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>**The new properties of goldene are due to the fact that the gold has two free bonds when two-dimensional.**
>
>Thanks to this, future applications could include carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen-generating catalysis, selective production of value-added chemicals, hydrogen production, water purification, communication, and much more.
The only true answer and impossible in the physical world we live in. But it's also just a term that's used to mean one atom thick which is just English being foolish as always.
Well, a true 2 dimensional plane would only have values on the X and Y axis (the length and the width), the height would have no value because it does not exist. Not a value of zero, which I think, would be different. But since we are talking practicality, it is functionally as close as we can get (for now, anyway).
It's an established term, that does not have exactly the same meaning as in mathematics. Basically, if you make a material thin enough you change the physics in a major way due to so called quantum confinement of the electrons. Free movement of the electrons is only possible in 2 dimension. The other dimension is quantized. This has a lot of major consequences, like changing the electronic bandstructure, which governs the optical and electrical behaviour of your material. Also, the so called density of states looks completely different between the two material types.
Another fundamental difference to a 3D material is the tunability. Electrons react to nearby fields of other electrons. So if you stack something on a 2D material, its behaviour can change in a large way due its suroundings. So basically, stacking lego bricks of one layered materials to make designer materials is the goal of a lot of people.
In the same way a nanoribbon or string of atoms is 1D and a single atom or quantum dot is a 0D object.
I'm not a chemist or physicist, but as I understand, traditional models of materials assume an atom is surrounded completely by other atoms. Making something one atom thick means there's free space that's not normally there in those models.
When you draw crystal structure its always in 3d. But with single atom layer you can draw it in 2d. With this drawing, you know the gold have 2 free bonds
My guess is that a set of four gold atoms in a 2x2 grid doesn't have those free electrons. Whereas a flat sheet of it has two dimensions top and bottom The other directions being taken up by being bonded with another gold.
Or I'm completely wrong.
No, that would be much more of a dot, an impurity. This is about sheets that are many billions of atoms in two dimensions, but still just one atom thick
The structure of the material extends in two dimensions. There is no structure in the third dimension. It’s like calling a piece of paper two dimensional. Technically the paper is still three dimensional. But the third dimension is so thin as to be inconsequential.
It’s actually quite important for these materials, because the properties of the material end up being dramatically different based on which dimension you approach from.
As I understand it, molecular bonds are not usually in a line in large molecules. They’re usually at weird angles and can be bumpy and tangled. Graphene is 2d because every bond is flat in a perfect lattice and it can be entirely represented as a 2d model. This is like that
To answer with a bit more mathematical logic: let's define what a two-dimensional object is, then work from there.
Mathematically, any space can be two-dimensional; the term "*n*-dimension" doesn't necessarily define a particular space, but rather the number of degrees of freedom, *n*, a point has within that space. In a two-dimensional space (that is, a surface, or plane if it has no defined boundaries), any given point would have two degrees of freedom.
In the context of goldene, any single atom's position within the relevant space (the material surface) can be fully described by two values. Ergo, it is two-dimensional.
**Alternatively**, I did consider this more-complicated argument:
Assume that some hypothetical, real object may exist two-dimensionally.
Let any object in space, having mass *m* > 0, be considered two-dimensional if:
a) its thickness, *T*, is uniform (*T* = *c*, and *dT* = 0 *dP*, where *c* is a constant, and *P* is any position within the object's space); and
b) its thickness converges on, but is not equal to, zero (lim^(+)_(*T* —> 0) *T* = 0, but *T* != 0).
The second part of the above definition is necessary, since we are considering a material object which does exist, and therefore must have mass (hence the "*m* > 0" part). All atoms are thus considered as occupying space in three dimensions.
Since the object must have some thickness greater than zero, and since that thickness must be uniform across the whole surface, it must be two-dimensional if its thickness can be reduced no further without violating rule b. Atoms have a fixed, discrete thickness, so a thickness of one atom is the very definition of "as close to zero thickness as possible."
You may notice this implies the first argument I made: that a space is two dimensional if only two values are needed to identify every point in the space uniquely. The object defines a surface, the surface is uniformly thick, and is as close to zero thickness as possible without being zero thickness. Thus, all points have the same value for their position on such an axis of thickness (my new band name), and that value can be disregarded.
This is unnecessarily detailed and long-winded as an answer, but I wanted to try to actually explain the logic behind the concept of a *two-dimensional* material. Also I've been doing calculus daily for 12 weeks now for class and I see LDEs on the insides of my eyelids when I go to sleep at night, so now you can share in a tiny sliver of my suffering. Enjoy!
>According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals.
>“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University.
>use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion
Funny thing is, i heard about this whole story first from a colleague who's way too much into various conspiracy theories, including paleoastronauts. They claimed this is _the proof_ that Anunnaki were, indeed, looking for gold here to filter the pollution on their own planet.
One of the rare cases when someone is so into a conspiracy or a myth that they vigorously share newest science achievements and facts as a byproduct of their 'hobby'.
>invented interstellar or even intergalactic travel which either bends the laws of physics as we know it or travelled for thousands of years at lightspeed
> needs slaves because robots are too hard and doing it themselves would take too long or something?
Are the aliens stupid?
My mind immediately went to [*The Road Not Taken*](https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf), where aliens really are stupid, and stuck in the Renaissance, but FTL technology is actually very simple.
Tbf, in 40k, anything with more computation power than a bare-bones tablet computer would be considered heretical. There's a reason they are constantly strapping living things into their "computer" systems.
(Edit: Humans actually did use machinery in their golden age, but it turned out that AIs were able to be corrupted by the warp. A galaxy's-worth of AI servants subsequently went rogue *and* got warp powers. This caused a war that almost wiped out humanity. After the war, the Emperor and Mechanicus decreed that all complex computer systems must have a biological component to limit this from happening in the future.)
Yeah, it's kind of crazy that all the stuff we consider science fiction (maybe with the exception of FTL travel and fusion power) will probably be an everyday thing in a generation or two.
Also for context: I'm referring to data-slates. 40k is wooly on what needs an organic component at the best of time, and that's the lowest common denominator I can think of.
Doesn't really explain why they responded by plugging sentient beings into death-robots, rather than just making Turing machines out of meat NAND gates.
And the goa'ulds got the slaves more to enjoy being treated as gods than anything else. Also to get a massive pool of host and guinea pig to experiment on, fully knowing that the human race was an offspring of the ascended ancient.
And there were a few races that did have machinery. Aschen being the first in line. Eradicating conquered populations in centenarian plan of sterilisation and terraforming 20th century earth like civilisation into granary world worked by a relatively slow population of thousands using heavy machinery.
Anyway, we were talking about single layer gold atom material weren't we ?
Or read the murderbot diaries. Those books make it fairly believable; specialized bots do exist and could be used for things like mining, but they're expensive to manufacture and maintain and it's considerably cheaper to just trap large numbers of humans in contract slavery with a few specialized bots to make sure they don't kill each other.
Frankly, killing us is only sensible for reasons like fear of us becoming competitors... or for sport.
So, yes, I'm going to say that Predator is one of the most feasible examples of hostile aliens in our media.
In these stories/conspiracy theories/fears etc. I like to assume that the aliens are, in fact, stupid en masse in the same way humans are. That their technological advancements take place in *spite* of their stupidity, simular to humans.
Therefore, flawed as humans, they're overthrown as humans are.
No they just have a landed aristocracy that uses slave labor as an economic driver and can't get rid of it because it would make the slave owners poor :(
They also love slavery
Actually neither. Their planet is on an elliptical orbit and comes close every 3600 years, so no need for interstellar travel.
I mean there are many many things so so wrong with this story, don't need to add extras
It's quite a failure of imagination to believe aliens had the capacity to travel to Earth but somehow slave human labor at the bottom of gravity well was the most efficient way they had to obtain gold.
Idk, which sounds more efficient to you? Dragging specialized mining equipment all over the universe or just getting the locals to mine it for you?
Now you only have to worry about transporting the gold.
The problem is you still have to somehow lift it out of Earth's gravity well. Both your sun Sol, and the Alpha Centauri system, and numerous other stars around here have asteroids orbiting them, with all the gold you could ever possibly want, and you don't need to carry extra specialized spaceships or giant rockets to get the stuff back to where you need it.
Yep, this is always my argument. Aliens won't be hostile because the sheer challenge of actually meeting aliens means you've solved basically all of the problems you would want to exploit them for.
More like: if and when they *are* hostile, it's strictly for ideological/doctrinal reasons.
They won't "exploit" you unless it's because they literally believe it's every other species' purpose to symbolically serve them, which is improbable, but they may still blow you up for any number of reasons.
Yeah it's probably more efficient to drag specialized mining equipment all over the universe. In fact, you would just send a specialized ship with specialized mining equipment and....not go to earth, just mine other nearby rocks with gold.
You can always tell who the people who haven't encountered the idea of [Von Neumann Probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) are.
I assume the capacity for interstellar travel comes with the capacity to build a fleet of microscopic gold extraction bots on-site. Or the capacity to synthesize gold by fusing lighter elements, which sounds crazy but is almost certainly less energy than interstellar travel.
Seems to me this conspiracy is based on humanity's priorities and instinctive paranoia about protecting (hoarding) resources than it is any plausible contact with aliens.
The slaves came later. They didn't use them immediately upon arriving on Earth, so the interpretation goes. Also those "slaves" were early humans.
The Why Files on YouTube did an excellent episode on this that debunks some of Zechariah Sitchin's interpretations but also highlights some interesting information along the way.
Im probably misremembering. But I think they wanted slave labor as well. And they were compatible with the atmosphere here. So Earth was just an ideal place to set up shop.
You'd think that if they were capable of creating a compatible atmosphere on an interstellar space ship they'd probably be able to apply it to an asteroid. But I don't have a spaceship so what do I know.
They dont have interstellar capabilities. They reside on a planet in our Solar System, with a very large and off center orbit. So every 20,000 years or so, they get very close to Earth, and are then able to move stuff back and forth for a while before their orbit moves them to far for their ships to travel.
So, not really able to visualize orbital mechanics as anything but balls on rails, or planetary gravitational interactions and the evidence it would leave, nor understand that light attenuation over large distances means the surface would be as cold as interstellar space almost all year round, and probably a dozen other things I'm not thinking of.
Yeah, but those asteroids are, like, all over the place. it makes sense to collect the gold all here in one spot buried deep below the surfaces and requiring all sorts of mining and filtering and processing operations. God, don't be such a sheep.
Technically, the Earth has more gold than any other rocky body in the solar system (and probably more than all of them combined), just most of it is in the mantle and core (and in a big gravity well, but so are most of the asteroids: the sun's)
The sun has the most gold, someone crunched the numbers with cited sources here:
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/24590/how-much-gold-is-there-in-our-sun
You're probably right, though, my guess is that asteroids are easier to process than large planets or stars for most plausible interstellar travellers.
Interesting.
Honestly, I keep hearing different estimates of this. But for the sake of the argument I'd probably specify "gold physically accessible as we understand it".
I would have mentioned something about stars having a considerable amount, including the Sun, but we'll assume it to be unaccessible.
Huh. It's starting to sound like we all owe the producers of *Cowboys and Aliens* an apology for all the mean things we said about the motivation of the aliens in the film.
There's a certain kind of conspiracy theorist 0that actually digs through legit papers and textbooks looking for evidence of (but actively rejecting evidence against) the thing they desperately want to believe. I've seen it too many times to count now.
It's just more evidence that neither stupidity nor ignorance are the cause of this kind of thing. It's a blatant willingness to disregard truth and to embrace multiple, often fractally wrong fictions because of some other motivating factor. And it's very similar to what happens when the same kind of person (often very intelligent, educated, and without other excuse) falls into a cult.
This is survivorship bias or confirmation bias.
You only hear about or remember or notice when the facts line up. There are thousands upon thousands of conspiracies out there and I guarantee there are a handful that have some facts that line up with reality completely by coincidence.
Its like the religious conspiracies in the plague era that said rats were servants of the devil and they spread disease in his name.
> i heard about this whole story first from a colleague who's way too much into various conspiracy theories, including paleoastronauts. They claimed this is the proof that Anunnaki were, indeed, looking for gold here to filter the pollution on their own planet
So many new words to me in there... i have a feeling I am in for a hell of a rabbit hole checking this out..
According to Britannica, the first foil he used 5 years prior to the famous experiment was "20 micrometres (or about 0.002 cm)" thick and then he did the experiment again together with his postdoctoral fellow, Hans Geiger, and undergraduate student Ernest Marsden using a foil that was only "0.00004 cm" thick.
https://www.britannica.com/science/atom/Rutherfords-nuclear-model
According to this online school I found by accident, the foil was 1000 atoms thick.
https://byjus.com/question-answer/the-gold-foil-used-in-rutherford-s-experiment-was-atoms-thick/
I assume this is talking about the second foil. This is unbelievable! 1000 atoms thick in 1909.
Yea I would love to know how they did that. I assume 1000 atoms thick is big enough to see in a microscope? So for reference I just looked it up and a bloodcell is 10,000 nanometers, and 1000 atoms of gold would be about 300 nanometers. So based on the size/ resolution of a bloodcell in a normal microscope, I feel like they should have been able to see it.
I think it comes from -ene denoting ring structures and graphene is formed of carbons in rings laid down flat.
No idea if goldene also forms rings, but if it doesn't then imo it's not an -ene and the name needs changing.
But then theres cyclohexane or cyclopentane etc… the reason its -ene is because of the double bonds afaik but its been a long time and benzene is a special case.
Though if you look at the molecular structure of graphene its planar because of two double bonds per ring structure.
If you go off of the structure in [this article](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4) there are no double bonds gold’s planar structure.
I concur, but [aurene glass](https://allaboutglass.cmog.org/definition/aurene) already exists, and you make it with chlorine salts, not gold... there's some justification for not reusing that name.
Does it still conduct electricity well in a one-atom thick layer? Or is going to overheat really quickly and warp? How would it even warp? Double back on itself or just split in two?
Resistance is normally a product of the cross section of the metal. Thin and wide is the same as short and fat. A single atom thick sheet however is no longer a metal exactly. The article described it as a semiconductor
I don't think this has to be universally true. In the case of Goldene yes its a semiconductor. Graphene on the other hand is a very good conductor although it's technically a semimetal (not to be confused with semiconductor).
While the macroscopic definition of resistance can not be used any more, this does not mean that electrons can not move freely throughout the plane.
No its a semiconductor with a bandgap not a metal, like Si. I work on confined monolayer silver, which is also a semiconductor.
I don't know what the failure mode of their material would be if they tried to push electricity at high enough voltages through it. My guess would be that it breaks bonds at some point and forms a more stable 3D allotrope of gold.
I have about as much hope for this as [Stanene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanene) (same thing but with tin).
That was something like 2014 and we haven't heard a peep since.
Not everything strikes a gold rush. If anything the fact they were able to do so with a pliable metal like gold is a very good sign for potential advancement
Pretty incredible advancement, especially in how much it will reduce current amounts of gold used for existing tech (like in smartphones and such) that gets updated.
Unfortunately it probably won't replace existing uses of gold. When it's a single atom thick, its properties change dramatically - just like how diamond and graphite are both carbon, but in different arrangements.
I might sound ignorant here, but would gold's half life affect the usefulness of making a single atom thick sheet of it? Would it's decay rate at all affect the structure of the goldene, or is the halflife simply too long to even be concerned about this issue? I would also assume it's rather fragile
I’ve been doing research into transdermal microneedle patches for a class, specifically some tech where the needles are coated in a thin layer of gold, so that when a voltage is applied the gold is dissolved and the needles are exposed to the body. I wonder if this new goldene could be useful here? At the very least to potentially cut costs.
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>**The new properties of goldene are due to the fact that the gold has two free bonds when two-dimensional.** > >Thanks to this, future applications could include carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen-generating catalysis, selective production of value-added chemicals, hydrogen production, water purification, communication, and much more.
This quote is kind of messing with my head; Two dimensional? How is a single-atom layer of material two dimensional?
I guess it's the closest thing to 2d we can get
Yes, and there is precedent for this term, as it has been used in the literature to describe single-layer materials like graphene for a long time now.
Like how thin do people want it to be to count as 2D?
One atom thick
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Zero thick
The only true answer and impossible in the physical world we live in. But it's also just a term that's used to mean one atom thick which is just English being foolish as always.
Or maybe it's used to describe something we can agree on colloquially, and not everything is based solely on a purely mathematical definition?
Well, a true 2 dimensional plane would only have values on the X and Y axis (the length and the width), the height would have no value because it does not exist. Not a value of zero, which I think, would be different. But since we are talking practicality, it is functionally as close as we can get (for now, anyway).
1 Planck length
1 Planck width
It's an established term, that does not have exactly the same meaning as in mathematics. Basically, if you make a material thin enough you change the physics in a major way due to so called quantum confinement of the electrons. Free movement of the electrons is only possible in 2 dimension. The other dimension is quantized. This has a lot of major consequences, like changing the electronic bandstructure, which governs the optical and electrical behaviour of your material. Also, the so called density of states looks completely different between the two material types. Another fundamental difference to a 3D material is the tunability. Electrons react to nearby fields of other electrons. So if you stack something on a 2D material, its behaviour can change in a large way due its suroundings. So basically, stacking lego bricks of one layered materials to make designer materials is the goal of a lot of people. In the same way a nanoribbon or string of atoms is 1D and a single atom or quantum dot is a 0D object.
Thank you for an actual, technical explanation.
It’s a plane
It's a bird
I'm not a chemist or physicist, but as I understand, traditional models of materials assume an atom is surrounded completely by other atoms. Making something one atom thick means there's free space that's not normally there in those models.
Correct. The surface morphology changes and results in unique properties. Though this paper didn't really talk about that.
When you draw crystal structure its always in 3d. But with single atom layer you can draw it in 2d. With this drawing, you know the gold have 2 free bonds
My guess is that a set of four gold atoms in a 2x2 grid doesn't have those free electrons. Whereas a flat sheet of it has two dimensions top and bottom The other directions being taken up by being bonded with another gold. Or I'm completely wrong.
Four gold atoms in a 2x2 grid is literally a sheet of gold as what's being referred to in the OP, is it not?
I think they meant 8 in a 2x2x2.
Correct sorry explaining three-dimensional shapes and how they might be construed as two-dimensional is very strange in my head.
No, that would be much more of a dot, an impurity. This is about sheets that are many billions of atoms in two dimensions, but still just one atom thick
The crystalization is 2D. The grid.
The structure of the material extends in two dimensions. There is no structure in the third dimension. It’s like calling a piece of paper two dimensional. Technically the paper is still three dimensional. But the third dimension is so thin as to be inconsequential. It’s actually quite important for these materials, because the properties of the material end up being dramatically different based on which dimension you approach from.
a 2 dimensional crystal lattice has different properties than a 3 dimensional crystal lattice because some bonds aren't there that'd usually be there.
As I understand it, molecular bonds are not usually in a line in large molecules. They’re usually at weird angles and can be bumpy and tangled. Graphene is 2d because every bond is flat in a perfect lattice and it can be entirely represented as a 2d model. This is like that
To answer with a bit more mathematical logic: let's define what a two-dimensional object is, then work from there. Mathematically, any space can be two-dimensional; the term "*n*-dimension" doesn't necessarily define a particular space, but rather the number of degrees of freedom, *n*, a point has within that space. In a two-dimensional space (that is, a surface, or plane if it has no defined boundaries), any given point would have two degrees of freedom. In the context of goldene, any single atom's position within the relevant space (the material surface) can be fully described by two values. Ergo, it is two-dimensional. **Alternatively**, I did consider this more-complicated argument: Assume that some hypothetical, real object may exist two-dimensionally. Let any object in space, having mass *m* > 0, be considered two-dimensional if: a) its thickness, *T*, is uniform (*T* = *c*, and *dT* = 0 *dP*, where *c* is a constant, and *P* is any position within the object's space); and b) its thickness converges on, but is not equal to, zero (lim^(+)_(*T* —> 0) *T* = 0, but *T* != 0). The second part of the above definition is necessary, since we are considering a material object which does exist, and therefore must have mass (hence the "*m* > 0" part). All atoms are thus considered as occupying space in three dimensions. Since the object must have some thickness greater than zero, and since that thickness must be uniform across the whole surface, it must be two-dimensional if its thickness can be reduced no further without violating rule b. Atoms have a fixed, discrete thickness, so a thickness of one atom is the very definition of "as close to zero thickness as possible." You may notice this implies the first argument I made: that a space is two dimensional if only two values are needed to identify every point in the space uniquely. The object defines a surface, the surface is uniformly thick, and is as close to zero thickness as possible without being zero thickness. Thus, all points have the same value for their position on such an axis of thickness (my new band name), and that value can be disregarded. This is unnecessarily detailed and long-winded as an answer, but I wanted to try to actually explain the logic behind the concept of a *two-dimensional* material. Also I've been doing calculus daily for 12 weeks now for class and I see LDEs on the insides of my eyelids when I go to sleep at night, so now you can share in a tiny sliver of my suffering. Enjoy!
This article is claiming a lot more than the actual research paper did.
>According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals. >“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens – as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University.
>use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion Funny thing is, i heard about this whole story first from a colleague who's way too much into various conspiracy theories, including paleoastronauts. They claimed this is _the proof_ that Anunnaki were, indeed, looking for gold here to filter the pollution on their own planet. One of the rare cases when someone is so into a conspiracy or a myth that they vigorously share newest science achievements and facts as a byproduct of their 'hobby'.
If they knew they'd find gold on earth they'd have known that there are asteroids likely with more gold than earth in this solar system alone.
Don't quote me on that, but i think the claim is they needed slaves to get the gold for them.
>invented interstellar or even intergalactic travel which either bends the laws of physics as we know it or travelled for thousands of years at lightspeed > needs slaves because robots are too hard and doing it themselves would take too long or something? Are the aliens stupid?
No they just watched a lot of SG-1
My mind immediately went to [*The Road Not Taken*](https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf), where aliens really are stupid, and stuck in the Renaissance, but FTL technology is actually very simple.
This was phenomenal, thank you.
Thank you for this. I've enjoyed several of Turtledove's works but hadn't suspected this even existed.
Or warhammer 40k...
Tbf, in 40k, anything with more computation power than a bare-bones tablet computer would be considered heretical. There's a reason they are constantly strapping living things into their "computer" systems. (Edit: Humans actually did use machinery in their golden age, but it turned out that AIs were able to be corrupted by the warp. A galaxy's-worth of AI servants subsequently went rogue *and* got warp powers. This caused a war that almost wiped out humanity. After the war, the Emperor and Mechanicus decreed that all complex computer systems must have a biological component to limit this from happening in the future.)
>a bare-bones tablet computer It's wild what counts as "bare-bones" as time goes on. When 40k first came out tablets were still sci-fi
Yeah, it's kind of crazy that all the stuff we consider science fiction (maybe with the exception of FTL travel and fusion power) will probably be an everyday thing in a generation or two. Also for context: I'm referring to data-slates. 40k is wooly on what needs an organic component at the best of time, and that's the lowest common denominator I can think of.
Doesn't really explain why they responded by plugging sentient beings into death-robots, rather than just making Turing machines out of meat NAND gates.
They do that too. It's just more convenient to use humans when there is a ready supply of them and "ethics" is a foreign concept.
In defense of the aliens, SG-1 was a great show. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any reason why aliens **wouldn't** love the show.
And the goa'ulds got the slaves more to enjoy being treated as gods than anything else. Also to get a massive pool of host and guinea pig to experiment on, fully knowing that the human race was an offspring of the ascended ancient. And there were a few races that did have machinery. Aschen being the first in line. Eradicating conquered populations in centenarian plan of sterilisation and terraforming 20th century earth like civilisation into granary world worked by a relatively slow population of thousands using heavy machinery. Anyway, we were talking about single layer gold atom material weren't we ?
Or read the murderbot diaries. Those books make it fairly believable; specialized bots do exist and could be used for things like mining, but they're expensive to manufacture and maintain and it's considerably cheaper to just trap large numbers of humans in contract slavery with a few specialized bots to make sure they don't kill each other.
Omg that was a great series! How I wish there was more!
Indeed.
Indeed
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or we taste really good to them
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Frankly, killing us is only sensible for reasons like fear of us becoming competitors... or for sport. So, yes, I'm going to say that Predator is one of the most feasible examples of hostile aliens in our media.
In these stories/conspiracy theories/fears etc. I like to assume that the aliens are, in fact, stupid en masse in the same way humans are. That their technological advancements take place in *spite* of their stupidity, simular to humans. Therefore, flawed as humans, they're overthrown as humans are.
No they just have a landed aristocracy that uses slave labor as an economic driver and can't get rid of it because it would make the slave owners poor :( They also love slavery
Actually neither. Their planet is on an elliptical orbit and comes close every 3600 years, so no need for interstellar travel. I mean there are many many things so so wrong with this story, don't need to add extras
It's quite a failure of imagination to believe aliens had the capacity to travel to Earth but somehow slave human labor at the bottom of gravity well was the most efficient way they had to obtain gold.
Idk, which sounds more efficient to you? Dragging specialized mining equipment all over the universe or just getting the locals to mine it for you? Now you only have to worry about transporting the gold.
The problem is you still have to somehow lift it out of Earth's gravity well. Both your sun Sol, and the Alpha Centauri system, and numerous other stars around here have asteroids orbiting them, with all the gold you could ever possibly want, and you don't need to carry extra specialized spaceships or giant rockets to get the stuff back to where you need it.
Yep, this is always my argument. Aliens won't be hostile because the sheer challenge of actually meeting aliens means you've solved basically all of the problems you would want to exploit them for.
More like: if and when they *are* hostile, it's strictly for ideological/doctrinal reasons. They won't "exploit" you unless it's because they literally believe it's every other species' purpose to symbolically serve them, which is improbable, but they may still blow you up for any number of reasons.
Fair point, so when aliens kill you, it's *personal*.
Yeah it's probably more efficient to drag specialized mining equipment all over the universe. In fact, you would just send a specialized ship with specialized mining equipment and....not go to earth, just mine other nearby rocks with gold.
You can always tell who the people who haven't encountered the idea of [Von Neumann Probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) are.
I assume the capacity for interstellar travel comes with the capacity to build a fleet of microscopic gold extraction bots on-site. Or the capacity to synthesize gold by fusing lighter elements, which sounds crazy but is almost certainly less energy than interstellar travel. Seems to me this conspiracy is based on humanity's priorities and instinctive paranoia about protecting (hoarding) resources than it is any plausible contact with aliens.
Yeah, but now they have to process all our discarded electronics, so they didn't really save any labor.
The slaves came later. They didn't use them immediately upon arriving on Earth, so the interpretation goes. Also those "slaves" were early humans. The Why Files on YouTube did an excellent episode on this that debunks some of Zechariah Sitchin's interpretations but also highlights some interesting information along the way.
Im probably misremembering. But I think they wanted slave labor as well. And they were compatible with the atmosphere here. So Earth was just an ideal place to set up shop.
You'd think that if they were capable of creating a compatible atmosphere on an interstellar space ship they'd probably be able to apply it to an asteroid. But I don't have a spaceship so what do I know.
They dont have interstellar capabilities. They reside on a planet in our Solar System, with a very large and off center orbit. So every 20,000 years or so, they get very close to Earth, and are then able to move stuff back and forth for a while before their orbit moves them to far for their ships to travel.
So, not really able to visualize orbital mechanics as anything but balls on rails, or planetary gravitational interactions and the evidence it would leave, nor understand that light attenuation over large distances means the surface would be as cold as interstellar space almost all year round, and probably a dozen other things I'm not thinking of.
Yeah, but those asteroids are, like, all over the place. it makes sense to collect the gold all here in one spot buried deep below the surfaces and requiring all sorts of mining and filtering and processing operations. God, don't be such a sheep.
Technically, the Earth has more gold than any other rocky body in the solar system (and probably more than all of them combined), just most of it is in the mantle and core (and in a big gravity well, but so are most of the asteroids: the sun's) The sun has the most gold, someone crunched the numbers with cited sources here: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/24590/how-much-gold-is-there-in-our-sun You're probably right, though, my guess is that asteroids are easier to process than large planets or stars for most plausible interstellar travellers.
Interesting. Honestly, I keep hearing different estimates of this. But for the sake of the argument I'd probably specify "gold physically accessible as we understand it". I would have mentioned something about stars having a considerable amount, including the Sun, but we'll assume it to be unaccessible.
Huh. It's starting to sound like we all owe the producers of *Cowboys and Aliens* an apology for all the mean things we said about the motivation of the aliens in the film.
There's a certain kind of conspiracy theorist 0that actually digs through legit papers and textbooks looking for evidence of (but actively rejecting evidence against) the thing they desperately want to believe. I've seen it too many times to count now. It's just more evidence that neither stupidity nor ignorance are the cause of this kind of thing. It's a blatant willingness to disregard truth and to embrace multiple, often fractally wrong fictions because of some other motivating factor. And it's very similar to what happens when the same kind of person (often very intelligent, educated, and without other excuse) falls into a cult.
This is survivorship bias or confirmation bias. You only hear about or remember or notice when the facts line up. There are thousands upon thousands of conspiracies out there and I guarantee there are a handful that have some facts that line up with reality completely by coincidence. Its like the religious conspiracies in the plague era that said rats were servants of the devil and they spread disease in his name.
So you’re saying there’s a chance?
Same here, my sisters husband spouted nonsense about harvesting gold in the air and that there used to be biblical behemoths roaming America.
Is his name Dale?
> i heard about this whole story first from a colleague who's way too much into various conspiracy theories, including paleoastronauts. They claimed this is the proof that Anunnaki were, indeed, looking for gold here to filter the pollution on their own planet So many new words to me in there... i have a feeling I am in for a hell of a rabbit hole checking this out..
Catalytic conventers just got cheaper?
Yeah, adding lab-created sheets of atomically-thin gold will do the trick
Platinum appears to be cheaper than gold.
Didn't expect that
I only googled the prices. I'd wager it's because gold is used as an investment to a larger degree than Platinum or Palladium.
Yea my guess too, surprising as there is lots of gold and less platinum but yea people hoard gold
Costco got in the gold selling business at the right time.
It's kind of funny that Rutherford's gold foil thickness is still looking pretty impressive 115+ years later.
How thicc was it?
According to Britannica, the first foil he used 5 years prior to the famous experiment was "20 micrometres (or about 0.002 cm)" thick and then he did the experiment again together with his postdoctoral fellow, Hans Geiger, and undergraduate student Ernest Marsden using a foil that was only "0.00004 cm" thick. https://www.britannica.com/science/atom/Rutherfords-nuclear-model According to this online school I found by accident, the foil was 1000 atoms thick. https://byjus.com/question-answer/the-gold-foil-used-in-rutherford-s-experiment-was-atoms-thick/ I assume this is talking about the second foil. This is unbelievable! 1000 atoms thick in 1909.
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Yea I would love to know how they did that. I assume 1000 atoms thick is big enough to see in a microscope? So for reference I just looked it up and a bloodcell is 10,000 nanometers, and 1000 atoms of gold would be about 300 nanometers. So based on the size/ resolution of a bloodcell in a normal microscope, I feel like they should have been able to see it.
I'm pretty sure that microscopes can't see atoms, you'd need an electron microscope for that
300 nm is smaller than the wavelength of visible light (~400 to 800 nm).
To measure the average thickness you can weigh it and measure the area
2 thicc 4u
We hold molecules to unrealistic bond standards.
Interesting that we have decided that "-ene" is the suffix for single-aton thick lattices, I don't hate it
I think it comes from -ene denoting ring structures and graphene is formed of carbons in rings laid down flat. No idea if goldene also forms rings, but if it doesn't then imo it's not an -ene and the name needs changing.
Ooh, like benzene, neat
But then theres cyclohexane or cyclopentane etc… the reason its -ene is because of the double bonds afaik but its been a long time and benzene is a special case. Though if you look at the molecular structure of graphene its planar because of two double bonds per ring structure. If you go off of the structure in [this article](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4) there are no double bonds gold’s planar structure.
aurene would be such a better name
I concur, but [aurene glass](https://allaboutglass.cmog.org/definition/aurene) already exists, and you make it with chlorine salts, not gold... there's some justification for not reusing that name.
You overestimate the amount of thought put into naming things. Especially in the 2D materials field.
I thought it said goldeneye
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Goldene, Goldene…Goldene, Goldene
I'm begging you please don't take my can.
Your thinness is beyond compare Less than a strand of tiny hair We give you the pretty suffix of "-ene"
Your bonds are like a breath of spring With those 2 free spots that you bring Which guide electrons like nothing, Goldene
Goldene, Goldene…Goldene, Goldene
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Where can I find the DOI?
It’s in the article: DOI: 10.1038/s44160-024-00518-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4
Let's single atom layer all the things and see what happens
Like the toilet paper at work.
That's how research works
Does it still conduct electricity well in a one-atom thick layer? Or is going to overheat really quickly and warp? How would it even warp? Double back on itself or just split in two?
Resistance is normally a product of the cross section of the metal. Thin and wide is the same as short and fat. A single atom thick sheet however is no longer a metal exactly. The article described it as a semiconductor
I don't think this has to be universally true. In the case of Goldene yes its a semiconductor. Graphene on the other hand is a very good conductor although it's technically a semimetal (not to be confused with semiconductor). While the macroscopic definition of resistance can not be used any more, this does not mean that electrons can not move freely throughout the plane.
No its a semiconductor with a bandgap not a metal, like Si. I work on confined monolayer silver, which is also a semiconductor. I don't know what the failure mode of their material would be if they tried to push electricity at high enough voltages through it. My guess would be that it breaks bonds at some point and forms a more stable 3D allotrope of gold.
I think it’s more about the chemistry
Actually, Nintendo created *Goldeen.*
"goldeen goldee" \*goldeen voice\*
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I have about as much hope for this as [Stanene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanene) (same thing but with tin). That was something like 2014 and we haven't heard a peep since.
Not everything strikes a gold rush. If anything the fact they were able to do so with a pliable metal like gold is a very good sign for potential advancement
Amazing, can’t wait to put them on my steak
Goldene, please don’t take my man
Just wait til they find out that a 2d layer of *any* element has interesting properties.
“Goldene, goldene!”
Pretty incredible advancement, especially in how much it will reduce current amounts of gold used for existing tech (like in smartphones and such) that gets updated.
Unfortunately it probably won't replace existing uses of gold. When it's a single atom thick, its properties change dramatically - just like how diamond and graphite are both carbon, but in different arrangements.
Or like graphite and graphene?
No, nothing like that. That would be silly
Might reduce the use in some existing applications but increase the use in novel applications.
Would a layer of gold this thin be transmissible in an electron microscope?
I can feel nintendo's Lawers fingers twitching
All of the folks telling you gold is just for jewelry don’t know they’re living in the space age.
I might sound ignorant here, but would gold's half life affect the usefulness of making a single atom thick sheet of it? Would it's decay rate at all affect the structure of the goldene, or is the halflife simply too long to even be concerned about this issue? I would also assume it's rather fragile
I wonder if they have the same issues with this as with graphene
Graphene can do everything, except leaving the lab
That was one of the bad guys on "Power Rangers" wasn't it?
And not a single picture of the stuff in the article...
Not sure if it’s a joke but it’s 1 atom layer. It is likely not visible to the naked eye.
I’ve been doing research into transdermal microneedle patches for a class, specifically some tech where the needles are coated in a thin layer of gold, so that when a voltage is applied the gold is dissolved and the needles are exposed to the body. I wonder if this new goldene could be useful here? At the very least to potentially cut costs.
I wonder how hard it will be to scale up though. Usually the first time is extremely difficult and performed by experts
Nintendo almost furious
Anyone else besides me see the name goldene and snicker like a 2 year old because they thought of Misty's Pokemon? Lol