Topic: Chemist needed for the year 4017

I'm writing a scene where I use a superacid to dissolve vehicles (e.g., aerial cars) into their constituent elements, which are then separated and reused to create new vehicles.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that lowering your average Volkswagen into such an acid would cause the acid to churn like crazy and release a ton of noxious fumes into the air.

But what happens to the elements? Are some of them completely vaporized? Does the acid bind with some of them forming other compounds? What might be a way of separating the elements/compounds from the acid?

Thanks.
Dirk

Quote Post 1

2 Reply by Charles_F_Bell (edited by Charles_F_Bell 2015-03-26 02:34:18)

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Norm d'Plume wrote:

I'm writing a scene where I use a superacid to dissolve vehicles (e.g., aerial cars) into their constituent elements, which are then separated and reused to create new vehicles.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that lowering your average Volkswagen into such an acid would cause the acid to churn like crazy and release a ton of noxious fumes into the air.

But what happens to the elements? Are some of them completely vaporized? Does the acid bind with some of them forming other compounds? What might be a way of separating the elements/compounds from the acid?

My sense would be that you would have to break up the vehicle, like take off the tires and glass bits, or you will get unpredictable results. 

The combination of hydrochloric, sulphuric, and nitric acids will dissolve about anything inorganic and you will generate a lot of explosive hydrogen gas.  The final solids (in solution that will have to be evaporated) will be the salts of the metals dissolved.  Reversing, getting the metal from the salts is a long, difficult process of electrolysis whereby there will a mess of impure products.  When I hear of such a Sci-fi scheme, I can only think, good luck with that.

http://www.docbrown.info/page03/AcidsBasesSalts04.htm

Quote Post 2

3 Reply by Tom Oldman (edited by Tom Oldman 2015-03-26 03:00:13)

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

But aren't you applying the science of NOW to the far future, Dirk? Perhaps by 4017 some new processes would be fairly simple. You have a 'black box' the size of, say, an 18-wheeler with an input chute. You drop the air car into it and the box hums, slurps, crunches, lets off condensation in the form of simple steam, a buzzer sounds and several bins along the side of the box receive ingots of whatever metals are in an air car. You don't have to explain it, it just is.

Call it the Stanislawsky Car Rendering Asunder Process (SCRAP).

~Tom

Quote Post 3

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

It is the far future, but I need an excuse for a very large vat of uncovered acid, big enough to pitch something in about the size of loaf of bread and have it instantly destroyed by the acid. Superacids can do that. I can come up with other reasons for a vat of acid, but there's a particular vehicle I was hoping to dissolve first. The latter isn't critical, but a nice to have.

Either way, it's been decades since I took chemistry, and I need at least a basic understanding of the process. As Charles suggested, I could strip the car first, but modern recycling techniques simply crush and melt the metal frame. I can't use heat in this case. It has to be an acid.


Dirk

Quote Post 4

5 Reply by dagnee (edited by dagnee 2015-03-26 04:13:17)

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Dirk, I don't know a lot about syfy writing, I don't read it, but I do watch a lot of syfy movies. And what I am wondering is this: in the year 4017 wouldn't technology have progressed passed acid as the way to get rid of a car? Like particle beam technology that would reduce it down to its basic elements? Is there a reason you chose acid?

Just a thought.

dags smile

Quote Post 5

6 Reply by njc (edited by njc 2015-03-26 04:33:07)

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

You probably have the truck designed for recycling.  It will be made out of metallo-organic composites that come apart when the magic solution is energized electrically... or else, after the rubber/plastic organics come off in one bath, the remaining intermetallic ceramic composites come apart in a plasma-arc chamber, with the aid of high-energy sound and some ionic species in the controlled plasma.  The material disintegrates like ice in a 200-degree oven.

Only true glass parts remain.  The glass is probably coated with aluminum oxy-nitride (AlON--current trademark) for extreme shatter resistance.  Or-it's all AlON.

Oh, and aftermarket components that were not removed can foul the process.  They're not supposed to, but some people buy counterfeit parts on the grey market for upgrade/customization.  A body disintegrating in the process would probably register as that kind of contamination on the meters.

Quote Post 6

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Here it is (with a commercial from 2015)!
See the gases? I'd scoop them up with 4017 A.D. tech, like a distillery on a mega-monster level and then reduce the gases to the metals, light metals, etc. then you also have some great poisonous gases for your story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3vrFP_1I4Q


I can also most hear and see tiny people in the bus... screaming for their lives and then dissolving tragically with the tiny truck!!! Ahhhhhhhhh!

Quote Post 7

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Tom Oldman wrote:

But aren't you applying the science of NOW to the far future, Dirk? Perhaps by 4017 some new processes would be fairly simple. You have a 'black box' the size of, say, an 18-wheeler with an input chute. You drop the air car into it and the box hums, slurps, crunches, lets off condensation in the form of simple steam, a buzzer sounds and several bins along the side of the box receive ingots of whatever metals are in an air car. You don't have to explain it, it just is.

Call it the Stanislawsky Car Rendering Asunder Process (SCRAP).

~Tom

There is a point in a story when Sci-fi may become magic should the author let it. If one adopts  the attitude that anything is possible (given enough time) then science becomes magic, or the stalking grounds of the Gods.  I ridicule this attitude in my book Remembrances and Reconciliation when in the year 12484 C.E., 0110101011 01110100 Jones discovers the link between collisional quenching of excited-state bismuth atoms by various gases and the meaning of love. I feel (in that superior way of mine) I can ridicule that attitude because I feel I know enough to believe that although the universe is causal, it is not deterministic.  Instantaneous travel across great distances by means of quantum entanglement is the latest sci-fi magic. Such a thing is possible in conception, but applied to biologic systems, I know with certainty just below absolute that what we speculate now will not be the result.  We, in our 20th-century materialistic determinism, that is a false philosophy, are wrong.

Quote Post 8

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

I point to Heinlein's post-Time Enough For Love works, where he lets the tech become magic and thumbs his nose at posterity, damaging his 'franchise' enough that nobody is likely to try to cash in on it.

Quote Post 9

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Charles_F_Bell wrote:
Tom Oldman wrote:

But aren't you applying the science of NOW to the far future, Dirk? Perhaps by 4017 some new processes would be fairly simple. You have a 'black box' the size of, say, an 18-wheeler with an input chute. You drop the air car into it and the box hums, slurps, crunches, lets off condensation in the form of simple steam, a buzzer sounds and several bins along the side of the box receive ingots of whatever metals are in an air car. You don't have to explain it, it just is.

Call it the Stanislawsky Car Rendering Asunder Process (SCRAP).

~Tom

There is a point in a story when Sci-fi may become magic should the author let it. If one adopts  the attitude that anything is possible (given enough time) then science becomes magic, or the stalking grounds of the Gods.  I ridicule this attitude in my book Remembrances and Reconciliation when in the year 12484 C.E., 0110101011 01110100 Jones discovers the link between collisional quenching of excited-state bismuth atoms by various gases and the meaning of love. I feel (in that superior way of mine) I can ridicule that attitude because I feel I know enough to believe that although the universe is causal, it is not deterministic.  Instantaneous travel across great distances by means of quantum entanglement is the latest sci-fi magic. Such a thing is possible in conception, but applied to biologic systems, I know with certainty just below absolute that what we speculate now will not be the result.  We, in our 20th-century materialistic determinism, that is a false philosophy, are wrong.

Huh?

Quote Post 10

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Thanks to everyone for their ideas. Based on the science, a superacid is more complicated than is appropriate for my book, which is more about entertainment (space opera) than it is Asimovian science.

I chose a vat of some of kind of goo (yet to be named) that liquifies whatever you put in it without the frothing and killer fumes that would come from a superacid. It bubbles a little, just to make it look good. As many of you pointed out, it's two thousand years in the future, so who knows what they'll come up with in their chemistry labs.

Thanks
Dirk

Quote Post 11

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Kraft Easy Cheese, - a vat of goo, yet to be named, but I name it here.

This product will last ten thousand years and probably do the job for you.

http://www.quill.com/cheese/cbs/5063220 … B_50632201

wtf is charles talking about?

Quote Post 12

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Archeologists of the future will be digging those little cans of squirty goo up and going nuts trying to figure out just what it does.

I have no idea.

~Tom

Quote Post 13

14 Reply by Norm d'Plume (edited by Norm d'Plume 2015-03-26 20:43:15)

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

LOL. Actually, any goo that dissolve cars whole can probably clean up our landfills too.

Dagnee, that quote your responded to wasn't mine, but I will say that according to your definition, all science fiction can be viewed as fantasy, it's just a question of degrees. Are Star Trek transporters sci-fi or fantasy? I lost count of the number of times Commander Data used technobabble to justify the solution to whatever emergency they were facing. What about "aerial" dogfights in the gravityless vacuum of space as pictured in Star Wars? With sound! Those two franchises are generally considered space opera (a subgenre of sci-fi), same place where I put mine.

Besides, the science says that the strongest superacids (nasty stuff) can dissolve anything pretty much instantaneously, so it's doable, albeit complicated. Mine is a simplified variant of that. As Gene Roddenberry is quoted as saying, when a cop pulls out a gun, he doesn't stop to explain it.

Thanks to all.
Dirk

EDIT: In case anyone is curious, the strongest acid is fluoroantimonic acid (20 quintillion times stronger than sulphuric acid). Apparently, the only thing capable of containing it is, oddly enough, teflon.

Quote Post 14

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Tom Oldman wrote:
Charles_F_Bell wrote:
Tom Oldman wrote:

But aren't you applying the science of NOW to the far future, Dirk? Perhaps by 4017 some new processes would be fairly simple. You have a 'black box' the size of, say, an 18-wheeler with an input chute. You drop the air car into it and the box hums, slurps, crunches, lets off condensation in the form of simple steam, a buzzer sounds and several bins along the side of the box receive ingots of whatever metals are in an air car. You don't have to explain it, it just is.

Call it the Stanislawsky Car Rendering Asunder Process (SCRAP).

~Tom

There is a point in a story when Sci-fi may become magic should the author let it. If one adopts  the attitude that anything is possible (given enough time) then science becomes magic, or the stalking grounds of the Gods.  I ridicule this attitude in my book Remembrances and Reconciliation when in the year 12484 C.E., 0110101011 01110100 Jones discovers the link between collisional quenching of excited-state bismuth atoms by various gases and the meaning of love. I feel (in that superior way of mine) I can ridicule that attitude because I feel I know enough to believe that although the universe is causal, it is not deterministic.  Instantaneous travel across great distances by means of quantum entanglement is the latest sci-fi magic. Such a thing is possible in conception, but applied to biologic systems, I know with certainty just below absolute that what we speculate now will not be the result.  We, in our 20th-century materialistic determinism, that is a false philosophy, are wrong.

Huh?

Did you understand this much? There is a point in a story when Sci-fi may become magic should the author let it.

Agree? or Disagree? or Don't care?

Do you understand "plot hole"?  If a sci-fi writer creates his way out of a situation by using a sci-fi speculation that is no more than magic, he is a bad writer.  The rest of what I said relates to the fact that not only writers who are not scientists but many scientists themselves simply want to believe in magic because it is fun to believe in magic, but real science dictates that the condition: you do A and you do B you will always get C applies to very few (and some say no) processes in 100% certainty of outcome, and magic basically says that all one has to do is do A (wave a wand) and do B (say: abracadabra) and you will get C (a pot of gold).

Quote Post 15

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

If I have to, I'll choose "Don't care". I've read some really marvelous SF novels that had glaring "plot holes" as you call them, and that didn't detract one whit from the story itself. And, yes, I know what a plot hole is. I've written a few myself.

But, we are far afield of the original question.

~Tom

Quote Post 16

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Tom Oldman wrote:

If I have to, I'll choose "Don't care". I've read some really marvelous SF novels that had glaring "plot holes" as you call them, and that didn't detract one whit from the story itself. And, yes, I know what a plot hole is. I've written a few myself.

But, we are far afield of the original question.

No, not really, because I was pointing out that a scientific plot device to advance a plot ought to be scientific, and I believe the  OP (Norm D'P/Dirk) was seeking such a plot device.   Sci-fi literature (and there is some still being written here and there) was read by geeks who enjoyed speculative science and were rather intolerant of plot holes solved by silly science (I am of that group), but once sci-fi as a genre became dominated by film (Star Wars) in which there is rarely any scientific content at all,  the plot holes are there for another reason. I can't guess which sort of plot hole you enjoy, but my money is on this last sort and not for reasons of lack of any science. There is at least some honesty in the label Space Opera and the fact that the SciFi channel changed its name to SyFy. I haven't actually found any sci-fi literature on TNBW that is not more properly Space Opera or Cowboys and Indians in Space or Action/Adventure and some dystopian fantasy mislabeled sci-fi.

Quote Post 17

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

max keanu wrote:

Kraft Easy Cheese, - a vat of goo, yet to be named, but I name it here.

This product will last ten thousand years and probably do the job for you.

http://www.quill.com/cheese/cbs/5063220 … B_50632201

wtf is charles talking about?

Sometimes if you have to ask, it is not for you to know.

Quote Post 18

19 Reply by njc

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

SF came to mean 'Speculative Fiction' for a while.  We seem now to have a spectrum rather than sharply defined categories.  I think the terms are more useful for description than for partitioning.

Quote Post 19

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

While I have everyone's attention, I'm open to names for my new goo. I usually use tongue-in-cheek type names for something like this. So far all I've got is espresso and rotgut. :-)

There's a Latin theme in my book, so I'm going to look up a few terms in Latin as well.

Thoughts?
Dirk

Quote Post 20

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

dagnee wrote:

The short answer: First, Science Fiction not based on science is fantasy. Second, Love is a chemical reaction, not an emotional one. Third, The Universe does not have an intellect. It is mostly a chemical reaction and not an intelligent response. You can use weather for an example, a hurricane does not strike coastal regions because it is angry at that particular area, but because of a condensation of water vapor.

dags smile

PS...I forgot to include, everything we imagine about the future is filtered through our desire to believe there is only one cause for every effect and can only be pure conjuncture.

Yes, that is a good summary. That sci-fi speculation (with rare exception like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- Weather -- Chaos Theory -- Butterfly Effect) depends on a 19th, early 20th century model of how the universe works that is wrong in a fuller context in which Chance must operate.

Quote Post 21

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

njc wrote:

I point to Heinlein's post-Time Enough For Love works, where he lets the tech become magic and thumbs his nose at posterity, damaging his 'franchise' enough that nobody is likely to try to cash in on it.

1980's magical realism

Anarchist-libertarians reach a point in which they don't care to have the real reality get too much in the way.

Quote Post 22

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Dirk,

Check your facebook message from me.

Quote Post 23

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

dagnee wrote:

I think we need to look at the name of the genre: Science FICTION. I don't know about anyone else in this thread, I am not a physicist, I only know what I read about. I have trouble getting my head around the notion of a transporter, my little brain can't envision a whole body being taken apart in one place and resembled hundreds of miles somewhere else. When I run up against something like that in Syfy...I just go with it.

I think getting your reader to suspend their disbelief should be the aim of any fiction writer. No matter what the subject, if you write it well enough to get the reader to 'go with it,' you've accomplished 90% of your goal.
big_smile

Certainly it is easy enough to downplay the modern role of the story-telling author to perpetuate convenient myths. We have scientists themselves, and the news media to do all that, and authors are as much victims as anyone else.

Nevertheless, there is much to be said about common-sense understanding of scientific myths even if you'd prefer to ignore it. There is no necessary truth to the process of creating an identical copy of the human mind hundreds of miles away because we might be able to do the same with a single photon,  and common-sense understanding of climate-change models that have never made a valid prediction over any period of any duration should not affect our entertainment crafted for us by novelists and movie producers.

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25 Reply by njc

Re: Chemist needed for the year 4017

Dagnee's point about the willingful suspension of disbelief seems to be the key point here.  The science fiction part of Dr. Who changed from storyline to storyline but the writers kept the viewer involved.  The categories only tell us something about the assumptions built into the fictional world.

Quote Post 25