All you Star Trek movie fans, do you remember when the Enterprise dropped down on earth in order to pick up a pair of humpback whales? They had to go back in time since none existed on the planet any more, and the earth was to be destroyed unless a probe detected real whale song?
So how do you transport whales in a starship? You build them an aquarium made of transparent aluminum, of course. There was an interesting discussion in the movie about Scotty giving away the formula that didn't yet exist, when a big part of their mission was not to change history, and practical Scotty simply asked how anybody knew that this wasn't how it was "discovered"? This was after, of course, Scotty found that the computers of the time didn't work on voice command and he'd have to actually type!
(Computer, meet Alexa. Two centuries early.)
There were a lot of funny scenes in the movie where Spock, recently reanimated and retrained on Vulcan, is introduced to Earth and humans and does his unique best to blend in.
Of course some of the fun of the movie was all of us knowing there was no such thing as transparent aluminum. How could there be? It was impossible, something yanked out of the writer's imagination to make space travel seem possible, ignore that it can't be real and move on in the plot.
Except, it's recently been produced!
It is an oxide, TAIOx. So far it's been an extremely complicated process, requiring large vats of dangerous acids, lasers, vacuum chambers... not your basic household supplies and equipment. But it is transparent aluminum.
Now there's a new process, much simpler, made by a pair of Filipino scientists in Ateneo de Manila University.which makes dot sized transparent "windows" in an aluminum strip. The newer process is called "droplet-scale anodization," and is also much more environmentally friendly, cutting down on chemical waste and energy use.
There are a lot of ideas for where it would be extremely useful, though nobody has seriously mentioned spaceship windows and whale sized aquariums - or not that I'm aware of. But a girl can still dream, right?
So beam me up, Scotty! I'll grab Steve and pull him along, and we'll enjoy some of that 23rd century medicine and a little space travel. Good times!
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