Complex Numbers

Material World

More from that internationally renowned science reporting site, Cracked:

    5 Alien Materials That Exist Naturally Here on Earth  

Naturally, I need to nitpick the headline.

Planet formation is an active area of research, so they might not have the precise sequence or timeline nailed down. But whatever the actual mechanism, it's pretty clear that everything on Earth, and even the Earth itself, came from outer space. We still get literal tons   of material from outer space every day. Everything, including your body and the air you breathe, has an alien origin: it was not of Earth until it was, at which point some of it started getting recycled, mixed, and recombined.

Astronauts and space pirates are exploring the cosmos, in search of unobtanium, transformium and precious red matter.

That multi-source science fiction reference is doubly amusing to me, as I just downloaded the game Starfield yesterday (featuring astronauts and space pirates and valuable materials) and started playing it.

Their quest may be fruitless, since none of those materials really exist.

Well, philosophically, anything we can think of "really exists" in some manner. But no, like the Easter Bunny, unicorns, honest politicians, and (probably) Bigfoot, they're not part of consensus reality.

5. Flammable Ice

Yes, water is a mineral (just one that happens to be liquid at room temperature), and when methane is trapped in water crystals, that’s called flammable ice. It has a second, equally extreme name as well: “fire ice.”

While I generally don't bother fact-checking stuff from a comedy site, this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. Yep, they're talking about {xlink:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathratemethane clathrates. They even lifted the image in the article (and put "methane clathrate" in its caption) from that Wikipedia page. In their defense, the photo is credited to USGS, which I'm pretty sure means it's in public domain, or at least freely licensed.

What exactly a clathrate is, I leave to any curious readers to follow appropriate links. It's a more generalized thing, and fascinating, but irrelevant to the article or my commentary.

So, is this some promising new energy source, ready to power our kitchens and our factories? Maybe! Or, maybe the warming oceans will melt the ice and release gigatons of methane, setting off a chain reaction of further global warming to push us ever closer to catastrophe.

Burning methane produces carbon dioxide, so why not both?

4. Snail Teeth

What is the hardest substance in the world?

A congresscritter's head.

Many of you will answer “diamond.”

And many don't understand the difference between material hardness, toughness, and strength. And pure stubbornness, as with my answer above.

We’ve also found a natural composite material harder than diamond, in a most unlikely place: inside the mouths of snails.

Doubt they'll try to make jewelry out of that.

If you think you should now fear these snails, who will cut and smash through your body without mercy, put those worries aside. In reality, your body is so fragile that any animal’s teeth could make short work of it...

As some cats I've known were prone to proving.

3. Glass Bombs

We’re not totally sure where australites came from. Once we dispensed with the volcano theory, we dubbed them extraterrestrial, having come from meteorites, but we don’t think that’s true anymore. Instead, we think an asteroid struck the ground in the distant past, somewhere around 800,000 years ago. It hit so hard that it threw terrestrial material into space. This material then came back, now transformed by its journey and smoothed through reentry.

As I noted above (of course I had a point to my nitpicking), that terrestrial material was actually extraterrestrial material that had been here longer.

2. Spontaneously Combustible Coconuts

...is the name of my heavy metal Jimmy Buffett cover band.

You’ve run into coconuts many times when you’ve been stranded on desert islands or when you bought one from a roadside vendor. And yet the dried flesh of the coconut holds strange properties and is a class 4.2 hazardous substance.

No idea where the joke ends and facts begin here, and can't be arsed to look it up.

1. Fire-Forged Feces

Bird shit has always held fascinating properties, sending us rushing to mine the stuff to exploit it and sometimes sparking actual wars. When we weren’t using it as fertilizer, we were digging out compounds from it to use in creating gunpowder.

Pretty sure those are the same material: phosphorus.

Like everyone, the kestrel poops. Sometimes, it poops above a Russian coal mine, where the blasts of hot gasses transform the guano into something new. It becomes a mineral, which can be colorless, reddish or lilac.

But, sadly, doesn't spontaneously combust.