Butterflies and Spacecraft

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There's a type of butterfly which has black on its wings which is quite literally black. Not due to pigmentation, but due to destructive interference of light. If it were possible to make the nano-structures on an artificial material similar to that which is on the wing of the blue don butterfly, except that it would be designed specifically to use the principle of destructive interference of electromagnetic radiation for a broader spectrum, that of the x-rays through gamma rays, through cosmic rays, then it might be that spacecraft designed to carry human beings would be able to have proper radiation shielding (from dangerous electromagnetic radiation at least) without needing a lead inner hull to add probably far more mass than a surface with nano-robot formed structures that would do to x-rays through cosmic rays the same as the structures on a butterfly wing does to visible light. If geometry permits only so broad a spectrum to be able to be cancelled, then there could be multiple layers of such hull plating made each causing the destructive interference of a different range of spectra. Such could be used as part of an inner hull so that ablative heat shielding for atmospheric entry or armor otherwise could be on the outer hull of which such radiation would pass through. Crew areas specifically could be shielded. Anyway, there's an alternative to having massive lead for electromagnetic radiation shielding.

Nice idea, but the problem is wavelength. It should be fine with x-rays, or some of them at least, but gamma rays can have wavelengths of less than the diameter of an atom. Now, I don't know exactly what sort of interference is being used here, but usually such things require slits on the same order as the wavelength.

Correct me if there's something here that I'm misunderstanding.

Perhaps the structures made could work with harmonics or perhaps, if possible, could use molecules that have spacings less than an atomic diameter apart. If the geometry of their fields is correct, the molecules of the structure could be held apart at the area of destructive interference by repulsion and held together by the rest of their molecular structure.

As I understand it even in solids matter atoms are usually farther apart than thier widths.

So you're talking about using very dense kind of matter as a shielding. In other words- something like- an inner hull made of lead!

Perhaps it would necessarily have a density greater than lead, but it's functionality as blocking the radiation would not be due to its density as it is with lead. Only the surface area would need to have such functional structures and not the entire volume of whatever material the surface is upon.

most truly effective protective measures are always a combination of factors,

as i understand it tehse structures would by their very nature be limited in spectrum,
i like the idea though, is there anywhere one can read about these butterflies? (what species are they?)

I think the problem there would be getting the X- or gamma- rays to interact sufficiently with the nano-structure for interference to happen. Basically, the structure has to either reflect or absorb the rays, or else the interference won't happen. -- And X-rays and above have a small cross-section (I forget if that's the proper term) for interacting with matter (which is why lead gets used).

There are some researchers using the same idea to create an "invisibility cloak," though. Right now it only works on a microscopic scale, but who knows how far they'll take it.

http://www.physorg.com/news67787896.html

Oh, also I got to hear a lecture on how stealth works (once, 20 years ago). It also uses the same principle of destructive interference, only on a radar-frequency level.

The species is the Papilio ulysses, colloquially the blue don, of Australia. I read about this butterfly in By Design by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, however there's also the wiki article which says nothing about how the wings have their coloration, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papilio_ulysses and here's what they look like also:





There's also this,

http://www.nature.com/news/1998/040126/ ... 126-4.html

Well, right now I neither have the equipment or precise enough knowledge to utilize this concept or refine it, but if anyone is willing to try to use it for the betterment of human spaceflight they are free to steal the concept.

Cool that you got to hear a lecture on stealth planes.

x rays are eaily bent using electromagnetism, using an energized hull might help combat that, though i dont know if the deflection would be high enough to make the beam intersect with enough hull (complete repulsion is very unlikely)
(plus side is that some ion engines actually do polarize the hull over time, what effect this actually have i dont know)
i doubt the same would work for gamma radiation.

the insivibility cloak might work if it could be tuned to anything but electromagnetic waves, i think it would require a whole new metamaterial to be made.

*Bump*

I read about this in discover magazine a few years ago. It looked interesting. They showed a few examples of man made constructive interference, but it was nowhere near as impressive as the humble butterfly.

If anything it may be possible to build an EM generator to mimic the inverse of incoming rays and cancel them out magnetically. That would require some super fast CPU and clever programming. Materials are a good idea, but they would degrade over time especially on a moveable object that's subject to all kinds of heat extremes.

Yes I kinda remember reading that to.
It occured to me that you could try to do the audio equivalent.

In a factory with noise you could set up Deejay equipment with amps and speakers. Then hook that up to a computer hooked to mics. The mics would feed the offending sound to the computer which would reproduce the sound and then have the amps blast the the recorded version of the same sound back, but the computer would govern it so the broadcasted sound was out of phase with the offending noise and would flatten the sound waves by negative interference and cancel it out- and create total silence.
Might work.

But this space ship thing is kind of like taking an M-16 rifle and then scaling it down to the size of a virus and then using it to gun down individual bacteria instead of using chemical antiseptics. Its just not feasible.

The butterfly wings probably only work on visible light- my guess is that they dont block infared nor ultraviolet light. And visible light is only a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Not only are X-rays and gamma rays at a much tinier wave length than visible light but they exist at a much broader range of frequencies than visible light. So this butterfly wing molecular pattern has to be both scaled down- and has to be able to work at a very wide range of frequencies.

Further- when you get down to the wavelengths of gamma rays - I doubt that any kind of matter not on a neutron star or a black hole is so dense that the space between atoms is less than the width of the atoms.

And if you could make matter that dense it would simply block the radiation instead of interfering with it if it work at all. So you might as well just invest in creating super dense paper thin material without any fancy atomic structure.

Interesting. I'm not sure it would be practical or anything, but it's nice to hear people's ideas.

You'd still need protection against micro meteoroids. Fabrics are turning out to be rather useful for this.

Space Kevlar?

ruveyn