This is my first time posting, I’ve mostly just been a lurker and am still currently finishing the third book I got from Amazon.
But I was rereading the page on muon metals and it kind of clicked for me that if you had the space magic to let you peel the leptons from the atoms of a material and cloth it with a different kind, couldn’t you easily as well do it to the rest of the atom too? Move around neutrons, protons, and electrons to transmute elements into different ones?
Welcome!
Yes on the transmutation, but only sort of on the cheaply.
It’s a bit harder than the muon metals in a sense. (That being that we could make muon metals today if we could stabilize the muon, which is the hard part that takes space magic. Stripping the electrons off a nucleus to make, effectively, beams of atomic nuclei is something we do regularly in particle accelerators and ion drives. We’ve also experimented with making muonic hydrogen, for muon-catalyzed fusion - it just doesn’t last very long before the muon decays.)
But yes, they have transmutation. The field, in the 'verse, is called alchemics, and the specific technology is ladderdown (if you’re moving closer to iron on the binding-energy curve, which you would be going from lead to gold; ladderup is the equivalent moving away from iron); it involves using (very speculative) targeted quantum tunneling to move baryons into and out of the nucleus or induce protons to become neutrons or vice-versa.
Price-wise - well, the expensive thing is the ladderdown reactor, which is a chonky and expensive piece of equipment. (Space magic always comes at a price, and all that.) Similarly, even though the ladderdown process yields energy (since you’re moving closer to iron) as a convenient byproduct, you need access to a high-grade energy supply to get the process going in the first place.
The running costs are relatively low once you get over that hump, though. So, yeah, fairly cheaply.
However, what may spoil it is that mined asteroid gold is really cheap, because there’s a lot of gold in them there rocks. (My usual analogy is that the gold price there is like the iron price here.) So even though it’s fairly cheap even including buying the original lead, it still can’t compete with mined gold in-'verse. The people making money with alchemics stick to much rarer elements than gold, silver, platinum, etc., or go straight for exotic matter.
I knew I was forgetting something. Mostly I just tried searching up the answer with ‘alchemy’ and ‘transmutation.’
Thank you. Though could I get one more question in? Just, one I swear.
This is actually another topic I’m still somewhat fuzzy on. Namely in regards to what ontotechnology actually is.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the basics of ontotechnology is essentially using advanced computers to execute processes that tap into the universe’s mathematical structure(though you still have to pay the thermodynamics tax).
Hence the source of Eldrae psychokinetics being subcellular computers as opposed to having nuggets of some kind of strange exotic matter in their heads. Correct?
Maybe there’s a market for atomically, or even isotopically, pure elements, which would be more economically supplied through alchemics than mining? E.g. diamond is a very good thermal conductor, and significantly better if it’s pure carbon-12.
If you’re talking about diamond specifically, in-universe nano-assemblers can do up single-crystal no-defect mountains of diamond no problem. As for other elements, isotopic separation doesn’t seem like something alchemy would do much better than mining. A mass spectrometer is going to separate your atoms just fine, regardless of whether the nucleonic furnace they were made from employs ontotechnology or ridiculous economies of scale.