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What are you thinking right now?


*Justine*

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Yea really, University tuition is way too expensive, I agree. Things need to change.

* I was on the wavelength of green economy and common elements thinking.. Trying to stitch together some thoughts on how to fit the puzzle pieces together..

So, if we were to green the deserts, that takes the solar infrastructure, and to make that happen, probably solar thermal electric generation in the short run until solar silicon photovoltaic production is fully krausened in the equatorial latitudes, but either way, a tremendous amount of aluminum would be used either in reflective surfaces, or in structural materials.

Aluminum: A Modern Nontransition Metal

To make that, using the concepts of common elements and safer processes, I looked back at the methods of Whoehler and Deville, Deville's seems more promising in that NaCl from the sea for instance is used to make sodium and chlorine, where the chlorine converts the alumina to aluminum chloride, and the sodium then acts as a reducing agent to produce aluminum metal, and the salt reformed then can be recycled in the process. It seems to avoid the problems of carbon electrode loss and greenhouse gas emissions, but probably uses substantially more energy, which is OK in equatorial regions since this wouldn't be the limiting step in the reaction, so to speak.

Thus, enough materials could be produced to yield the infrastructure and grow the system, given the byproducts found in the red mud would be useful as well to produce iron for tubing and silicates convertible to silicones for flexible seals and the like.

But I also pondered enzymatic pathways to use engineered enzymes to create the needed results, as the activation energy is often much less and the risks significantly lower, though the technology to make that happen is refined to a high degree as well..

What either pathway offers is the advantage of not relying on rare and riskier elements and their compounds (the fluorine-rich cryolite used in the current process, or mercury amalgam in one of the original processes), and would offer a way around the emission of greenhouse gas carbon compounds as well.

Anyhow, just musings!

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Thus earth minerals in the form of NaCl from desalinated seawater, clays for bauxite and thus aluminum and iron, silicon from sand or quartzite for silicones and glass types, and water from the beach wells completes the cycle, power from the sun growing the system. In the end, a vast system of growing fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, chickpeas, fiber crops, and the like can take shape in places which were formerly inhospitable to man, and provide a self-priming pump, an engine to an economy based on common elements and virtually limitless solar power.

What else may be in need, such as phosphorous which is limited today might be found in deep ocean sediments, as well as trace minerals lacking from region to region. Given the growth in prosperity possible, one could imagine equatorial regions going from the poorest places on earth, up to the richest! At least in what really counts, health and happiness in life.

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