Meet the Chemiballs; Earthbreaking Alkaline Earth Metals
The Alkaline Earth Metals are a bit like a diet version of the alkali metals. So it’s a bit unfortunate that I am covering them first since I can only describe them through comparison.
Unlike the alkali metals who have one valence electron that they really want to get rid of, alkaline earth metals have two that they sort of dislike having. They’re still very energetically reactive, often bursting into flames during chemical reactions. But they’re less likely to outright explode as sodiumball or potassiumball are.
Table of contents:
Berylliumball:
Unlike most other alkalines, beryllium isn’t ionic and mostly makes covalent compounds. This is another example of period 2 elements being the odd ones out compared to their group mates.
Beryllium is very rare and expensive. It’s also highly toxic. It’s also extremely lightweight and is the lightest element that is solid and doesn’t like to explode, but because of the aforementioned expense and toxicity, it isn’t used as a material very often.
Magnesiumball:
Not to be confused with manganeseball. Though it does still make ions, magnesium is also able to make covalent bonds similarly to lithium and beryllium. In fact, magnesium has a lot of chemical similarities to lithium. Like lithium, it’s one of the few metals that can react with nitrogen gas in the air.
It’s cheap, abundant, and light weight while being relatively strong, making it a common choice for lightweight building material if aluminum and titanium aren’t light enough and you’re fine with it being flammable.
As you may know, magnesium burns extremely hot and bright.
Calciumskull:
As you likely know, calcium is the primary element in bones. Though if you ever see pure calcium metal you will notice it looks nothing like bone. It’s just a boring metal. This is of course because chemical compounds can share none of the properties of their constituent elements. Calcium metal appears metallic for the same reason anything is metallic, it has a lot of free electrons. But the primary compound of bone, calcium phosphate, is white because calcium doesn’t have any spare electrons that can change energy levels.
But besides that, calcium has lots of applications in life and chemistry. It’s highly abundant but is more ionic than magnesium, making it a useful cation.
Strontiumball
I always thought strontium was named after a weird pronunciation of “strong” or something. But no, it’s not strongium. It’s actually named after the small village of Strontian, Scotland.
One of the most concerning parts of radioactive fallout following a nuclear detonation is the radioisotope Strontium-90, which is one of the possible fragments that split uranium atoms can become. Being relatively light, Sr-90 dust can spread high into the atmosphere and travel very far.
Not only is Sr-90 radioactive, but it likes to pretend it’s actually a Calciumball, tricking your body into putting it into your bones. Obviously, having a radioactive alkali metal sitting inside your bones for years, continuously irradiating you from the inside, is not ideal. I hear that bone cancer is one of the most painful experiences possible. Most people who did so much as breath back in the good old days when nuclear testing was done by the US and USSR would still have a small amount of strontium in their bones and teeth. Radium and plutonium can do this as well. How are so many chemiballs able to pretend to be a calciumball? He’s literally a skeleton!
Y’know, with that and all the lead and mercury in people’s skeletons and brains thanks to leaded gasoline and tooth fillings, old people sure have a lot of heavy metals inside them. I wonder if you could make any money selling boomer bones to chemical supply companies. Hmmm…
In any case, normal, nonradioactive strontium isn’t dangerous or concerning.
Bariumball
Barium is a medically important element because it’s a very heavy element that isn’t particularly toxic, provided it’s in its sulfate form. Most other water-soluble barium compounds are very toxic. The benefit of this is that you can drink (or enema if you’re into that) a solution of barium sulfate which will make your GI tract show up on an x-ray. This is because heavier elements absorb more x-rays than lighter elements. Hence why metal and bone shows up on an x-ray but your softer organs, made almost entirely of light nonmetal elements do not. The only downside being that barium sulfate tastes revolting.
But other than that, there really isn’t a whole lot interesting about Barium. It doesn’t have many other uses or interesting history. It may have some potential in the future, but that is unrealized so far.
Radiumball:
Is a very large ball that is silvery and glows green. Its chemistry is similar to Barium, which is to say not particularly interesting. If it wasn’t also radioactive it might be forgotten entirely.
You might know about radium even if you aren’t a huge chemistry nerd who knows every element’s name and spends their free time anthropomorphizing and researching them.
Radium is a historically significant element that was discovered by Marie Curie, and in doing so also paved the way for the discovery of radiation. Technically, the first radioactive element to be discovered as such was uranium when Henry Becquerel found that potassium uranyl sulfate could develop photographic plates without the help of sunlight. But it was Marie Curie who coined the name “radioactivity” when she was studying the phenomenon Becquerel discovered. While she was extracting uranium from uranium ore to study, she found the leftover ore was even more radioactive than the uranium. So she extracted and isolated that, in doing so discovering radium and polonium.
People were a bit overly cavalier with radioactive materials early on, considering that they are the closest thing we have to a real life SCP object. It may seem ridiculous to us now that Curie would carry around samples of radium in her pocket at all times. That people would use radium to make glow in the dark paint for watches, and that workers licked the radium paint brushes. Or that people would wear bracelets laced with thorium oxide powder believing that the negative ions it releases are good for them.
But honestly, how were they supposed to know that this stuff could kill you years later just from being near it? Like some kind of freaking Medusa? It’s not their fault they lived in a time when people didn’t know any better. Oh, wait, that last one is something people are doing today. Huh.
But yeah. Sadly Marie Curie, and a lot of other people from that time, died quite young thanks to radiation. Apparently, the door handle to Curie’s office is still notably radioactive.
Addendum
I drew all these. As I am a firm believer in freedom of info on the internet, I give anyone permission to do whatever they want with them. Copy, repost, modify, etc, I don’t care.
These are all poor-quality Jpegs because I value the page load speed of mobile users, and also because of a subversive plot to direct people to my social media. For higher quality versions check out this Reddit post. For more Chemiball stuff, check out r/Chemiballs. This is a shockingly obscure community and deserves more attention.
All my info came from Periodic Videos and Wikipedia.
