IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

188 Chapter 9
of an abalone is twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics. Spider silk, ounce
for ounce, is five times stronger than steel. Mussel adhesive works underwater
and sticks to anything—without a primer. Bone, wood, tusks, heart
muscle, antlers, skin, blood vessels, tendons—they are a ‘‘bounty of resilience,’’
says Benyus, ‘‘miracle materials all.’’ 2
We do, on occasion, learn from nature—but we are clumsy students. The
design of Kevlar, for example, was inspired by the properties of silk. Kevlar
is indeed extremely tough: It can stop bullets. But compare, as Benyus has
done, a quietly spinning spider to the violent and expensive process we
need to manufacture Kevlar: ‘‘We pour petroleum-derived molecules into a
pressurized vat of concentrated sulfuric acid and boil the noxious brew at
several hundred degrees Celsius into a liquid crystal form. We subject this
crunchy mush to extremely high pressures, in order to force the fibers into
alignment as we draw them out. The energy input in this process is extreme,
and the by-products are toxic. The spider, by comparison, makes
her equally strong (and much tougher) fiber at body temperature—and
without the need for high-pressure vats, heat, or corrosive acids. ‘‘She also
produces locally,’’ concludes Benyus, ‘‘with no need to drill holes in the
middle of stormy oceans in order to obtain her raw materials.’’ 3
Perhaps we would learn more quickly from penguins and spiders if we
were not surrounded by swarms of our own technologies. Stranded on an
ice floe, with nothing but penguins for company, we’d probably study
them more closely. But we live in a world filled with materials and devices
invented by ourselves. I touched on today’s flood of technical information
in chapter 8. A comprehensive technical directory, in the improbable event
that one could be produced, would contain four and a half million terms
today—and would be growing at a fast-accelerating pace.
‘‘I have a hammer, but I need a nail,’’ say Swedish materials scientists.
New opportunities presented by our global technology machine come
faster than we can find uses for them. We’ve never before had to deal with
such an uncontrolled increase in technical performance and forms. For
the first million years or so after his appearance, man used essentially five
materials to make all his tools and objects and structures: wood, rock,
bone, horn, and leather—a small number, but themselves the product of
millions of years of evolution. Today, in contrast, most big companies
own research factories that churn out technical knowledge in impressive
quantities. But they often don’t know what to do with it. Sometimes they