Panacea Engineering [Worm]

Moving out of TanaNari's "Amelia" thread.

What kinds of macrostructures can Panacea make with her powers?

Notable materials and their strengths and specific gravities (g/mL):

From Earth life forms

• Limpet Teeth: 3-6.5 GPa, ???
• Black Widow Spider Silk: 1.5 Gpa, 1.3
• Human bone: 0.14 GPa, 1.6
• Quebracho wood: 0.08 GPa, 1.03
• Pine: 0.03 GPa, 0.34

Other:

• Structural Steel: 0.40-0.55 GPa, 7.8
• Concrete: 0.02-0.04 GPa, 2.2-2.4
• Granite: 0.097 GPa, ??
• Brick: 0.007-0.105 GPa, 2.0
• Wrought Iron: 0.23-0.34, 7.5-7.9
• Super-strong Steel: 2.7 GPa, 8.0
• Tungsten: 1.5 GPa, 19.
• Diamond: 2.8 GPa, 3.5
• Carbon Nanotube Rope: 3.6 GPa, 1.3
• Carbon Nanotube: 11-63 GPa, 0.037-1.3

Relevant buildings:

• Monadnock Building: Tallest iron-framed building in the world: 16 stories tall (Note: you could do taller, but it would be more expensive because you would need thicker walls at the base)
• Washington Monument: Nearly the tallest all-stone structure in the world: 170m
• Muhlacker radio transmitter: Tallest all-wood structure: 190m
• Philadelphia City Hall: once the tallest habitable building in the world: 9 stories tall. Supported by brick.

 

I remember doing a similar analysis for wood / tree structures at one point. Just going with the obvious, look at the giant redwoods of California, and combine that with the whole forest made of a single tree (several square kilometers of trees that share 1 root system).

Not going to bother converting units, but check out the hardest woods known to man: http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/top-ten-hardest-woods/

 

The life-form strength ratings appear to be taken from Wikipedia's chart, but that lists tensile strength, when what you really want is compressive strength. For example, the compressive strength of bone is 0.17 GPa.
I find myself skeptical of claims that Panacea couldn't mass-produce building materials of sufficient quality to build reasonably tall buildings.
Previously in Amelia, she converted 20% of the atmosphere from CO2 to O2. This requires converting on the order of a quadrillion kilograms of atmosphere. So whatever they can produce, they can produce in virtually unlimited quantity.

Basic materials:
* Oil - There isn't any oil, since natural life has been killed off. Panacea can make it artificially, though.
* Concrete - You need gravel, sand, and cement. Cement is a little complicated, since it's formed through limestone interacting with shale oil, but that can probably be done too. Unreinforced concrete is a pretty kickass material. The dome of the Pantheon is made out of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome
* Stone - Probably pretty easy. If the ancient Egyptians could quarry stone, some bio-automatons probably can, too.

Utilities:
* Natural gas
* Electricity
* Sewage
* Water

Sewage and water is easy - Yggsdrasil can just recycle the sewage into water. Electricity and natural gas is harder. I think the simplest solution would be to pipe oil into each house and have them use that for heating, and have each house have a generator. It doesn't need to be efficient, because you have an unlimited supply of petrochemicals. This still leaves the problem of wiring each house for electricity internally.

 

Make the right bugs, and Taylor can lay wires. Amelia can give the bugs the ability to coat the metal in insulation.

You don't need stone or concrete because bone is stronger.

Panacea can definitely create the common limpet (FYI, it's found all around the UK IRL), so it's just a question of how fast she can make their teeth grow and weld together into whatever shape she needs to replace steel.

EDIT: Note that I'm pretty sure they still need metal for the wiring, Taylor can just lay it all at once.

 

I would think there are some clear advantages to steel. However considering the process by which bones are made, shouldn't it be within the realm of the probable that she could create an organism to take raw-iron and create bones of steel rather than calcium?

 

Let's calculate the housing needs.

• 350 kilopeople
• Assume family units follow an exponential distribution up to 6 person groups (i.e., #2people / #1person = #3people/#2people) with a ratio of 1:2
• Assume single people can room with one other person
• Assume 2000 square feet of apartment is enough for a family unit of up to four, with larger units needing proportionally more space.
• Assume you need the same amount of space again for work, and another for transit, and another for infrastructure, for a total of +300%

Math:

• The numbers I gave average out to about 1500 ft^2 per person for living, which multiplies out to 6 x 10^3 ft^2 total space per person
• Multiplied by the number of people, we get 2.1 x 10^9 ft^2
• With single-floor living, this maths out to a 5-mile radius circle
• If they can make iron-equivalent structures, then they can do 16 floors, which yields A 1.75 mile radius semi-circle of 16-story buildings
• If they only do stone-equivalent, then the radius goes up to 2.3 miles

 

That wouldn't be the right approach for someone like Panacea to take, especially with a bonesaw & khepri helper.

step 1: design a tree that rapidly grows into a full 4 bedroom house with easy places to insert wires for furnishing. Mostly made of wood, with a few components specifically designed for the water and sewage pipes.
Step 2: design a plant that will function as a section of road+sidewalk, including various pipes (water, sewage, electrical, etc) under the street.
Step 3: create a pant that will sprout hundreds of thousands of seeds.
Step 4: have Kehpri distribute the seeds of the roadplants and housetrees sim city style. (would probably be good to have a few professional city planners helping with this part)

Getting the house pipes to hook up to the street pipes should be pretty simple - just some chemical or audio signal that causes pipe A in the house tree to grow towards slot A in the street plant.

You may need actual engineering to build up highways and street lights, but those 4 steps are all you really need to make a massive suburban housing area. Should probably throw in a few houseTrees adapted to make commercial buildings too.

Getting water flowing is easy - just hook up existing water infrastructure to the new water main system under the streets.
Electricity is a bit harder - you'd need to pull wires under all the new streets and into buildings. If Bonesaw can do an organic power grid and data connect, then it just becomes a matter of hooking up the standard power and internet outlets.

 

My idea for organizing all the details was to have the growth of the actual structures be regulated by bug-like nervous systems under Taylor's administration, and planned by Contessa flinging buckets of bugs around under the influence of PtV.

 

The thing is the boundary between "life" and "non-life" in Panacea's case is extremely ambiguous. I know more than a few creditable biologists who would be hesitant to call prions a form of life. Yet in canon she easily creates and disperses a counter-prion to Bonesaw's prion plague.

If Panacea can effortlessly manipulate proteins, what other organic (and inorganic) molecules can she manipulate? Clearly, besides hydrocarbons, she can manipulate bone, which can be approximated by the mineral hydroxyapatite.

If she can effortlessly create and manipulate molecular structures (even novel ones!) that satisfy her shard's vague notion of what consistutes "life", she is the greatest chemist and molecular engineer to ever live.

Creating the tether for a space elevator using single strands of carbon nanotubes thousands of kilometers in length would be child's play for her.

 

Regardless of your opinion on prions, the common limpet is definitely "life".

 

Of course, "life" is very strictly defined in the whole "not dead" thing. She can't heal a corpse, even if that corpse is so fresh that the individual cells for much of the body still haven't actually died. So creating something "only bone" would be impossible- whatever she makes has to be very clearly a full organism that functions.

Now, her Shard can clearly do a whole fuckton more than that, and I'm sure carbon nanofiber and godknowledge of organic chemistry are all in its repertoire... but the arbitrary and artificial limitations on her power only allow her to manipulate "living things".

 

Make a sessile critter with super-thick bones whose growth is controlled by insect-brained nutrient-tube critters.