4 ms·

Because "refine" really means "melt at temperatures ranging from 500 to 4000 degrees celsisu and then extract via various mechanical processes and/or using vari

Because "refine" really means "melt at temperatures ranging from 500 to 4000 degrees celsisu and then extract via various mechanical processes and/or using various reactants which often require gigantic plants to produce and are highly unstable". Basically all of the history of science until 200 years ago was figuring out "mine and extract" and the course of civilization is very much linked with the price & quality of metal structures they could produce. But it's gotten so good we take it for granted. However that is because of gigantic plants situated in specific areas where energy is cheap that do this thing at an amazing scale. Aluminum is cheap as chips, except that it used to be more expensive than platinum (and at a much higher impurity ratio than the stuff we use for baking or for making cheap cases). Heck, gold is "a thing" because we could purify and mold it without bringing it to a melting point and it was, for a very long time, the only metal available to us to do anything with, way before the bronze age. And the problem with the refinement process is that you can't really "be smart" about it, reaching very high temperatures is one of those things you can't really scale down in an efficient way. You'd have to propel 100,000 tons of factory to mars in order to efficiently refine anything remotely close to the metals we had access to 100 years ago. Which is not to touch on the mining bit, that is in itself very complicated (see how slowly and shallowly rovers are currently able to drill). Are there workarounds for this? Maybe, I don't think anyone knows them though, they are not the kind of thing that's within easy reach. Maybe if we happen to stumble upon large reserves of bismuth or lead or gallium or mercury close to the surface of Mars, and build a whole branch of engineering around using those to build machinery... ? But my limited knowledge of geophysics and geology tells me that finding those in large amounts is very unlikely. For reference, if you take an oven, that can reach, say, 450 degrees celsius (home) and up to 700 (industrial). Those aren't enough to refine any "useful" metal (e.g. iron) and building them requires materials that were produced at 1500+ degrees. IANAChemist/IANAMaterialScientist/IANABlacksmith though, so take with a spoon of salt.

mikewarot 6y ago
We don't have to be efficient, just small and reliable, no matter how slow... if there were enough small machines to turn out enough materials to build new ones faster than the failure rate, then geometric growth wins, and you can build whatever you want, eventually.
- george3d6 6y ago
  I don't think you're getting my point, consider reading again. There's a fundamental limit you will hit here, you can't just "make it slower" or "make it worst" to lower that limit.
  - mikewarot 6y ago
    There is a fundamental limit of power... I get that. The Perseverance Mars Rover has one experiment that requires 180 watts of power, (The Oxygen Generator experiment) and it has a 110 watt RTG powering everything. They charge up some lithium batteries during down time, and use them to make up the difference. In the limit, If something takes 5,000 watts, you could run it for a few minutes/day, with that same RTG, provided you had suitable energy storage. Perhaps they could gather grains of material, and just sort them, one at a time, only keeping the iron rich material, or use a permanent magnet to gather ferrous material. You could sinter the grains together using a microwave or laser pulse. The results don't need great quality, just enough tensile and compressive strength to be mechanically stable during additive or subtractive manufacture. Lots of minds have been thinking about refining metals for a very long time, but they haven't been thinking about doing it on Mars, with limited power, and very far outside the box of normal constraints, like cost. This is one time capitalism doesn't apply at all... and most solutions assume capitalist incentives and costs, instead of going back to first principles thinking.
- zo1 6y ago
  It could be something very low-tech even. Just a machine that turns solar-energy + some mechanical power into say mars-dust bricks, non-stop for use in future missions? Maybe something that just keeps digging a perpetually deeper and deeper trench in a straight line so that subsequent missions don't need big drills to find out below-surface samples? But thinking about it now, I can't envision that we here would be able to come up with something sublime/novel that a huge army of really-smart people haven't already after spending decades thinking about it. Then again, we have a lot of smart people concentrated in this forum, so who knows if a weird/silly conversation triggered by IT-minded people, acts as a catalyst for the engineer-lurkers that see it.
nickik 6y ago
I agree with you overall. There are some really interesting things you can do on the moon. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RTBGnzNks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RTBGnzNks

mikewarot 6y ago

We don't have to be efficient, just small and reliable, no matter how slow... if there were enough small machines to turn out enough materials to build new ones faster than the failure rate, then geometric growth wins, and you can build whatever you want, eventually.

george3d6 6y ago
I don't think you're getting my point, consider reading again. There's a fundamental limit you will hit here, you can't just "make it slower" or "make it worst" to lower that limit.
- mikewarot 6y ago
  There is a fundamental limit of power... I get that. The Perseverance Mars Rover has one experiment that requires 180 watts of power, (The Oxygen Generator experiment) and it has a 110 watt RTG powering everything. They charge up some lithium batteries during down time, and use them to make up the difference. In the limit, If something takes 5,000 watts, you could run it for a few minutes/day, with that same RTG, provided you had suitable energy storage. Perhaps they could gather grains of material, and just sort them, one at a time, only keeping the iron rich material, or use a permanent magnet to gather ferrous material. You could sinter the grains together using a microwave or laser pulse. The results don't need great quality, just enough tensile and compressive strength to be mechanically stable during additive or subtractive manufacture. Lots of minds have been thinking about refining metals for a very long time, but they haven't been thinking about doing it on Mars, with limited power, and very far outside the box of normal constraints, like cost. This is one time capitalism doesn't apply at all... and most solutions assume capitalist incentives and costs, instead of going back to first principles thinking.
zo1 6y ago
It could be something very low-tech even. Just a machine that turns solar-energy + some mechanical power into say mars-dust bricks, non-stop for use in future missions? Maybe something that just keeps digging a perpetually deeper and deeper trench in a straight line so that subsequent missions don't need big drills to find out below-surface samples? But thinking about it now, I can't envision that we here would be able to come up with something sublime/novel that a huge army of really-smart people haven't already after spending decades thinking about it. Then again, we have a lot of smart people concentrated in this forum, so who knows if a weird/silly conversation triggered by IT-minded people, acts as a catalyst for the engineer-lurkers that see it.

nickik 6y ago

I agree with you overall. There are some really interesting things you can do on the moon. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RTBGnzNks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RTBGnzNks