Materials

Silicon carbide, shown here post-assembly, is normally found as small fragments of the naturally. For a naturally occurring mineral,  silicon carbide  — found naturally in the form of  moissanite  — is only slightly less in hardness than diamonds. (It's still harder than any spider silk.) A chemical mix of silicon and carbon, which occupy the same family in the periodic table as one another, silicon carbide grains have been mass produced since 1893. They can be bonded together through a high-pressure but low-temperature process known as sintering to create extremely hard ceramic materials. These materials are not only useful in a wide variety of applications that take advantage of hardness, such as car brakes and clutches, plates in bulletproof vests, and even battle armor suitable for tanks, but also have incredibly useful semiconductor properties for use in electronics.

On the biological side, spider silk is notorious as the toughest. With a higher strength-to-weight ratio than most conventional materials like aluminum or steel, it's also remarkable for how thin and sticky it is. Of all the spiders in the world,  Darwin's bark spiders  have the toughest: ten times stronger than kevlar. It's so thin and light that approximately a pound (454 grams) of Darwin's bark spider silk would compose a strand long enough to trace out the circumference of the entire planet. The web of the Darwin's bark spider is the largest orb-type web produced by any spider on Earth, and   the silk of the Darwin's bark spider is the strongest of any type of spider silk. The longest single strand is measured at 82 feet; a strand that circled the entire Earth would weigh a mere 1 pound.