There’s No Planet B

Re:There’s No Planet B by giantrobot on Monday January 16, 2023 @02:00PM (#34404208)

It doesn't matter if the moon has required elements to build semiconductors. Getting from sand to a solar panel or computer chip takes literal tons of infrastructure and precursor materials. Most of that infrastructure can't come from 3D printers. It's non-trivial to spin up a chemical factory on Earth with access to all of our infrastructure. Building one in space is orders of magnitude more difficult even if all of the technology required to do so already existed.

3D printers aren't Star Trek replicators. You can't take a manufacturing flowchart, add a "3D printer" node in the middle, and then consider your manufacturing problem solved. Even if you had a magic 3D printed that could print pipes and fasteners and ducting, it would still need to be assembled and the facility processed to get it clean enough to build semiconductors. Then you'd need smelters/factories processing raw materials to get the necessary feedstocks. Then you'd need reprocessing facilities that could recycle wastewater to be reused and catalyze waste chemicals to reuse.

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Re:There’s No Planet B by ben_w on Monday January 16, 2023 @02:58PM (#34404795)

While you're obviously correct to say you can't just pop them in at a random manufacturing node, "3D printers" are a category, not a specific tech.

Similarly, semiconductors don't only mean the really good ones we use now (though once you have the capacity to make an appropriate factory, obviously you should do that), there are also relatively easy but also mediocre options like copper oxide.

Looking at the tech timeline, the first (semiconductor) PV predates quantum physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells

Edit:

If it takes merely literal tons of pre-made equipment from Earth to bootstrap, that's easy. Musk's (for all I know paper napkin) stated intent of a million colonists is ~100,000 tons just of human biomass.

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