Precambrian Noonday deposit in Mosaic Canyon, Death Valley

What's the oldest stuff you’ve ever seen, or better still, touched? Have you ever felt awe from contact with something of great antiquity? How old can stuff be? These are questions that have ravaged my mind since childhood.

I've always loved things of antiquity—antique objects, artifacts, fossils, and rocks. "Like." But what's that got to do with astronomy and space? Well, that's where all the oldest stuff originally comes from…but I'll get to that in a moment. First, an anecdote about old stuff.

In search of the oldest stuff, there I was at Badwater, in Death Valley, the lowest point in the continental US (the place where you crane your neck and strain your eyes to make out the words "Sea Level" on the sign waaaay up the cliff). Not far off, to the south, an alluvial fan slouched off into the salt pan, issuing from an unseen but obviously existent canyon in the mountains that make up the east wall of the valley.

I had learned at the visitor center that those mountains (the Black Mountains) are made of some very old rock: Precambrian rock that was originally laid down about 1.7 billion years ago!

So, up the alluvial fan I scramble, turn left, and up the deep, narrow canyon that the alluvium betrayed…

…to the base of a dry waterfall…

…to a wall of raw, exposed rock, the very bones of the Black Mountains…

…and reach out a hand, pressing palm and fingers firmly to the stuff.

Ahh….

1.7 billion years old; that rock I touched had been rock (albeit slowly transforming) for over a third of Earth's existence, and over a tenth the age of the universe itself. I don't know about you, but I find that awesome! And I had my hand right on it!

When we talk about the age of a rock, it is measured from the time the rock solidified ("aggregated"), either with the cooling of molten lava or magma, or the solidification of sediment. Finding really old rocks on Earth is complicated by weather and geologic processes, which continually transform, bury, and "disaggregate" them. Even so, very old rock can be found in certain places, like Greenland, Canada, Australia, and Africa. We're talking about ages between 2.5 and 3.8 billion years, and maybe more. I'd like to get my hand on some of that!

Get away from Earth and its rock-disaggregating processes and you can find some much older stuff. On the Moon, pretty much all of the material you find lying about is at least twice as old as that stuff I put my hand on at the base of the Black Mountains. On the Moon, significant surface activity (volcanism, bombardment by asteroids) ended some 3 billion years ago, and since then the crust has remained more or less unchanged, other than alterations caused by the occasional meteorite impact. The youngest rocks on the Moon are about the same age as most of the Earth's oldest stuff.

We even have a piece of that old stuff at Chabot: a chunk of 3.3 billion year old basalt brought back by Apollo 15 astronauts–and the only things that separate my hand from its speckly gray surface are two panes of glass and some nitrogen gas. Alas!

Get out to an asteroid or a comet and you may very well be setting foot on stuff that's over 4.5 billion years old, unchanged since the formation of our solar system! Within our solar system, that's about as old as stuff gets, but venture beyond it, perhaps to a planetary system that is older than ours, and you'll undoubtedly find older stuff! (This blog post is beginning to ring of George Carlin material.)

But what's the oldest stuff? I can't give you a rock of age beyond a certain point in time, because it took the early universe some time to develop the elements needed to build rocks-as-we-know-them, through nucleosynthesis in the cores of stars. Before that time, the only "stuff" around (at least that we would recognize as stuff; we won't go into dark stuff right now) was hydrogen and helium, which cannot by themselves a rock make.

But that primordial hydrogen and helium, the original building blocks of all material substances, has been around almost from the beginning of time, 13.7 billion years ago, soon after the Big Bang burst forth on the scene (whatever scene that may have been). Hydrogen, found in every water molecule in every glass of water you drink, in vast abundance within the oceans and waterways of the Earth, and through and through your own body, head to toe, is stuff we live and breathe, and is as old as the universe itself!

I don't know about you, but I find that spine-tingling.

Now, after an exciting discovery at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the hydrogen highway is a good idea whose time may have come around.

Remember the Hydrogen Highway that would run the length of California and provide the infrastructure for the Hydrogen Economy? California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger talked up the idea in his 2004 State of the State Address:

I am going to encourage the building of a hydrogen highway to take us to the environmental future…I intend to show the world that economic growth and the environment can coexist.

It might have been a good idea, but a bit premature in 2004. Now, after an exciting discovery at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), it’s a good idea whose time may have come around. Hemamala Karunadasa, Christopher Chang, and Jeffrey Long, who hold joint appointments at LBNL and UC Berkeley, discovered a cheap way to create hydrogen from water—even “dirty” water like seawater.

Hydrogen is normally created from natural gas, or some other fossil fuel; it can also be created using electricity, water, and a catalyst capable of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Once created from an energy source, hydrogen is used in fuel cells to create electricity, or it can be burned directly, for example, in a combustion engine.

If you use renewable energy, such as electricity produced from the sun or wind, to create hydrogen, it’s a clean and carbon free process that doesn’t add any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or use up any fossil fuels—like the kind floating towards the Louisiana wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico. But it requires a catalyst; unfortunately, the most common and effective catalyst is platinum, which is a precious and expensive metal.

The LBNL scientists have discovered a catalyst for the production of hydrogen from water that is 70 times cheaper than platinum—it’s based on molybdenum, an abundant metal that is commonly used in steal alloys. So creating hydrogen has become clean and cheap! There are still some issues to work out—for example, how to transport hydrogen long distances and how to create cheaper fuel cells—but the hydrogen highway has taken a big step toward reality.

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Hydrogen is not exactly a fuel. That is, we don't burn it to make energy. It's used more as a medium for storing and transporting energy.

The science of hydrogen fuel cell systems is based on a simple concept. When you combine hydrogen with oxygen, energy is released. You get electricity. What makes it such a clean technology is that the byproducts of that chemical reaction are just heat and water.  So when a fuel cell takes hydrogen from a fuel tank and combines it with oxygen in the air, it produces electricity and emits only a wisp of heated water vapor from the tailpipe.

Hydrogen is combustible (remember the Hindenburg?), and needs to be handled carefully. However, there are easy ways to demonstrate electrolysis, which breaks water apart into oxygen and hydrogen, and the opposite process of joining those chemicals. In fact, you could make a type of fuel cell in your kitchen, with a popsicle stick, battery clips, Scotch tape and a few other household products. You do need one item that can't be found in your kitchen: platinum wire or platinum-coated nickel wire.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And hydrogen fuel cell conversion is a squeaky clean technology. But the production of hydrogen for use in fuel cells — that can produce a lot of carbon dioxide. In fact, most hydrogen is currently made by stripping, or re-forming, natural gas. That's one of the ongoing criticisms of fuel-cell technology, that it generates greenhouse gas emissions just to get the hydrogen in the first place.

Fuel cells also can store energy generated by solar-powered electrolysis, as well as similar energy generated by wind and hydropower. That's the kind of hydrogen generation that advocates hope to eventually use in fuel cells. But being able to store energy also makes it extremely attractive to harnessing wind, solar and hydropower.

For example, California could generate a lot of wind energy at night, but since electricity has to be used right away, that nighttime, offpeak energy is less valuable. But if it could be stored in a fuel cell through the electrolysis process, that would make it much more lucrative.

Listen to the Where's my Hydrogen Highway? radio report online, and watch our Web Extra Slideshow.

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Governor Schwarzenegger, clad in a pink tie– an odd sartorial choice for dedicating this giant hulk of a building housing 500 trillion watt laser housed within– nevertheless succeeded in channeling at least some of his Hollywood days. When they originally visited the facility last November, "we were so excited that we said, 'We'll be back.'"

The project's goal is to focus 192 laser beams onto a BB-sized capsule of hydrogen fuel in order to heat it to the point of ignition, that is, to achieve a nuclear fusion reaction where more energy comes out of the capsule than is put in. Fusion is the common process for creating energy in the Sun, and has been demonstrated on Earth both in the apocalyptic specter of thermonuclear weapons and in the more hope-inspiring form of plasma reactors such as those at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Britain. However, ignition has yet to be demonstrated, as JET requires a constant influx of energy greater than anything it is capable of producing. If all goes well within the next several months, ignition could be achieved at NIF as early as 2010.

For all of these exciting aspirations and promise of new technology, the press' reaction to NIF throughout the twelve years of its construction has been often lukewarm, and at worst scornful. Some of this has been deserved, and it is certainly true that the facility's $3.5 billion dollar construction cost is a hard price tag to swallow.

However, NIF is a worthy scientific cause and might well turn out to be an excellent investment. To put things a little bit into perspective, other large science projects are similarly expensive. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Hubble Space Telescope have both been estimated at about $6 billion. Dianne Feinstein argued in the past (and reminded the audience at Friday's dedication) that Enron needlessly cost $9 billion during the California Energy Crisis. Put another way, with $9 billion you could (a) experience rolling blackouts while Enron power traders cheer for wildfires ravaging your countryside, or (b) assemble the world's most powerful laser and use it to bring the nation to the brink of being able to replicate, in a controlled manner, the sorts of reactions that power the Sun. Twice.

The physics promise of the NIF, meanwhile, is truly fascinating on all three fronts of NIF's stated goals: energy production, basic research, and national security.

Fission reactors, which extract atomic energy from the splitting of large atoms such as uranium, have been a viable source of energy since 1954. However, the waste they produce remains radioactive for thousands of years. Potential fusion plants, on the other hand, would operate by an altogether different mechanism: the merging of much smaller hydrogen atoms. Radioactive byproducts are still generated, but the timescale for their radioactivity is shorter, on the order of 10 to 20 years.

A significant line of inquiry has already been pursued toward commercially viable nuclear fusion at JET and its planned successor, ITER. Such experiments employ powerful magnetic fields to maintain hydrogen plasma in a confined space and heat it to the point of fusion as it soars around inside a doughnut-shaped ring.

NIF serves as a valuable compliment to these magnetic confinement experiments. Instead of forcing a fusion reaction to perpetuate using costly magnetic fields, the NIF laser will attempt to blast its fuel with so much energy in such a short time period that the fuel will have no time to expand before it undergoes fusion. "If it works, developments at NIF would entirely reshape the dialogue on nuclear fusion energy," said Brian MacGowan, a NIF Program Director.

Even the most optimistic estimates place the viability of these types of energy sources 20 years into the future. NIF itself will never be able to function as a power generator even if all experiments performed at the facility proceed exactly as planned. The raw potential for such power extraction is nevertheless tantalizing.

Additionally, there is basic research potential for NIF beyond fusion power. Stars are typically easy to observe from a distance but inevitably too far away and too inhospitable to explore up close. A miniaturized version of the reaction as created in the NIF target bay could provide an interesting model system. There is no way to tell, but it could be that hand in hand with this ability comes a better understanding of some of the deepest outstanding questions in physics as well, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

NIF also offers a unique way for the U.S. to test the effects of nuclear weapons without violating the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. NNSA Administrator Tom D'Agostino noted at the dedication that, particularly as the United States' nuclear arsenal ages, this will provide the U.S. with invaluable data.

We may emerge from this economic crisis a poorer, humbler country. Still, I hope that we are not yet so humble that we have lost the ability to dream big, and not yet so poor that we can no longer actively pursue at least a few of those dreams.

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