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There was a project a few years back to demo 3d printing with solar sintering of desert sand: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596... - very neat idea.



Very interesting, do you know if there are any actual applications today?


I've not heard of it since, no. It's got some steep hills to climb as a concept before it's a better option for building materials than just pouring more concrete.


Not sure what those hills are, but it’s always surprised me that this type of hobby project hasn’t been ever been scaled up industrially.

Setting aside applications for moon base 1 and other sci-fi, there’s a lot of desert on earth. If the construction method is automatic or even semi automatic, and costs almost no energy, then who cares if it’s slow? A legion of robots that can’t even make other robots but can make glass bricks from sand seems like it could be paving the Empty Quarter one decade, finishing the glittering glass towers in the next.


I don't think we want to encourage more people to live in the desert.

See https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M0LUdqFJEPI


If you're going to start slinging youtubes at people, isn't it common courtesy around here that it should be cool machine-shops or tokamak reactor videos or something kinda educational instead of this awful attempt at comedy/memes? Get out of here with that.




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