When I learned chemistry in school it seemed like this awesome thing that made cool explosions and dissolved all kinds of materials into sludgy liquids but now I'm an adult and can do my own research I've found just how boring the topic really is. For example boron only has 2 uses: make metal harder and make carbon harder. Now carbon is truly useful as it's used to make molds for setting liquid metal or glass into solid shapes but there's absolutely no reason for boron to get involved in the process other than saving money by having molds that wear out less often. I also don't think I need to explain the importance of metal as most man made things on the planet contain at least some metal and you'll find that other than tin foil and soda cans which are made of aluminum, electrical wires which are made of copper or any of the random unless metals that are used in jewellery simply because they're rare that metal is almost invariability iron or a mixture of mostly iron with a very tiny amount of something else. You would think therefore that anything that makes metal stronger would be useful except alloys of boron are so damned expensive the only real place they're used is in the engines, gearboxes, axles, brakes or generally any of the fast moving parts of certain select sports cars because those vehicles are already so over priced that the companies that make them spare no expensive on things that will make them perform better. This of course means boron is pretty unless overall. In fact it just seems that every other use for it is just trying to get rid of the damned stuff on the pretense that it will make it stronger maybe. Now don't get me wrong there are some truly amazing things in chemistry like sodium which is used to make cement and drain cleaner and sulphur which is used to make fertilizer, batteries and explosives but for literally 90% of that periodic table you learned about the materials are either almost unless or in fact even worse than unless like in the case of mercury. Mercury is very toxic and it's normally a waste product impurity of trying to get some other material from mined or quarried stones and ores. In fact the only use it seems to have is to show off to chemistry students about how weird it is that it's a metal that is liquid at room temperature. That's the limit of its uses really since any attempt to use it for anything results in toxic gas which is an environmental hazard and you'll have the government and environmental agencies turn up at door threatening to shut your business down. By comparison crete or to give it its scientific name calcium carbonate is the most useful thing ever. In case you don't know what that is we often call it limestone, clay, ceramic, plaster, porcelain, china, marble or earthenware depending on the water content that's mixed in with it. We often wrongly refer to it as calcium when we talk about it in food, it's what makes milk products opaque and it's used by animals a lot to make their hard parts such as bones, shells (for their eggs and the animal itself), scales, teeth, claws, hooves, spines, feathers and horns. It's often used in construction as well to make bricks, mortar and concrete and to make pottery, tiles and ornaments. The most interesting thing about it is that it can only be created by living organisms and not by any cosmic forces. Because it's so easy for life to make, anywhere life exists there's bound to be traces of especially as pretty much takes a star exploding or a black hole to destroy the stuff. By destroy I don't mean it can't be smashed to pieces. I mean no matter how much you break it up, melt or dissolve it or bombard it with heat and radiation there always seems to be some trace of it left behind. So if we find another planet, moon or asteroid out there with crete on it we'll know for certain life either is there or was there at some point. In fact NASA is already debating whether certain rocks they saw on the moon and mars might have shown evidence of potentially containing crete and white substances observed on mercury's surface, distant asteroids, jupiter's moons, the rings of saturn and uranus and in pluto's and charion's shared orbit around the sun may be traces of crete meaning that not only are we not alone in the universe but there could be multiple places inhabiting alien life within our very own solar system though since earth is the most bountiful planet for life's resources they are not likely to contain sentient life as quickly as it developed on earth and are probably going to contain life similar to our insects, invertebrates, ocean life or dinosaurs.