9.2.1 Buckyballs have shown up in some strange places in the decade since their discovery. They were found in candle soot, lightning-struck soil, and, most astonishingly, in a meteorite in a crater near Sudbury, Ontario, that formed some 1.85 billion years ago. Jeffrey Bada, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initially thought that it would not be likely to find life traces in rocks from the crater. He reasoned that if the molecules had not been incinerated on impact, they would have been destroyed by hungry microbes years ago. He gave the rocks to a graduate student, Luann Becker, to analyse. She dissolved the pieces of rock until she was left with bits of black, powdery carbon residue and then again in a solvent called toluene. The solution turned purple, which is what happens when buckyballs are present. Not long after publishing their results, other labs began to trap atoms caught inside the cage-like structure of buckyballs. This gave the Scripps team impetus to see if anything got trapped in the atoms from 1.85 billion years ago. Becker and Bada worked with Robert Poreda at the University of Rochester to see what was inside their buckyballs and found that one in every million buckyball came up with a helium atom. When Poreda saw the results, relates Bada, he "called us absolutely speechless; he was stuttering, [the finding] blew all our minds." (Sawyer, 1996, pg. A3)

9.2.2 The buckyballs could not have formed after the meteorite impact, in the Earth's helium poor atmosphere. They concluded that it must have been formed in a place where the pressure of helium was 500 times more than that of the Earth's entire atmosphere. The only place with such an abundant helium is the neighbourhood of dying red giant stars. The survival of buckyballs has important implications in the puzzle of the origin of life. Life on Earth needed carbon-based molecules to get started, but the Earth's early atmosphere did not have much organic carbon. For years scientists have debated whether large terrestrial objects seeded the Earth with building blocks of life.

9.2.3 Bada was initially an opponent to the hypothesis of the impact-delivery scenario, but got turned around by his discovery. In the April 12th issues of the journal Science the research team announced that this was "the most compelling evidence yet to support the theory that as comets and meteorites bombarded the earth early in its history, they helped bring about life by fertilising the planet with vital organic compounds." In fact, Becker claimed, the major reason for the study was that "we thought we found a clever way to study Earth's early atmosphere‹something nobody's been able to do." Instead, "the fullerenes were more clever than we were. They came right out of the stars and managed to survive the impact. I really think of them as stardust." (Bada et la, 1996)

9.2.4 Now, let us return back to earth and see of what use buckyballs are to our lives here and now. The same architecture that enabled survival of an impact that is compared to detonation of all of nuclear weapons at once is being used in the development of technology beyond the silicon chip. Semiconductor technology relies on silicon, the second most abundant element on earth. But, after only fifty years of silicon-based computer chips, scientists are seeing the limitations of them and are turning towards soot. Soot is made of carbon, and when carbon is vaporised in an inert gas such as helium and allowed to cool slowly, it spontaneously forms into a buckyball, consisting of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a symmetrical pattern. They are chemically inert, incredibly strong, and in some cases electrically and thermally conductive. In the first few years proceeding their discovery, however, no one could come up with practical applications. And just as the buckyball excitement was to die down, "buckytubes," or "nanotubes" came in.

9.2.5 In 1991 Dr. Sumio Jijima of NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan discovered cylindrical carbon molecules which he has dubbed "buckytubes" because of their similarity to fullerenes or "buckyballs." The cylinders are made of sheets of carbon atoms, arranged in hexagons as in graphite. Instead of forming closed cages, they form open-ended cylinders. The science community immediately got excited at this discovery, because cylinders are an unusual crystal structure, as well as because the carbon hexagons corkscrew around a helix.

9.2.6 Helical structures are well-known in proteins, DNA, and bacteria, but this is the first time these structures have been seen in inorganic materials, reminiscent of Gaia theory. Buckytubes, or nanotubes, hold a promise of a new semiconductor technology-nanotechnology. Nanotubes are only one-50,000th of the thickness of a human hair and are predicted to be able to perform electronic functions analogous to those of vastly larger silicon devices. Alex Zettl, a physicist from UC Berkeley, reported in Science that he and his team found certain parts of the tube to behave as a metal: a current varied smoothly as the voltage applied to it was changed. Elsewhere, the current came on only after the voltage reached a particular threshold, much like a semi-conductor. Zettl predicts a world of "nanocomputers" and considers an approach of generating a "network of devices made of nanotubes, and then see what sorts of outputs they give for certain inputs." (Economist, 1997, pg. 145.)

9.2.7 Looking even farther into the future, Dr. Zettl suggests that clumps of carbon nanotubes might spontaneously organise their electronic interactions into complex webs analogous to neural networks in the brain. The density of a nanotube interconnections achieved by clumping is staggering‹if all the nanotube molecules that could be packed into a one-half-inch tube were laid out end to end, they would extend 250,000 miles. He further speculated that a random jumble of nanotubes in such a cube could generate a network of nanocomputers that might be able to perform complex tasks and to reconfigure itself to improve its own efficiency. Until a decade ago, we knew of only two forms of pure carbon: diamond and graphite. With the discovery of the third, it may be that we are entering an entirely new era.

9.2.8 Following the extraordinary path of Fuller's intuitive and mathematical work, which was eventually affirmed by the hard-science world that rejected Fuller during his lifetime, has proven to be a highly inspirational force for me. I started looking at the Information Personae from a long-term lens, projecting many futures way beyond those possible today. [top]