to be sentient. According to Google, sentient animals are those that can experience feelings and sensations, both positive and negative, like pleasure, pain, joy, and fear. So, while an octopus may have elements of sentience, could distant observers elsewhere in the galaxy detect them from optical or radio astronomy techniques? Try as it might, the ability of an octopus to construct a powerful radio transmitter and beam a message into the cosmos is sorely limited by its physical anatomy. Except for humans, no other sentient life form on Earth is known to construct a radio transmitter that would serve as a beacon of sentient life.
Until recent history, SETI was limited by the lack of technology to light up the universe with our own signals or to detect faint manufactured signals across interstellar space. At such point that metallurgy, electrical engineering and the hundreds of other critical and apex technologies bloomed into a sufficient state of development, no intelligent emanations from Earth found their way into space.
While TV and radio broadcasts began their journey into space, it is important to realize that our signals were encoded onto carrier waves. Amplitude modulation (AM) signals carry their information by simply varying the magnitude of a single frequency in time with the human voice or music. This is most likely to be grasped by alien radio astronomers. Frequency modulation (FM) is a bit more challenging because audio signal is mixed with a carrier signal by a heterodyne circuit. Extracting useful information would require them to pull audio frequency information from the heterodyned signal.
Television is much more difficult. While the alien radio astronomers may have figured out FM encoded radio information, the particular details of the TV raster scan are based how human engineers decided to interlace and sequence scans to produce an image on a screen of a particular aspect ratio. TV designers took advantage of the human’s persistence of vision to seamlessly follow moving pictures to give continuous images yet maintaining a fast enough frame rate to avoid flickering. The television’s electronic timing is based on frame rate, the number of interlaced lines, and the aspect ratio of the screen.
The point of this TV discussion is that a TV signal must be deconvoluted into a signal that properly displays an image and plays the sound on a particular piece of equipment. This could be challenging for an alien radio astronomy research group to decode.
All of this talk about an octopus developing radio astronomy presupposes that its unique octopussian sentience includes such desires.
It could be that the initial energy at t = 0 yielding the primordial plasma constituting the early Big Bang was only capable of producing a specific set of fields producing elementary particles which then give way to a specific set of quantitative relationships and properties. The burst of energy causing the Big Bang must have had constraints driving its transformation into matter, which is also constrained by quantum mechanics, etc. Maybe the present universe is simply what primordial energy naturally does when expanding as a universe. Why do the quantitative values of physical constants need to be variable? An imaginary and feverish conundrum.
As the highly energized primordial plasma of the Big Bang began to cool, matter and energy channeled into particular states. The particle energy states that had the highest barriers coalesced first followed by subsequent lower energy plasma condensing into other particles. I’m drawing a crude analogy to the process where individual minerals form from cooling magma according to their melting points.
There is a notion prevalent among Creationists that the probability of a life form spontaneously forming from individual atoms is 1 in 10large or some other inconceivably miniscule chance. And if that was how life had to form, then the Earth would still be a sterile wet rock. But that is not how chemical transformations work.
Central to the Creationist view is that evolution cannot happen because there is nothing but random chance to guide the molecules of life into a highly complex organism. They start with the assumption that life arose purely from random chance. I hope to show that this assumption is false.
All atoms and molecules have properties that either qualify or disqualify them as a candidate for a given atomic or molecular transformation. All molecules have properties that either qualify or disqualify them to take part in a transformation resulting in a given product. The words “qualify” or “disqualify” could mean that something will or will not happen absolutely. But just as likely, the words could mean that a transformation is just too slow at a given temperature to give the desired effect. As it happens, temperature is critically important to molecular transformations. At a low enough temperature, most transformations will slow to a negligeable rate, shutting down that particular transformation channel. In general, where there are competing transformation channels, the fastest channel will prevail in producing its product.
All molecules have a limited set of reaction channels at a given temperature as a result of their particular reactivity.
What we think of as ‘ordinary’ chemistry is more precisely the electronic behavior of valence electrons. Nuclear chemistry also exists but in the domain of nuclear change.
Valence electrons on earth will behave the same everywhere in comparable conditions. Chemistry happens at the outer, valence level of ions, atoms and molecules. So, we should expect that bond forming and bond breaking mechanisms should be the same throughout. All of this leads to the high likelihood that chemical reaction mechanisms elsewhere in the universe should not be unfamiliar to Earthlings in general.
Life on earth exists as a result of the behavior of particular chemical substances within a range of chemical and thermal environments. The range of chemical environments and substances present during the initiation of life is thought to be quite different than what we find on earth at the present time. For instance, gas phase molecular oxygen was not present until a considerable time after life began. The initiation of life on earth was under anaerobic conditions and was able to start and survive with the materials at hand. Biochemistry is a series of reduction/oxidation events driven by the Gibbs energy of a transformation as is all of chemistry. Even on anoxic earth, diverse oxidizers were present.
Today, anaerobes are known to use the oxidative properties of inorganic species like sulfate (SO42-), nitrate (NO3-), ferric iron (Fe3+), carbon dioxide (CO2) and manganese (Mn 4+). Other anaerobic oxidants include chromate (CrO42-) and arsenate (AsO43-) which may have been present as well. Reductants include nitrite (NO2-), ferrous iron (Fe2+), and sulfide (S2-).
Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe and the second most abundant heavy element on earth behind iron. Many elements are strongly attracted to the abundant oxygen so it is no wonder that so many minerals are oxides of one sort or another. Oxyanions like silicates, carbonates, sulfate, nitrate, and oxides like CO2 or any number of metal oxides all contain oxygen that has been bound with another element. The oxygen pulls negative charge away from the central element making it electron deficient. In the case of sulfate and others, the actual oxidizing part is the atom with the oxygens attached, in this case the sulfur.
The presence of life on Earth means that there is a “habitable zone in parameter space“. All of the parameters affecting biochemistry must align in such a way that a zone of allowable chemical and physical conditions will exist. Many things must exist simultaneously such as the many properties and abundances of chemical substances, a suitable atmospheric composition and pressure, a planetary temperature range allowing for the presence of liquid water and the presence of sufficiently reactive organic molecules.
Not every transformation of matter is within reach in a given condition. Chemical reactivity which comprises kinetics and thermodynamics has the effect of channeling matter into a finite number of probable pathways. This bestows the property of selectivity. For any given chemical substance, only a certain limited group of transformations are possible or likely, given the conditions.
Life as we know it exists because our biomolecules were robust enough to survive their chemical and thermal environments, but not so robust that they resist the needed transformations. Life depends on biomolecules being moderately stable but not by too much. Biomolecules can organize into particular structures that are physically robust, like the chitin shells on shellfish. In the chemistry of life, chemical transformations must be tolerant of the aqueous environment in and around an organism, but not so tolerant that the necessary reactions are too slow or too fast within the narrow range of environmental temperatures available.
Organisms on earth are tolerant of water at the level of molecules. The internal apparatus of the cell is an aqueous environment having some amount of viscosity. In order for molecules to interact, they must collide with each other. Life in the solid phase would mean that biomolecules would be immobilized and unable to collide and react. Cell structure for metabolism and reproduction would not be feasible. Life in the gas phase is limited by the vapor pressure of the necessary substances. Many, if not most, biomolecules would not tolerate the heat necessary to volatilize. They would decompose.
A diversion into molecular evolution.
I’ll just blurt it out- ongoing evolution requires heritable change in a genome. A genetic change must be survivable for the parent cell to reproduce and produce viable daughter cells. The inherited mutation must not be deleterious to further reproductions of the subsequent generations. A mutation may randomly result in something that has either a lethal effect, no effect, or produces some biomolecular improvement. The mutation may be as modest as an enzyme alteration causing it to bind either more or less tightly to a ligand resulting in a few percent change in rate of some the enzyme’s function. This could translate into better efficiency in producing some cell structure or better use of energy. It could also be that nothing changes as a result of the efficiency alteration, or that it has an overall negative effect further challenging the survival of the cell line in a nonlethal way.
There are two kinds of changes that can occur with DNA. One is a change in the sequence of the DNA molecule itself. The other kind is “epigenetic” which is heritance not reliant on changes on the DNA sequence.
Creationists like to make a show of the probability of random chance producing even simple ordered sequences as fantastically small. Actually, their superficial analysis of permutations and probability looks plausible. I can’t argue with the low probability of individual atoms coming together randomly to form a living organism all at once. However, the beginning assumptions are wrong. Life did not spontaneously form out of a bunch of loose atoms by simply condensing into a centipede or a human. Change in evolution happens at the molecular level a step at a time. A change in the amino acid sequence of any given enzyme must trace back to a change in the DNA sequence to pass along a heritable mutation. Evolution moves by fits and starts. A mutation may have no effect, advantageous effect or deadly effect.
At the level of molecules, change happens through very definite chemical mechanisms. Molecules are constrained to do certain things and in a particular way. It’s like a channel. Sometimes two or more channels may be possible. In this case, the fastest channel will dominate in output and influence. An evolutionary change might cause a biochemical transformation to stop, speed up, slow down, or be more or less specific in outcome.
Molecular bonds vibrate in the range of 1013 to 1014 Hertz. A hydrogen molecule will reportedly undergo 2.5 x 1010 collisions per second at 2 bar and 24 oC. If two atoms or molecules are to react, then they must collide. At a given temperature, a collection of hydrogen atoms will be dispersed over a statistical distribution of energies.
Biochemistry on earth has evolved around water and takes advantage of certain properties of water. Its ability to hydrogen-bond is exploited extensively in biomolecule structures. Water has the ability to accommodate charged species or neutral dipolar species. This is called hydrophilicity. It is important not just to keep ions and molecules in solution, but also to stabilize the transition of a reaction if it generates a momentary dipole.
Water is immiscible with substances having a large hydrocarbon protuberances like fatty acids, phospholipids or certain side groups found on a few amino acids. This is called hydrophobicity. Terrestrial biochemistry exploits both hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity.
A benefit of hydrophobicity in biochemistry is that fatty substances like phospholipids will spontaneously organize into the lipid bilayer structure. Hydrophobicity in this case leads to the formation of stable compartmental structures. Life takes full advantage of the lipid bilayer in the production of the cell wall. This keeps all of the necessary biomolecules contained and concentrated for effective and timely biochemical transformations to occur. The cell wall excludes a great many deleterious substances as well. However, many protein structures have sections that are sufficiently hydrophobic as to be compatible with the hydrophobic lipid part of the bilayer. This property allows the protein to anchor itself within the bilayer leaving the more hydrophilic portions of the protein jutting out into the extra- and intracellular aqueous media. Many of these proteins penetrating the bilayer- channel proteins- are sufficiently hollow as to allow ions or molecules to pass through. Even better, the ability to pass ions or molecules through can be switched on or off by other biomolecules or with drugs.
Some larger molecules like the fatty phospholipids above have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions. Given the chance, phospholipid molecules will spontaneously orient themselves in a way that when combined the water ‘repellant’ hydrophobic tails will tend do aggregate. This leaves the hydrophilic phosphate features at each end to remain in contact with the water environment.
Cells have compartmentalization and cell walls simply because of the incompatibility of the polar water molecule and nonpolar hydrocarbons. These two incompatible liquids arrange in a way that minimizes the surface area of contact between them. They will form layers when stationary or droplets when one is dispersed in the other. This is the minimum energy condition they spontaneously go to. Micelles will even form spontaneously in your soapy dishwater.
Life on earth presently requires many environmental conditions to be just right. Cells of micellar-like construction take advantage of the hydrophobicity of substances with long chain hydrocarbon parts on one end and charged or polar features on the other side. Micelles are structures that spontaneously form in water. Living cells adopt a bilayer structure based upon the tendency for “likes to dissolve likes.” That is, non-polar hydrocarbon features “prefer” not to be in contact with polarized water, but rather cluster in a way that minimizes water-hydrocarbon surface contact. The effect of carbon chain structures in the biochemistry of earth is the stability of carbon-based structures and the wide variety features it can accommodate. These features include stable carbon-carbon chains as well as carbon bonds to hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O) and sulfur (S) in particular. Carbon is unique in that it readily allows the formation of stable double bonds with itself or N, O, or S. Carbon also can form triple bonds with itself or N. Cyanide and acetylene are examples. The ease and stability of carbon bonded to C, N, O and S, along with the stability of multiple bonds on carbon all point to it as an excellent candidate for as the ideal building block for biomolecules.
It is often mentioned that since silicon has certain similarities to carbon why isn’t life based on it? Silicon-silicon bonds are prone to oxidation and not found in nature. Silicon is almost always found in nature as silicate in its various forms in minerals and very often in variety of silicate oligomers and polymers. Silicon-nitrogen and silicon-sulfur substances are not easy energetically. Furthermore, silicon does not form double bonds with itself or other elements. So, the variety of structural motifs silicon can form isn’t as broad as carbon. Silicon vastly prefers to be silicate in nature. Silicon is not found in biomolecules despite its high abundance in the nature.
Conclusion
I’m trying to make the point that extraterrestrial life will surely be different from life on earth at the macroscopic scale but maybe not so much at the level of molecular transformations. Every living species today trails behind it a unique evolutionary history, some of which remains in their genomes. Despite the huge variety of life forms on earth and all of the attendant structural variability that goes with it, we all share the use of DNA/RNA, proteins, carbohydrates, phosphates, lipids, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, etc. All life forms on earth are able to capture and use energy as well as reproduce.
The history of life reveals an obstacle course through which organisms struggled to stay alive. Those that did survive had no way to anticipate the future and no way to prepare for it even if they were able to “anticipate” at all. The history of life is the history of challenges to survival.
Humans exist today because our ancestors going back into deep time were able to survive both anaerobic and oxygenated earth, snowball earth, competitive pressures from other life forms, vulcanism, cometary impact, solar UV radiation, chemical toxicity from the environment, disease and climate.
Today we can add stupidity to the list of survival challenges. Can we survive the results of our behavior? Humans have a brilliant streak in developing weapons- explosives, guns, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. If all else fails, there will always be the sharp stick and club.
Humans are the way we are because of the way that natural history unfolded. A planet with the same makeup and conditions 3 billion years ago would evolve life in a different way than we went. Evolution happens because of the ability of our genetic material to be just a bit unstable and to be passed on in reproduction. But this change is a random process in both features and time. A genetic change can be fatal or helpful. The manner and schedule in which random genetic alterations happen is impossible to predict. Evolution is blind going forward. Another try at evolution is highly unlikely to produce Homo sapiens again.
Any given “intelligent” species may or may not invent or use radio technology. Therefore, they may or may not emit or receive radio transmissions. Such creatures would be undetectable using radio astronomy. Although two patents for wireless telegraphy came out in 1872, humans have only had useable wireless telegraphy since 1895 (Marconi). As of this writing, only 128 years have elapsed since Marconi sent his first long distance (1.5 mile) radio communication.
We have only had radio communications for 128 years in the entire history of our species. In order to have this invention in 1895, the European enlightenment had to happen leading to the idea of scientific inquiry and a minimum understanding of physics and chemistry. The voltaic pile had to be invented which gave way to further refinement of electricity. At minimum, the metallurgy of iron, copper and zinc (for brass) had to be in place for the for the discovery and use of electricity. The path to broadcasting and receiving radio waves required a fair degree of curiosity and industrialization.
Lamentations on Chemistry 