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"I can't tell whether or not there's going to be a Singularity. I don't really believe the rapture of the nerds stereotype..."
- Charles Stross
 |
| Synthetic Spider Silk | ||
| Artificial fabric thread as strong as steel. |
A roofed enclosure is under construction on an asteroid; the fabric will be like a tent over a small valley.
| Libby concentrated for an instant, then looked puzzled. "But look -- This valley is a thousand feet long and better than five hundred wide. At half of fifteen pounds per square inch, and allowing for the arch of the roof, that's a load of one and an eighth billion pounds. What fabric can take that kind of a load?"
"Cobwebs." "Cobwebs?" "Yeah, cobwebs. Strongest stuff in the world, stronger than the best steel. Synthetic spider silk, This gauge we're using for the roof has a tensile strength of four thousand pounds a running inch." |
| Technovelgy from Misfit,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 Additional resources -
|
Ordinary spider silk is very tough; it is a protein fiber that has a tensile strength comparable to that of high-grade steel and about half that of fibers like Kevlar. Efforts to make garments with it date back to 1709 (if not earlier), when gloves woven from spider silk were presented to the Academy of Science in Paris.
I can't find any clear evidence that synthetic spider silk as described by Heinlein was sought prior to the publication of the story in 1940. There have been recent attempts to create artificial or synthetic spider silk:
Weaving with silk from silkworms is at least 5,000 years old and silkworms have been bred for much of that time.
Compare to silksteel from Alpha Centauri (1990) by Sid Meier and
Plasto-textile from Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov. Also, see goat/spider silk from Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood.
In 2000 Canadian biotechnology company Nexia successfully produced spider silk protein in transgenic goats which carried the gene for it; the milk produced by the goats contained significant quantities of the protein, 1–2 grams of silk proteins per liter of milk. Attempts to spin the protein into a fiber similar to natural spider silk resulted in fibers with tenacities of 2–3 grams per denier...
(From Spider Silk)
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Misfit
More Ideas
and Technology by Robert Heinlein
Tech news articles related to Misfit
Tech news articles related to works by Robert Heinlein
Synthetic Spider Silk-related
news articles:
- 'Smart Silk' In Quantity
- Artificial Spider Silk
- Thin Film Dome Protects Cities From Nuclear Blasts
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| FlexRAM Liquid Metal RAM And One Particular SF Movie Robot |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
