re: #52 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

I’ll be the old curmudgeon and point out that ALON is a new material working on a very old discovery. Namely, that Aluminum oxides can be transparent to visible light.

Sapphires are aluminum oxide, and clear natural ones were prized, until it was discovered how to make sapphires inexpensively.

I’m pretty sure that the Star Trek story inclusion of “transparent aluminum” was intending to present the metal as transparent, not aluminum oxide.

Most of the floors in my house are transparent aluminum oxide—it’s the surprisingly durable final coating on laminate flooring. They only block mind-control signals coming through from the direction of the Earth’s core however, and only if properly grounded (earthed).