"Supposedly, spider silk is incredibly strong. But if you can't scale that strength there is no point to it." Actually there's a Japanese company that scaled i

"Supposedly, spider silk is incredibly strong. But if you can't scale that strength there is no point to it." Actually there's a Japanese company that scaled it using all kinds of genetic engineering and biochemistry and supposedly North Face is shipping a jacket made of it in Japan for $1K "around now" although I can't find it on the website (only exists as press releases claiming it'll be released right about now). Two days ago according to this press release Kraiglabs started commercial production in the USA under a variety of interesting licenses and patents. http://www.kraiglabs.com/kraig-biocraft-laboratories-new-spider-silk-production-facility-now-fully-operational/ http://www.kraiglabs.com/kraig-biocraft-laboratories-new-spi... Spider silk is right on the cusp of wide availability. Very interesting material. Unless its discovered to cause cancer or something, you'll probably own some in a decade. You can do weird and interesting things with low density materials. I can think of some interesting applications for a Zeppelin sized piece of aerogel with embedded bars of conductive metal foam carrying a (solar generated?) current to resistively heat it. A Zeppelin sized piece of aerogel would be kinda expensive, right now. But someday we could make an island sized platter and cover it with solar cells dumping heat into it during the day and make a halfway decent eternally flying island. In my infinite spare time. The military industrial complex options are interesting. So there are some projectile weapons that ignore low density materials and go right thru (tank sabot round, etc) and others that crumble when they hit anything (some high velocity small caliber rounds, perhaps a HEAT tank round could be triggered by impact no matter how low the density). Meanwhile I'm sure its not very good for the aerogel but I wonder how much energy it dissipates blowing apart in a shock wave, that has some interesting shielding effects for soldiers. Here's a helmet liner that makes you concussion proof exactly once while it turns to dust. Or maybe not.