Thursday, June 15, 2023

A better MOXI?

Say we have lots of energy and lots of carbon-dioxide; and you want to, like, breathe. Like if you're down a mine. Or in bad air on our own Moon. I would add Venus but, well, you saw THAT coming. Mars is a possibility as well on account the thus-far tested tech, MOXI, may well be less-efficient as straining out Mars' free oxygen like we do on Earth with noble-gasses.

So: Warwick's semiconductor photosynthesis. Especially if we're not bothering with light for plants. I don't know how well it goes with the regolith method.

INTERJECT 8/22: I believe I have found the original paper, with the barest thanks to Warwick inasmuch as they named Sophia Haussener and Katharina Brinkert (but not even the lead author Byron Ross). This scheme still leaves carbon-monoxide as a byproduct, which admittedly is great for doing reductive chemistry elsewhere like getting metals out of oxides. Otherwise it will be soaking up water to create pure hydrogen or methane. Overall I recommend this less to humans so much as for rockets. Humans in a long-term colony will prefer acetates with their oxygen.

I'm meanwhile seriously wondering about collecting carbon high in Earth atmosphere and shipping it up to LEO and beyond. As you may know I don't give a rat's about "climate change"... as yet. But we do have lots of carbon here, arguably more than plants and chemists need; and rather than bury it in the ground, mayyyybe we could lift it over to carbon-poor environments, like space-habitats in nearby rocky planetoids and oh look at that moon we got.

No comments:

Post a Comment