3 ms·

My interpretation was that the origin of the material was simply unknown, which doesn't mean much. If I wake up in the morning and there's an unexpected beer c

My interpretation was that the origin of the material was simply unknown, which doesn't mean much. If I wake up in the morning and there's an unexpected beer can in my yard that I did not place there, then that would be an object that arrived from an unknown origin. It doesn't make the object itself particularly mysterious, but you could have a lot of fun imagining how it got there or why it was placed there. And you can imagine that getting reported in an interesting way. Did a squirrel carry it into the yard? Did a neighbor drink a beer and toss the can into the yard? Did beer drinking aliens drop it from a space ship into the yard? Well, the latter is a fun story. Of course it's infinitely more interesting to have a genuinely mysterious alloy or element that is inexplicable or just new and fascinating for whatever reason. I'm sure a lot of people felt that way about vanadium oxide, for example. https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/vanadium-oxides/8838.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/vanadium-oxides/8838...

mortenjorck 9y ago
There are still plenty of other degrees of interestingness in between "known" and "definitely aliens." These alloys could very well be mysterious not so much for their composition, but for their condition, or their use at all in aircraft.
- starpilot 9y ago
  I could see them as hyper advanced metamaterials with effects we don't entirely understand. Materials science is still a very empirical field with lots of physical experimentation, trial and error. We can observe with SEM, x-ray etc. without fully connecting the dots to the end result. Sort of like dropping an iPhone X into the hands of a Victorian era scientist, who just dismantles it and sees it's a bunch of metal, without a chance of ever being able to reverse engineer it. It's just too advanced. But this is probably nothing.

mortenjorck 9y ago

There are still plenty of other degrees of interestingness in between "known" and "definitely aliens." These alloys could very well be mysterious not so much for their composition, but for their condition, or their use at all in aircraft.

starpilot 9y ago
I could see them as hyper advanced metamaterials with effects we don't entirely understand. Materials science is still a very empirical field with lots of physical experimentation, trial and error. We can observe with SEM, x-ray etc. without fully connecting the dots to the end result. Sort of like dropping an iPhone X into the hands of a Victorian era scientist, who just dismantles it and sees it's a bunch of metal, without a chance of ever being able to reverse engineer it. It's just too advanced. But this is probably nothing.