Message #27788

[Qoais]

"The buckyball, being the roundest of round molecules, is also quite resistant to high speed collisions. In fact, the buckyball can withstand slamming into a stainless steel plate at 15,000 mph, merely bouncing back, unharmed. When compressed to 70 percent of its original size, the buckyball becomes more than twice as hard as its cousin, diamond."

So - we don't have to worry about gathering a bunch of space junk to protect our work station.

Strictly speaking, any tube with nanoscale dimensions, but generally used to refer to carbon nanotubes, which are sheets of graphite rolled up to make a tube. A commonly mentioned non-carbon variety is made of boron nitride, another is silicon. These noncarbon nanotubes are most often referred to as nanowires. The dimensions are variable (down to 0.4 nm in diameter) and you can also get nanotubes within nanotubes, leading to a distinction between multi-walled and single-walled nanotubes. Apart from remarkable tensile strength, nanotubes exhibit varying electrical properties (depending on the way the graphite structure spirals around the tube, and other factors, such as doping), and can be superconducting, insulating, semiconducting or conducting (metallic).

So - we don't need a bunch of wire cables all over the place either.  Just have to figure out how to layer the tubes so that the insulating ones are on the very outside, and the very inside, and the conducting ones are in between. 

Sounds a bit like Tesla's theory that one can just stick a rod in the ground and have free electricity.  If you have a generator to make the electricity, then the nanotubes that the construct are made of, would carry the current. 

Nanotubes can be either electrically conductive or semiconductive, depending on their helicity, leading to nanoscale wires and electrical components. These one-dimensional fibers exhibit electrical conductivity as high as copper, thermal conductivity as high as diamond, strength 100 times greater than steel at one sixth the weight, and high strain to failure.

Pictures and audio:

http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/qhall_c98/dekker/