Test for alien metal?

[DrMatt]

I have a Canadian quarter. That's alien metal!

 

[gnome]

In Dave Barry's summary of the last millenium, he described the Roswell incident as when "an alien spacecraft made of balsa wood and mylar crashed in New Mexico."

 

[Eric Haas]

The instability of trans-uranic elements is generally thought to be a temporary thing. They should get stable again somewhere around atomic number 150 to 200. The presence of such an element would be easy to test for, but we don't know how to make them.

I'm pretty sure that means those elements will have half-lives of hours or days, rather than milliseconds.

Of course, if the aliens travel fast enough, maybe time will slow down enough to make such elements useful.

 

[epepke]

I'm pretty sure that means those elements will have half-lives of hours or days, rather than milliseconds.

I did a web search, and there were some claims for half-lives in the hundreds of years. Which still isn't much.

 

[Ladewig]

When I was playing devil's advocate, I wasn't really getting behind the idea. I don't really imagine a alien species that can survive in our atmosphere without respiratory or pressure gear, that can pass through walls, that can crossbreed with humans to really strip the threads on a bolt on their spaceship.

 

[Beanbag]

When I was playing devil's advocate, I wasn't really getting behind the idea. I don't really imagine a alien species that can survive in our atmosphere without respiratory or pressure gear, that can pass through walls, that can crossbreed with humans to really strip the threads on a bolt on their spaceship.

The trouble with forums is that I can't see the the expression on your face, hear the tone in which the message is delivered, or any of the other cues that tell me what you're really intending.

Regards;
Beanbag

 

[MRC_Hans]

*snip* I don't really imagine a alien species that can survive in our atmosphere without respiratory or pressure gear, that can pass through walls, that can crossbreed with humans to really strip the threads on a bolt on their spaceship.

They might be able to breathe the atmosphere. After all, life bearing planets are likely to be water/oxygen planets, so...

Otherwise, I agree .

Hans

 

[DrMatt]

Source? I'm aware that there is a theory that there should be an isalnd of stability but I've not heard anything about them being that stable and I rather doubt that they would be much good as building materials.

A building made of it couldn't be very tall, as the ground would sag.

 

[Patricio Elicer]

There's no need of complicated technical analysis and details. The key to the enterprise are the double blind tests.

Just ask an independat laboratory to identify that unique un-earthly metal from a group of, say, other 9 samples of rare but earthly alloys. Ask them to repeat the experiment a number of times so that you can safely rule out a hit by chance alone. And that's it!

 

[doppelganger]

I bet if this alien metal really existed, it would have homeopathic properties.

 

[SGT]

What about supercrystals? Ordinary crystals have failures in their crystaline structure. This is what allows impurities to be difused, producing doped semiconductors (diodes, transistors ans such).
A supercrystal has no gaps. This make them orders of magnitude stronger than ordinary crystal. A thin sheet of supercrystal would have very little mass and more resistent than a huge plate of steel, beeing suited to make the hull of a spaceship.
Our scientists have been able to grow tiny filaments of supercrystals. If we found a big chunk of supercrystal we could be sure it was of extraterrestrial origin.