In the following text, we present the concept behind Sci-fi Miners.
João Martinho Moura. June 2019.
Full publication at ACM, PDF here.
More information about the ‘Sci-fi Miners’ work here.
The reason we are naming this work ‘Sci-fi Miners’ is purely conceptual, imaginative, reminding brave explorers discovering and facing unknown worlds, looking for new spheres of research, and trying to solve human problems, as the alchemists of medieval Europe that employed water and fire to change the optical, chemical, and physical properties of materials [1]. Natural resources, like critical metals, especially rare platinum group metals (PMGs), are essential and used for heterogeneous and electrochemical catalysis. As 90% of things (goods) we use in our societies is produced by catalysis, humans depend strongly on these natural resources. Currently, many countries are profoundly dependent on the mining industry to obtain these materials, relevant for fuel cells, storage of renewable energy, and for pollutant emissions control. There are indeed studies and plans to extract those resources in outer space, in the moon and asteroids, to fulfill the need of current consumer and economic trends on Earth.
Humans depend strongly on catalysis. And catalysis is dependent on Platinum Group Metals. PGM belongs to the so-called Critical Raw Materials – becoming rare on earth [1]. PMGs provides clean and sustainable energy technologies, an important value for us and future generations. Earth is immensely large, but as these materials are only found underground, hard to obtain, we will soon enter the risk of supply in the next decades. We should worry about natural resources running out, and these rare materials should be replaced by something abundant on the Earth. This is the aim of CritCat project. Nowadays we can extract a few grams of platinum per ton of rock. Latest EU reports say that in 15 years, platinum group metals will not be sufficient to fulfill current society consumer trends [2]. Urgency is the word we find for this research. That is why this work’s name is Sci-fi Miners (referring to the researchers), once the extraction of those rare materials is currently made by the mining industry, large economic groups, in deep caves located in a small number of regions in the world, in very low concentrations. Also, resource extraction is responsible for half the world’s carbon emissions [3].
Catalysis is the process of increasing the rate of a chemical reaction by adding a substance known as a catalyst, which is not consumed in the reaction and can act continually and repeatedly. 18th-century chemistry scientists that worked in catalysis were Eilhard Mitscherlich, whose contributions to classical chemistry were indispensable, and referred to it as ‘contact processes’ [4], and Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner, who spoke of ‘contact action’ [5][6]. In fact, this is the literal definition of Interface, a wide term used in the media arts for different proposes. Interface (in the physical sciences) is a boundary between two spatial regions occupied by different matter, or by matter in different physical states.
Imagine one millimeter … now, divide it by one million. That is one nanometer. This is an incredibly small scale. The conceptual underpinnings of nanotechnologies were first laid out in 1959 by the physicist Richard Feynman, in his lecture ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’ [7]. Feynman explored the possibility of manipulating material at the scale of individual atoms and molecules, imagining the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica written on the head of a pin and foreseeing the increasing ability to examine and control matter at the nanoscale [8].
Nano-clusters have been shown to exhibit “magic numbers”, corresponding to closed shells of atoms or of electrons with particular stability. Clusters also exhibit physical and chemical properties which differ drastically from the corresponding individual atoms or bulk solids and depend acutely on cluster nuclearity – especially in the “non-scalable” regime [9].
‘Sci-Fi Miners’ is an artistic residency happening at CritCat partners a) the Nanochemistry Research Group [10] at INL (International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, located in Braga, Portugal, led by Doctor Yury Kolen’Ko and b) the Surfaces and Interfaces at the Nanoscale (SIN) group [11], located in Aalto University, in Helsinki, led by Doctor Adam Foster. The artist visited both labs in the course of the residency.
The nanotechnology term was coined by Tokyo University of Science Professor Norio Taniguchi describing semiconductor processes [12]. Implications of using nanotechnology are present in everyday life, and it plays a significant role in our life and society. Robert Fludd, 17th-century alchemist Robert, imagined the Sun as gold, and printed it by using gold nanoparticles [13]. In 81 came a great breakthrough: the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, the inventors of the STM, wrote that when they first captured images of a surface of silicon atoms [14].
As in the proposed concept, Sci-fi Miners are the brave researchers finding alternative methodologies to substitute PMGs, using earth-abundant resources. Moreover, this is not done with large construction infrastructural digging machines in the deepest caves, but in the cleanroom labs, at the nano and atomic scale. Researchers are exploring Nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence to do it. In the past months, the artist in residence has been interacting with researchers from CritCat project partners, talking with them, observing their current research, making questions, looking at images at the nanoscale, materials, data, and publications, to develop visual interactive simulations and interfaces. Sci-Fi Miners is an artistic exploration of how, with the help of scientific advances in nanotechnology and AI, we will substitute critical rare raw materials on Earth, intending to let the public know how significant this research is for humankind and the sustainability of our planet.
