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I decided to do some research into the composition and likely melting point of martian black sand.  This appears to be the most suitable material for cast basalt on the Martian surface.

Curiosity's Investigation of the Bagnold Dunes, Gale Crater [black sands]
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com … 18GL079032

'CheMin data show that sands from Phases 1 and 2 are composed of five main components: plagioclase feldspar, olivine, augite, pigeonite, and X-ray amorphous materials (Achilles et al., 2017; Ehlmann et al., 2017; Rampe et al., 2018). Minor amounts of hematite, magnetite, anhydrite, and quartz are detected in both Gobabeb and Ogunquit Beach, and ~7 wt.% phyllosilicate is detected in Ogunquit Beach.'

Plagioclase feldspar: melting point is 1100°C for sodium based plagioclas, to 1553°C for pure calcium plagioclas.
https://www.science.smith.edu/~jbrady/p … page04.php

My analysis of this document, which analyses the plagioclase in Martian meteorites, suggests a 60% Ca and 40% Na abundance on average.  This suggests that melting will begin at 1220°C and the sample will be fully liquid at 1400°C.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a … 3709005651

Martian olivine appears to average at 30% Fe and 70% Mg, by number density.  This suggests a complete liquidus at 1700°C, with melting starting at 1200°C.  The two components are quite well intermixed.
https://www.science.smith.edu/~jbrady/p … page04.php

Augite is the most common pyroxene.  It melts at ~1000°C.
http://mingen.hk/augite.html

Pigeonite is part of the pyroxine group of minerals.  Melting point ~1000°C.

To summarise: Martian black sand consists of a mixture of basalt based minerals.  Melting will begin at 1000°C and complete liquidus will not occur until 1700°C.  At 1250°C, a substantial fraction of the components are liquid.  The material will have the properties of a viscous colloidal paste.  This may be suitable for injection moulding.  However, the presence of suspended solids within the paste may make it relatively abrasive.  We need to keep this in mind when designing equipment that is designed to process this hot material.

On the other hand, this reference suggests that all silicate based basaltic rock will be fully molten at 1200°C and complete solidification can be assumed at 600°C.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb … trock.html

Either way, temperatures in the ~1200°C range appear to be adequate to turn the sand into a mouldable liquid.  The exact reological properties of the liquid (viscosity, solud content, abrasiveness, etc) are things that we would need to test on a simulant material here on Earth, because they have a bearing on exactly how we can use this material.  If the liquid is relatively fluid in this temperature range, then we can sand cast it in cast iron moulds.  These are things that we could initially import but should be able to make on Mars once we have the ability to produce iron from native materials.

Robert, the statistics you referenced are questionable to say the least.  In the UK, immigrants are far more likely to commit crimes.
https://yournews.com/2025/03/11/3292903 … 71-higher/

The illiegal migrants flooding into the US are the same sort of people.  How do you account for the divergence between UK statistics and the stats you referenced?

I'm not saying I am against what Trump is trying to achieve by relocalising production.  But if we are heading for a world where more of the production chain takes place in high wage countries, the same high wage countries where goods are consumed, then manufactured goods are going to be more expensive to the consumer.  That may mean people being poorer overall.  Maybe that is a hit that we should all be prepared to take for the greater good of a more equal society?  That may be the case.  But understand that there are consequences.  Disrupting trade could end up triggering some severe recessions.

The situation is different for Canada.  There, you have a smaller and older population.  For Canada to transition to a domestic economy, in the way Trump seems to be pushing the US, will be much more difficult.  Manufacturing complex items requires scale economies because of high capital costs.  The Canadian internal market is just too small.  Which is why I think CANZUK is a good idea for the four anglosphere countries involved.  Individually, they are small.  But a unified market of 160 million people, is big enough for companies that manufacture complex things like phones, computers, machinery, etc.  The Canadians made the mistake of electing another left-wing government at the last election as a kind a tantrum against Trump.  That was unfortunate because grownups will need to be in charge to build something like CANZUK, which is going to take a lot of work to set up.

Trump has effectively ended NAFTA.  For better of worse, it has happened.  It is time for the rest of the world to stop complaining and realign accordingly.

In the UK, the government has active programmes for ethnically cleansing British people from their own land.
https://youtu.be/RGNINb3Vh38

Would you rather have that government, or a government that is at least trying to keep you safe by removing invaders from your land?  I wish we had some version of ICE.

Whilst tarrifs have their uses, Trump's use of tarrifs as a political weapon in every dispute or negotiation is damaging to American industry.  Businesses make investments with return windows measured in years to decades.  They are now in a situation where they have no certainty at all about whether a particular business case is profitable or not, because the tarrif rate changes at the drop of hat.  That makes future investment in cross border supply chains very risky.  KBD512 would like to see more goods consumed by americans made by americans.  That sounds good in theory.  But different parts of the manufacturing process require labour at different skill levels and price points.  There are also issues with economy of scale that make it difficult for individual nations to produce complex products for a limited internal market.  The smaller a nation is, the more difficult that becomes.

We know that this is true, because we have done it before.  The UK once had several car companies.  We made our own fighter jets.  We even built our own space launch vehicles under the Black Arrow programme.  Canada could do it as well.  The problem is that cars and fighter jets have grown more and more complex.  And development cost has increased accordingly.  But a very simple car could even be homemade.  So any competant nation could build a workable car of good quality.  Just maybe without all of the superfluous electronics.

A close alliance of Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, could potentially punch at the same weight as the US, miltarily.  We would still have only half of the population.  But more land and natural resources overall and a better position to project power.  If someone from France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Latin America, Russia or China, proposed an alliance capable of replacing the US, it would be hubris.  But for Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, it is a realistic proposal.  But only if we combine our resources.  The old British empire was a UK centric creation.  Given that Australia and Canada are now peer powers, all three would be equal partners.  I think CANZUK could do just as good a job of colonising Mars as the US.  If we can work with the US on that project, it becomes more realistic for all of humanity.

Underground geothermal storage works best for storage of relatively low grade heat, at temperatures low enough to avoid boiling groundwater and causing explosions.  The low thermal conductivity of groundrock (1-5W/m.K) means that boreholes need to be close together.  This increases upfront drilling cost.  But unlike normal geothermal energy extraction, this is not heat mining because the heat is being stored and replenished.  So the infrastructure does not face the same life limiting problems associated with hot dry rock geothermal.  With the latter, once heat has been drained from an area, you have to move your power station because it takes millenia for conduction and radioactive decay to heat the local rock up again.  If you are using the rock to store externally supplied energy, that limitation doesn't apply.

This kind of technology could have a number of applications.  In situations where an industry needs a year round supply of relatively low grade heat, ~100°C, solar thermal infrastructure can charge this in the summer and the store allows heat to be used constantly throughout the year.  That has a lot of potential applications.  This technology really excels if we are prepared to make the investment in piped heating systems, i.e district heating.  This is expensive to set up, but if done properly it will last for centuries.  It is necessary because geothermal energy storage requires that heat be stored in a centralised volume.  A piping system is therefore needed to distribute heat to dispersed consumers.  A potential application for this technology is in small modular reactors providing waste heat for district heating.  The reactors will operate 24/7/365.  But heat demand is concentrated in the winter.

Another application is in solar assisted steam cycles.  We build hybrid solar biomass/coal powerplants.  In places away from the equator, the sun provides all of the energy to raise high quality steam in the summer, but cannot do so for the other 75% of the year.  So we othersize the collector relative to the boilers.  Heat is stored in boreholes at temperatures between 100 and 200°C.  Outside of summer, stored heat is used to heat water between 100-200°C is a combined cycle boiler system.  Coal or biomass provide the rest of the heating needed to provide high quality steam 300 - 400°C.  Using the geothermal store, you get a power station that uses a combination of solar heat and fuel to provide baseload power.  It is valuable, because biomass is a limited resource and it reduces CO2 emissions.  We can use biomass as a fuel in the autumn and early winter and then switch to coal when biomass runs out in the spring and early summer.  By using stored heat and leveraging fuel in this way, we get a baseload power source with reduced CO2 emissions and obviate the need to transport and store huge amounts of biomass.

Downsides: Every time you move heat you need a thermal gradient.  The low thermal conductivity of the rock means that the heat source must be substantially hotter than the store.  You end using higher grade heat to store lower grade heat.  But maybe that is a hit you can afford to take.  The other obvioys downside is that this is capital intensive infrastructure, that requires longterm investment horizons.  Humanity needs to begin thinking in this way.  We need to think of our grandchildren when we make investments.

The rotational energy of asteroids can be converted into linear kinetic energy by extending a tether into space, far beyond the geostationary point.  The tip speed of the tether is proportional to its length.  Within the limits of tensile strength, a tether can be used to accelerate a payload to arbitrary speed.  If the tether extends far enough, it can be used to accelerate payloads to escape velocity, possibly resulting in velocity change of many km/s.  This is effectively free energy, as it derives directly from the rotational energy of the asteroid.

The kinetic energy stored in a rotating body is given by:

Ke = 0.5 x I x w^2

Where I is moment of inertia and w is angular velocity in radians per second.  Let us assume a roughly spherical asteroid.  The moment of inertia of a uniform density sphere is given by:

I = 2/5 x MR^2

Where M is the mass of the asteroid and R is its radius.  For a spherical body, mass is given by:

M = Rho x 4/3 x pi x R^3

Where rho is density.  Substituting into the moment of inertia equation:

I = rho x 8/15 x pi x R^5

Substituting I into the KE equation gives:

KE = 4/15 x rho x pi x R^5 x w^2.

In this example, we find an asteroid with a diameter of 710m and a rotation rate of once every 1.88 minutes.  That is an angular velocity of 0.0557 rad/s.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news … -2025-mn45

If we assume a stony iron composition and a density of 2600kg.m-3, we can use the rotational energy equation to estimate the amount of energy available to a tether system.

KE = 4/15 x rho x pi x R^5 x w^2

KE = 4/15 x 2600 x pi x 355^5 x 0.0557^2 = 3.81E13J (10.58GWh).

Suppose we were to use half of that energy to change the velocity of a mass by 2km/s.  How much mass could we accelerate?

M = 1.91E13 / (0.5 x 2000^2) = 9,526,103kg (~9500 metric tonnes).

This is only 0.002% of the total mass of the asteroid.  But it could potentially be valuable in the early years of asteroid mining, before advanced nuclear propulsion systems are available.  It could also be sufficient to make fast rotating asteroids into dangerous weapons.

A new lead on Planet 9.
https://youtu.be/vdqQMmVplYA

I don't think Trump is a Russian agent.  The Russian collusion hoax was a smear campaign invented by the Obama administration on behalf of Hillary Clinton.  It was a convenient lie that they literally pulled out of thin air.  People will happily believe whatever nonsense is thrown at them if it supports their ingrained political prejudices. People that don't like Trump because of his politics will talk whatever nonsense they think will make him look bad.  It is called 'throwing mud'.

What the events of the past several days have shown is that Trump is a poor statesman. He is neither a politician nor a diplomat.  And he has managed to convince all of Europe that the US is a potential enemy that they need to rally together to guard against.  The amount of damage he has inflicted on America's reputation and foreign policy is incalculable.  They now see the US as a threat to their security on a par with Russia.  All of this for Greenland, which the US already had access to anyway.  Trump didn't need to be a Russian asset to do this.  He just needed to be what he undeniably is.  A poorly educated and underqualified old man, trying to do a job that is beyond his capabilities.  The problem isn't so much a problem of his personal politics.  It is a problem of his personal competance.  And he has a weak yes man as vice president, who either doesn't understand the situation or is incapable of standing up to his boss and telling him hard truths.

Peter Zeihan pointed out that there is nowhere near sufficient gold in reserves to cover the value of trade that modern economies undertake.  This is a fair enough point.  Traditionally, the currencies were e changeable for gold and silver.  But even though they were theoretically exchangeable, very few people ever took a pound note to the Bank of England and demanded a pound of silver.  In the modern world, we could base the value of a currency on a basket of non-perishable commodities.  Instead of the promiss to pay 1 pound sterling, our banks would pay one pound sterling or its equivelent value in other non-perishables.  This could be gold, silver, copper, aluminium ingots, pig iron, gem stones, rare earths, ethanol, oil, etc.  Gold and silver are always better from the point of view of being value-dense and easy to ship for barter.  But 100te of pig iron still has the same value as 1kg of gold.  Others have suggested that currency could be valued in energy units.  This may make more sense, as wealth is very much a product of energy and energy use scales with GDP.