Once upon a time-

     (eyes rolling and moans from the board, as it is going to be one of those essays)

     Ahem! Once upon a time, say, 14 billion years ago or so, a very important part of our lives did not exist. But as the
     party wound down, and the primordial slosh coalesced and condensed, certain large gas balls started a fad that became
     a trend that went on to become a grand tradition.

     Certain of these gas balls were large enough (say, 8 times the mass of our sun) to move good ol’ thermonuclear fusion
     beyond the plodding, pedestrian realm of smooshing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Panting hard and sweating
     profusely, they smooshed heliums into carbons and oxygens. And when they were done with that, they went to work on
     the carbons and oxygens, and hammered out neons, magnesiums, sulfurs, and… silicons!

     (Now, after that you get to the irons and that’s that, but that particular that’s another story).

     These gas bags had a process volume going that looks like skins of an onion; unburnable iron at the core, then a shell
     where silicon and sulfur burn, and so on outward with the lighter elements. Eventually, these gas bags run out of silicon to
     feed the iron core (a lesson in here I think), and give a sigh, a whimper, perhaps a sad giggle, and blow themselves up.
     The stellar remnants left to fend for themselves are neutron stars and black holes. The rest of the stuff is sent packing, to
     start the process anew. Do this two or three times, and you get to us.

     And here we are! And silicon is with us, ready to do all sorts of useful things. Silicon is the second most abundant
     element on earth, and the seventh most abundant element in the universe. Forget about the Bronze Age, the Iron Age,
     the Post-Industrial Service Industry Age. When it comes to what we use most often, we are still in the Stone Age, or,
     better still, the Silicon Age.

     First isolated by Jöns Jacob Berzelius (a Swedish chemist, but not everyone can be Norwegian) back in 1824. He
     named it after Silex (his latin Uncle Flint). Berzelius had committed an unnatural act, for silicon does not occur on its own
     in nature. It is always hanging out with some other element. Silicon and two oxygens give us silica. Di-silicon dioxide
     gives you the backbone of glass – that strange, short-range ordered, long-range disordered supercooled liquid. But I’m
     getting ahead of myself.

     About 4 million years ago, some protohuman version of Charles Goodyear managed to retain within his muddled mind
     the idea that a piece of flint (or obsidian) could be smashed into chips with a wicked edge. And not just any wicked
     edge, but one of the sharpest edges in the universe (no shit!). Obsidian, properly smashed, can give you an edge only
     one molecule thick. Fast forward through a beautiful symbiosis, and smashing leads to flaking, flaking to shaping, shaping
     to grinding, grinding to typing upon electric teletypewriters.

     Today, we have dropped the proto from human, and we extract nearly 30 million tons of silicon a year for various tasks.
     And we have gotten slightly smarter in how we use it.

     One of the first smart things we did was to use materials containing silicon to produce the resonating heat cavity. Forget
     the wheel, the resonating heat cavity is where it is at, baby. These wonderful little hot boxes and their progeny allowed
     us to make pottery, then smelt and purify metals, then isolate and identify other elements, and currently to decompose
     trichlorosilane in a hydrogen atmosphere to produce silicon blanks for chips.

     Four million years and we are still messing with chips!

     In the form of sand and clay it is used to make concrete and brick. Combine it into an aluminosilicate, and it is a useful
     refractory material for high-temperature work. It also makes glass, one of the most inexpensive of materials. Add just
     the right stuff to glass, and you get a material that is so transparent that you could see through a cubic mile of it. Stretch
     that out, and you can pipe coherent light signals down it (currently several Earth circumferences of the stuff in use and
     still growing). Hell, the stuff can be used to make lasers, to transmit coherent light down the light pipes you just laid out
     all over the globe.

     Dope it with boron, gallium, phosphorus, or arsenic and you get transistors, solar cells, rectifiers, and other solid-state
     devices. Hydrolyze a silicon organic chloride, such as dimethyl silicon chloride, and you get the silicones; good for all
     sorts of things, from waterproofing bathtubs to expanding women’s boobs. Add it to steel, and you get several times the
     durability of mere iron. Throw in a little carbon, and you get an abrasive almost as hard as diamond, which also is
     transparent to 95% of all infrared wavelengths, making it an excellent choice for heat exchangers in reverbatory furnaces.

     We've developed quite the addiction.

     Are we done with silicon yet? Wrong question perhaps. Is silicon done with us yet?