Wakanda forever!!

You know it, or at least someone in your inner circle is aware of the blockbuster Marvel creation of Black Panther. A film that depicts a “small” African civilization that, in the eyes of the world economy, at least during its original showing in 2018, was observed to be a docile country. In the movie, there is a development from a villain named Ulysses Klaue, who attempts to steal and actually does receive some success obtaining vibranium. This vibranium powered his super weapon of a missing hand. The United States Government wants to get their hands on it and Klaue. In a more serious way than his typical personality, someone who makes it rain money during a gunfight, he addresses the arrogance of Agent Carter, a member working on behalf of the United States Government. Carter, who was amazed not necessarily by the bad guy but by the technology he possessed with this weapon. During an intense interrogation of Klaue, Carter doesn’t inquire about deaths, the countless deaths there are at Klaue’s hand. No, he wants to know about the technology.

Klaue’s anger comes through as he calls the Wakandans savages and addresses that what he has is only a fraction, that the Wakandans themselves sit on "El Dorado". That this vibranium that powers his weapon that Carter so badly wants also powers everything around their city. That this small “savage” country of Wakanda is actually the most technologically superior country in the world because of this material: Vibranium.

The Lore of Vibranium

Now what of this material, its lore? Well, vibranium is not simply a metal found within the borders of Wakanda, it is the foundation of an entire civilization. Thousands of years before the modern age, a meteorite composed of vibranium crashed into the African continent, embedding itself into the land that would become Wakanda. While the rest of humanity would progress through ages of stone, bronze, iron, coal, and oil, Wakanda would experience a different evolution entirely. Much faster, much quicker, advancing far beyond their neighbors all because of vibranium. This single material reshaped their relationship with society, reaching into every facet of life from weapons, architecture, medicine, and surveillance. The same material that could absorb the impact of the strongest attacks could also become the backbone of a city hidden from the world. So Wakandans chose to hide in plain sight via a forcefield-like dome from the world.

Even the protector, defender, and King of Wakanda at the time, King T’Challa, had a suit made from vibranium. Vibranium, the wonder material. Vibranium, the fictitious material? Well, vibranium has the ability for kinetic energy absorption, energy storage where the metal’s lattice structure can store energy at the molecular level, lightweight material design, sound/vibration manipulation which is used in Wakanda for their sonic weapons, stealth technology, and transportation systems because it can control vibrational frequencies. It has energy production which is used to power their cities and trains. It is radioactive, this material changed organisms over thousands of years, creating the effects of the Heart-Shaped Herb mutation, permitting them to go to the other side and speak with their ancestors, and giving the Black Panther enhanced strength, speed, etc. As we see, vibranium can touch almost every facet of society with some pretty real science.

Our Real-World Vibranium?

That being said, I ask you again: Vibranium, the fictitious material? Well, in a simple answer, vibranium is, just like the MCU, part of a fake universe with its own laws and properties. But we live in our real universe with our own laws and properties. Our universe does not have vibranium, but we do have graphene.

Now you may have never heard of it, but it’s known as the wonder material that may never leave the lab. And for our sake, let’s hope that’s a lie because if it does leave the lab, the way vibranium changed Wakandan society, graphene could change ours.

The Strange Discovery of Graphene

So graphene was founded in 2004 by scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who are a few wacky fellas. And when I say wacky, I mean the good, think-outside-the-box wacky, like making frogs levitate with magnets type of wacky.So you’re talking about a guy who levitated frogs with magnets and won the Ig Nobel Prize (which is basically a parody award for crazy as hell thinking type of science), who assisted in finding graphene.

How did he find said graphene? Well, what do outside-the-box thinkers do? They think outside the box.

This was their Friday night experiment where they said yeah, forget normal research, just throw bologna at the wall until it sticks and test strange ideas. One of these bologna to wall sticking ideas was not actually bologna. It was graphite, and the stick was a piece of tape, scotch.

(Now the true story is it was intentional, but I lie to people all the time and say they accidentally had a piece of tape stick to graphene and saw it. It adds to the lore.)

But really  they kept folding the tape, sticking it, and peeling it apart, splitting the graphite thinner and thinner and thinner until they isolated a single sheet of carbon atoms, which ended up winning them the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Properties of Graphene

Now graphene is one of the strongest materials in the world ever tested, roughly 200x stronger than steel by tensile strength because of the carbon-to-carbon bonds in its atomic structure. The saying goes it takes an elephant standing on a sharpened piece of pencil to be able to pierce a small hole in graphene equivalent to what Saran Wrap thickness would be. Think of that. Saran Wrap, the stuff we wrap our foods with. If it was made of graphene, it would take a 10,000 to 14,000 lb behemoth of an animal to pierce a small hole into it.

Graphene is also ultra-lightweight, only one atom thick, giving it a high strength-to-weight ratio. Much like an ant that can lift much more than its weight, graphene can do the same.

Graphene is also extremely conductive due to how efficiently electrons move through it. It has great thermal conductivity and transferring of heat, can bend and is flexible, not rigid. It is transparent, where it absorbs approximately 2.3% of visible light, making it damn near invisible. Because every atom is exposed due to being only one layer thick, it is extremely sensitive to environmental changes and can feel the slightest changes.

Sound fake?

Sound like a material we only hear about in comic books?

Well, it is something that is real to us.

This graphene can touch, much like vibranium, every facet of society. From biosensors, to stronger concrete (currently in use), stronger rebar (currently being worked on), water purification, supercapacitors, faster-charging batteries (slight deviation of use), smart windows, adjustable facades, environmentally reactive paints, foldable technologies, faster, stronger, and lighter transportation vessels, and much more.

It truly is a material that can bring in a new age.

An age of abundance.

Why We Don’t Have Our Wakanda Yet

Though unlike in a comic book where there is plot armor, we in the real world don’t have that luxury.

Graphene is known for only staying in the lab because it is very hard to mass produce on a grand scale. It’s easy to make one perfect sheet, but for what society needs and its expectations, making tons of perfect graphene sheets cheaply is the biggest hurdle for this material to become mainstream. We want McDonald’s production quantity of a “perfect” material.

Which leads to the next level of difficulty: graphene requires perfection. Even a small atomic change can reduce conductivity and strength, which ultimately reduces performance. If something is not consistent in the eyes of society, it doesn’t get absorbed or utilized by society. Standardization and simplification are things humans love and can form their minds around.

There are more reasons, like the cost to make it. There’s an infrastructure already using many other materials that we rely on, and changing fast could be hard. There’s a band gap problem in electronics where we don’t know how to turn on/off the electronic flow like we can with semiconductors, and there are still safety questions. We at least know with things like microplastics what it’s doing to the world. Graphene is still so new we don’t know yet.

So I’m sorry, we have a little bit of time before this full-scale revolution.

Building Our Own Wakanda

But fear not superheroes, in the comics and movies it took Wakanda thousands of years to gain mastery of this technology…

I’m being facetious here.

We potentially can bring this degree of technological abundance to reality for not just an individual country, but all of humanity. There’s a lesson we can learn from fiction, a lesson from this parable. Wakanda itself was not created because they found vibranium, even though it seems like it’s everything. Wakanda’s technological supremacy was a combination of human innovation, attention, and desire to make something real.

A resource not in use is just a resource. It took innovation and pursuit to bring this revolution to fruition. They invested in the material to bring out a world that others wanted access to (which kind of came in Black Panther 2, not as good as the first but ya know one man’s opinion, even though I like Shuri much more as a leader than T’Challa, but that’s just subjective).

We may not have the meteor sitting beneath our feet that they have. We have laboratories, we have AI advancement (I hope I didn’t lose anyone with that AI statement), Moore’s Law may happen in this technology, we have scientists, builders, engineers, dreamers, and the public. The public who can ask for attention, no, demand attention towards this material to create the world into a better place.

Science fiction doesn’t just arrive like in the comics. What makes our species so amazing is we research it, we fund it, we build it, and we have conversations on whether to support it or not.

The goal of course is not to create a Wakanda utopia and hide it from others. It is to create a future where utopia is hidden from no one.