In Full...
There’s a scene in Star Trek IV - the one where they go back to the eighties to fetch a couple of whales - where Scotty needs a huge tank built and hasn’t got the materials for it. So he sits down at a clunky old Mac, tries talking to it, gives up, picks up the mouse like a microphone, and in the end just types out the formula for “transparent aluminium” in exchange for the plexiglass he’s after. The manufacturer stares at the screen, baffled, while Scotty cheerfully hands over a material that won’t be invented for a few hundred years.
That scene stuck with me as a kid, more than the phasers or the warp drive ever did. Something about the idea that the really futuristic thing wasn’t a machine at all, but a material - a substance we just didn’t have the recipe for yet.
I keep thinking about it lately, because we’re getting close to the first half of that. Not the chatbots, but a different kind of AI - the sort that models physics and chemistry rather than language. It’s started working through the space of materials that could exist: which combinations of elements would actually hold together, which crystals are stable, which steels and glasses are perfectly possible but nobody has ever happened to mix. The numbers are staggering. People are talking about hundreds of thousands of stable materials we’d never catalogued, found not in a lab but on a computer, by working out what nature will and won’t allow.
So the recipe part is, slowly, arriving. We’re going to know what’s possible.
The catch is that Scotty didn’t just name the stuff. He had to hand over how to make it, and even with the formula in front of them, that eighties manufacturer would have spent years and a fortune actually producing it. That’s the part the film skips over, and it turns out to be the part that matters. Knowing a material is possible is nothing like being able to make one. Predicting that something is stable is the easy bit next to working out the temperatures, the pressures, the order of the steps, the fiddly craft of getting atoms to line up like that out in the real world.
And, as it happens, transparent aluminium is real. There’s a ceramic called ALON that gets sold, fairly straight-facedly, as “transparent aluminium armour”. The reason you’re not looking out of an aluminium window right now isn’t that nobody knows it’s possible. It’s that making the stuff is slow, hard and expensive.
Which is roughly where I think we’re going: a growing list of miracle materials we know are possible and mostly can’t make yet. A library of the future, running miles ahead of the factory. The hard part stops being what could exist and becomes the duller question of how on earth (or perhaps not) you actually build it. Scotty got the formula across in about a minute. The rest of it was always going to be the real work.