[Culture of Chaos IV] Funny Fog on Sunny Days

Copyright 2010 Thomas James Hardman, Jr, all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. References to real places and things may be included but their usage is fictional in nature and intent. Any similarity to real persons or parties is coincidental and should be seen as fictional in nature and intent.

Surrealism combines a blend of reality and unreality. Any person unable to sort the fiction and fantasy from the factual is strongly advised to seek professional help.

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Nanotubes are a specific class of the larger structural order of fullerines, but then again, so are buckyballs.

Buckyballs are nothing incredibly novel or hard to manufacture; they occur naturally in nature and indeed they're pretty much everywhere. Everything from the natural processes of stellar formation and aging and destruction, to the lighting of even the most primitive candle all create buckyballs. It's just that earth humans never thought to look for them until the 1990s or so. Once they started looking for them, they started to find them everywhere.

In nature, on earth, they aren't found in significant concentration, and for this we should probably be glad; in their pure form, they're effectively frictionless, more or less little molecule-sized ball-bearings that are harder than diamond.

If someone fell into a dish full of buckyballs, there they would remain until they were fished out. They wouldn't be able to stand, not any more than they could stand on a pile of marbles. Yet for all of their durability and effectively frictionless nature, buckyballs don't seem to be particularly harmful.

Well, at least not until they start to pile up in drifts, like the strange summer snowstorm that started sometime back in late 2008. Perhaps it started to fall earlier on, but 2009 is when I first noticed it.

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Look up at the sky, on a clear summer day, and you'll see something which is not at all strange. You've become accustomed to it. Yet the sky wasn't always that pale blue that you now see. It was blue, that is for sure. Yet it didn't have that washed-out paleness to it.

Look around you, and notice the haze. It's not fog, and it's not dust. It's not adding to the humidity nor does it partake of it, and even after a rain, it's floating around out there. It's too small to see, individually, but in aggregate, over distance, it all adds up to a slight whitish haze.

At first, I presumed that it was nothing but fly ash, but fly ash is trapped at the generator stations, and has been for years. Indeed, it is often mixed with concrete to both hold it in place, and to strengthen the concrete.

Yet for the concrete to actually become more durable, the proportions of admixture must be correct. Adding too little simply fails to strengthen the concrete. Adding too much has the same effect on the strength of the concrete as would adding too much sand. The main difference is that sand is easily discerned when too much has been added to the mix; with fly-ash, it's indistinguishable from the other whitish portions of the cement mix.

Note that in the same way that buckyballs are created by any flame burning carbon, coal-fired electrical power generation facilities will generate buckyballs. One may reasonably presume that they collect in the fly-ash traps, to the degree that they are collected at all. As they are in units of single molecules containing 60 or so carbon atoms, they're kind of hard to filter.

They might go right past the fly-ash filters and directly into the environment, where they would tend to migrate to the lowest point reachable without going uphill.

They might also tend to be blown about on every last breeze, too.

Then again, like an awful lot of people hereabouts, I might just be batshit crazy. Or maybe my eyes are going bad. But what exactly, then, is this nearly frictionless dust collecting on almost every flat surface that isn't swept by the breezes, or vacuum cleaners?

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It's difficult to test for the presence of fullerenes, especially in the case of buckyballs. Once created, they're a little bit less chemically reactive than a diamond. There is the so-called Bingel Reaction, but that's not exactly a commonplace reaction nor one likely to occur in nature, outside of cellular mechanism scales, and none such are known (at least not to this writer) at this time.

If you have enough of them collected in one place, they're lightly soluble in some rather obscure solvents that one can't just run out and buy, as these solvents mostly tend to be used in the production of illicit recreational chemicals.

You can't filter buckyballs either, other than perhaps with a filter made of mats of carbon nanotubes, which are themselves a bit difficult to detect.

So, one might reasonably ask, how exactly does one manufacture and refine buckyballs, or nanotubes for that matter?

Manufacture is easy, just burn something containing carbon. To approach the efficiencies of industrial needs, usually a carefully metered flame of acetylene is burnt with a carefully metered stream of oxygen, across a high-intensity direct-current arc. This carefully-metered combustion may be directed into a neutral-gas/noble-gas atmosphere, for instance helium or argon. The resulting "ash" may be collected in a variety of ways, notably by recycling the product gases through some of the solvents known to concentrate fullerenes. When it turns a deep purple, you carefully evaporate the solvent and what remains is mostly buckyballs mixed with nanotubes. The nanotubes will frequently accept an electrical charge and may thus align themselves along magnetic field lines on an inclined plane, while the buckyballs won't accept such a charge, and will just roll downhill. If you're trying to make and collect nanotubes -- which are probably the most lucrative use of fullerenes -- the buckyballs can more or less just all pile up.

They're still going to be hard to test for, without adding solvent and looking for the telltale color. However, you'll still see them as they pile up... a sort of gray dust, unless well-lit, in which case, they create a sort of sparkling haze that will float for hours if you shake up a jar full of them.

That sparkling haze looks a lot like the sparkling haze that's floating in the air outside...

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