On Earth, some of the rarest elements like gold and platinum have been fought over for centuries. Platinum, for example, is mostly found in a former colony of the British Empire, South Africa. One reason these elements are so scarce is that the astrophysical processes that create them are extraordinarily rare. The elements we’re made of, like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, are made in stars. Those element factories are everywhere – there are at least a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.
But only about 1 in a million stars explodes as a supernova, creating a super-dense neutron star. Then two of those one in a million stars have to be in a binary system with each other, and both have to go supernova. Those resulting neutron stars then have to orbit each other so closely that they distort spacetime with their extravagant densities, causing them to merge, creating a kilonova explosion and a black hole. That’s what it takes to make platinum and many of the heaviest elements on the periodic table.
And the kicker is, modern computers use platinum and rare earth elements. Since we need computers to navigate space, like in Dune, we need to extract rare resources to find our way through the cosmos.
Sandworms
The most iconic imagery from Dune is the sandworms. These huge creatures tunnel under the sand, posing a constant threat to anyone dumb enough to traverse the desert without taking precautions. They’re spectacular, and I just love seeing science fiction creatures based somewhat on animals we know from Earth but distorted into something plausibly alien.
Sandworms are reminiscent of a few different Earth creatures. They look like worms, but they have the overwhelming scale of a whale. Let’s look at those teeth. They face inward in many rows like shark’s teeth. In Dune, the Fremen have a ceremonial dagger called a Crysknife made from the tooth of a sandworm. This isn’t too different from the weapons many island cultures have made from shark’s teeth.
But how can sandworms travel so fast? One clue comes when we see people sinking as the sandworms are surfacing. In fact, if you run air through sand, you can make it behave like a liquid. Check out this video of people playing in a hot tub filled with sand. This is called a fluidized bed, and the principle is used in all kinds of industrial applications, including combustion, the separation of solids, freezing vegetables, and applying coatings.
Something similar can happen during earthquakes. The shaking of the ground can cause the water pressure in soil to increase, filling the spaces between the sand with water, making it act like a liquid. That’s what happened in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 in San Francisco. The Embarcadero Freeway was destabilized because it had been built on a landfill. So they decided to tear it down and put in a beautiful boulevard instead, which revitalized the neighborhood and rerouted traffic all over San Francisco. All because of basic physics!
It seems the sandworms somehow vibrate or blow air into the sand on Arakkis to make it act like a liquid, allowing them to traverse great distances at high speed. The filmmakers even took the time to render this! This is exactly the kind of detail that turns what could be goofy fantasy into something believable and terrifying.
Sensing vibrations
Sandworms can detect any regular vibrations – which puts nearly everyone in the desert in a constant state of peril. Actually, there are plenty of animals on Earth that have similar senses.
Horned desert vipers rest their jaws on the ground. Both halves of their jawbone are independent and are connected to the inner ear. That allows them to locate prey by sensing vibrations. Golden moles don’t have eyes, but they dip their heads into the sand to sense vibrations from termite mounds.
Lots of species tap their feet in patterns called foot drumming to communicate with each other. Elephants can produce low-frequency sounds that travel through the ground so that other elephants can sense the vibrations with their feet. Some spiders can listen to the vibrations of their webs to sense damage or if prey has been trapped. Assassin bugs even pluck spiders’ webs to emulate trapped creatures, then ambush the spider when it investigates. That’s similar to the thumpers used to attract sandworms in Dune!
