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Life On Mars: Elon Musk Reveals Details of His Colonisation Vision
Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free. SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space. From a report: The paper outlines early designs of the gigantic spacecraft, designed to carry 100 passengers, that he hopes to construct. "The thrust level is enormous," the paper states. "We are talking about a lift-off thrust of 13,000 tons, so it will be quite tectonic when it takes off." Creating a fully self-sustained civilisation of around one million people -- the ultimate goal -- would take 40-100 years according to the plans. Before full colonisation takes place, though, Musk needs to entice the first pioneers to pave the way.
I'm sure Musk could easily find thousands to initially travel to mars, even with a 50% survivability rate... just look at how many people applied for that contest that was a one-way mission.
I myself would happily go, if they are really looking...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
#DeleteFacebook
As Capt. Denniinger I would like to welcome you aboard the spacecraft Ascension...
No thanks, not until they can fix Gibabit internet connection.
This will work. All we need to do is mine and asteroid for space dust and fill the hull with it. When we land on Mars we will construct caves and live in them to get around the radiation problem. Anyone else have any ideas on how to colonize Mars?
Are there valuable minerals and resources on Mars? Because besides that I can't think of a good reason. Overpopulation isn't really a problem once nations modernize. In fact, underpopulation is. Don't we have better things to be doing then this?
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Why else do you think all the billionaires are pursuing stuff like life extension and rocketry? They want to live forever and not with you, peasants.
...to fuel the Elon Musk money machine. You are all fools.
It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere, which, being primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.
Just by compressing the atmosphere...? How do you compress an entire planet's atmosphere?
Because it's the ultimate in real exploration and a frontier needing a million problems to be solved, both technical and physical.
I wouldn't expect to ever come back again; I wouldn't really care. Though I'm sure eventually some people would be able to return I'd think that would be pretty rough with years spent in the lower gravity of Mars.
I could easily turn the question around though, and say - I can't imagine not wanting to go, so why NOT go? It makes no sense to me, for any reason.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Taking the sun's-eye view of Life As We Know It, it can all go away with a massive asteroid (that we can't see), a freak solar storm (that we'd see for about 8 minutes), or other event that could take us all out.
After that, all the science, all the technology, all the things we've done to separate ourselves from the rocks we kill each other with are gone. All because we are on a semi-closed system (planet Earth can take new mass in, and ejects minimal amounts of hydrogen).
It seems prudent to me that we make the ark (Stephenson wasn't the first to name it) and get at least some life (some of it with the ability to sustain the rest) off of this planet. That gives us a non-zero probability of surviving if an extinction level event should happen. We have a budget of billions of dollars spent on items of less importance, sometimes I wonder how we get priorities like this.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
All the challenges of trying to inhabit a resource poor super cold desert, but the atmosphere is still breathable.
And if the your test colony fails, there is still a chance of evacuation.
What?
Don't they need to do a 5 year EIS? Mars is pristine. What if they introduce pathogenic that wipe out whatever life may be hiding there?
Elon Musk only got media attention after Steve Jobs died. It's a Highlander scenario.
Who would you rather have on Mars with you, one 300 lb man, or three 100 lb women? Cost to get there is the same for both right, based on weight?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Hard to explain these completely unrealistic visions otherwise.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Still better than...Captain Donner: "Welcome aboard, please join us for dinner."
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Who would you rather have on Mars with you, one 300 lb man, or three 100 lb women?
That's not hard to choose at all - the one guy uses less oxygen than the three women, not to mention if it comes down to it that one 300 pound guy provides a lot more calories than three thin women.
Cost to get there is the same for both right, based on weight?
See: Oxygen. Plus you could half the food rations for the 300lb guy figuring he can live party off his own body weight for a while at least.
In fact if they were smart they'd send only really fat people up in the first few missions so they could ship up very little food.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So just how will the Colony be governed? It's charter? Enforcement?
When you LITERALLY have a private entity able to control your air and water it's quite easy to see a nightmare emerging.
Every person who even thinks about colonizing Mars should overwinter at McMurdo station for a least 2 years straight. I don't think you'll find a million volunteers after that screening process. Even Elon Musk would probably change his tune.
Live a short time, being afraid the whole time and dying a painful death within a that short period of time.
Live short and fail.
Musk is a strong believer in powerful AI coming soon. He should combine his two visions, and send robots to Mars so they can build a nice cozy house for him to live in, and enjoy the sunset.
The paper outlines early designs of the gigantic spacecraft, designed to carry 100 passengers, that he hopes to construct.
the paper states. “We are talking about a lift-off thrust of 13,000 tons, so it will be quite tectonic when it takes off.”
The current situation is summed up in a Venn diagram
“What we need to do is to move those circles together,” Musk explains
the paper strikes a buoyant, even jocular tone and doesn’t get excessively bogged down in technical detail
It would be quite fun to be on Mars
The spaceship’s design is summed up as: “In some ways, it is not that complicated,”
“We have to figure out how to improve the cost of trips to Mars by five million percent”
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
why he spells it with an "S" in the title and a "Z" in the summary? That's what we really want to know. Dual British/American citizenship? Or just lousy copy editing?
Vacate the basement, Brent.
Climb up the stairs, bears.
Get your ass to Mars, Lars.
And get yourself free.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Correct. Consider Derrick Jensen's Heaven on Mars:
The sea dragon was a gigantic rocket designed to be as simple as possible. It was never done full scale, though small scale tests were done and the design was considered viable. It was designed to bring 550 tons to LEO, which is about the same as Musks's super rocket.
A few awesome facts about the sea dragon :
- 2 stages, with a single engine (the same) for each stage
- The first stage of the Saturn V can fit in the engine bell
- It is a pressurized tank design. No turbo-pumps, the engine is basically 2 valves and an igniter
- The first stage burns kerosene + LOX. Regular kerosene, not the more expensive RP-1. The 2nd stage uses hydrogen
- Designed to be launched directly from the sea, with most of the rocket being underwater. The rocket would be powerful enough to destroy any launchpad anyways.
- Made from 8mm sheet steel, in a ship yard, using the same techniques they use to build submarines
- Reuseable. It is designed to be able to resist a fall back into water. No costly delicate parts to break
The whole idea behind this rocket was to make things BIG instead of complex. It is terribly inefficient compared to current designs but it is so huge that it doesn't matter.
As described in the documentary "Total Recall"; controlling the air supply is great for putting down riots too.
they'll leave you to die long before that.
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and making city air clean. And making clean manufacturing. And What about the upcoming potable water crisis? Mars doesn't exactly solve that one. Now, if we're going there to get more Helium after venting it all into space to make party balloons I might be for it (electronics require Helium)
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So much energy is needed just to escape Earth's gravity well, it would make more sense to set up a refueling station either on-orbit or on the moon (much smaller gravity well). That way the giant rocket doesn't have to make the whole trip in one go and it would be much easier to arrange resupplying missions. Anyway, an unmanned mission should be planned first to set up power, air, and begin producing fuel so that the colonists have some things waiting for them that they can rely on for survival. Sending people alone with nothing set up on the other end is easier to plan but has higher chance of disaster. Better to take it slow and incrementally.
The article talks about their plans for building a rocket. I really would like to know about the plans for *colonization*.
What things do they need for a self sustaining colony, in what order will they do them? Not that the rocket isn't interesting, but this is a plan for getting to Mars, not colonizing it. Wake me up when they have a *colonization* plan.
More questions below....
Are they planning to build a propellant plant first? Then Biodomes for growing food? Or do they plan to mine materials to make the domes? What pressure do the domes need to hold for plants to grow? What Martian materials will they use?
Is someone going to go set up the propellant plant first and return to earth while it fills up tanks? Or is the first mission going to be a suicide mission if they can't get either the propellant plant for bio domes running before they run out of supplies?
Will they send a robot to assemble the propellant plant and get initial things ready for the first people? A 4 minute communications delay makes remote controlling a robot difficult, but if it was smart enough to be given more complex instructions this wouldn't be an issue. Surely a robot of some sort will be needed for mining ice for the propellant plant.
Food, fuel, material for building structures - these are the heavy things that they really must create on Mars. Other things that take more processing but weigh less can be set at least for a while - clothing, electronics, etc. Do they need to locate near iron and water deposits? So they have a location in mind?
Mars only gets 40% of the sunlight of the earth. How much will this hamper plant growth? 60 degrees north gets this amount of light, but it is about mid Canada or mid-Russia and I don't think they're planning to grow pine trees (nothing against pine nuts).
It is reasonable to assume hyperloop is the plan for travel, and tunneling is the plan for habitation. For habitation, is the rock sufficiently air tight to keep an atmosphere, or will they line the tunnels, and if so what with, and how will they make it?
You claim if "any of that happens you are dead" but...
Well, if shit breaks you can get spare parts
Which you obviously pack more of on a ship to Mars, then in many scenarios get shipped to you about once a year while you are there.
Also of course, you do realize you ship a lot of spare equipment out ahead of time and don't go until you know it's safe???
Low on food?
How would that realistically happen on the trip out which would have packaged meals to last the trip + one year minimum on Mars (probably more). It's the time past that where growing the food may become an issue but that's quite a long point beyond the main goal which is simply to live on Mars and advance a colony. Even if you all day you have at least prepped something for those that come after.
And again you would have shipped extra food out ahead of you so you know if you arrive you will have enough to eat for X number of days.
Low on air? Simply make more
This is the only realistic danger to my mind but with enough spare oxygen redundantly stored on the way out along with scrubbers you should be OK. At least in this area we actually have a lot of experience providing long term oxygen supplies in space.
Once you get to Mars you can also make more.
Got a fire? Lots of water to put it out.
Guess what fire needs to burn, and you can't find in space or in much abundance on Mars... Lots of small compartments easily voided mean fire is less of an issue.
All of the issues you raise apply to the space station to some degree, even though it can get new supplies that does not happen with greta regularity. Yet it has been around for a long time without major issues.
The biggest danger at all is landing, but there again is where landing a few un-manned supply ships of the same design ahead of time ensures a higher degree of confidence in being able to land. In an era where we can land a rocket on a freaking floating barge in the ocean I'm pretty sure we can land on a stable rock.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Musk is the new Bond Villain.
To send 100 cows to Mars and they will die sooner due to the cosmic irradiation!
On Mars, there are not herbs for the 100 cows, so that they wont give milk to the people.
Don't pollute the Earth, and don't pollute the Mars.
As described in the documentary "Total Recall"; controlling the air supply is great for putting down riots too.
Well nobody wants to listen to their crap music.
Physics is simple. Biology is complex. Humans are insane.
Objection #1. The "colony" wouldn't be self-sufficient for decades or centuries (if ever). Who do you think is going to pay to supply them? Musk? Not likely.
Objection #2. Their children and children-to-be didn't volunteer to live in literally inhuman conditions. Is it "right" to allow these arguably crazies to abuse their children this way? Far worse that genital mutilation, imho, they're literally condemning these kids to prison for life.
Objection #3. Given the likely high incidence of mental illness of those choosing exile-for-life, is a stable government likely? Is a stable society likely? I think not.
Objection #1b. And is there *any* example of any Earth government or corporation or nonprofit institution which dedicated an equivalent (huge) fraction of their capital and resources to such a useless, impractical effort?
Continue to sound like my chimichanga dinner an hour later. As funny as that experience is, it's also pretty peurile. I can't wait for the day he is yesterday's news, just like my flaming pooper.
Like many, I am excited about what SpaceX is trying to do. I am often trying to fill in the blanks they've left, though. Here are a few:
1. Gravity. I've long advocated a broad pill-shaped vessel for distant space travel. Spin can be used to simulate gravity but too much will create an uncomfortable corealis effect (dizziness, and the feeling of being pushed walking one way, pulled walking the other). Zero corealis is when the spin is 2 rpm or less but even at 8 rpm, the effects are reasonably negligible. For 2 rpm and Earth-like gravity, the craft would have to be 400 meters in diameter.
The colonial transporter does seem to have bare walls in the lower occupiable deck. It looks like they may be able to put spinning crew quarters in there with perhaps a bit better than moon-like gravity. One could design a toilet to flush with splash-guards in that environment. If a curfew is put into effect, one could increase the rate of spin after lights out, such as to perhaps greatly reduce the long term effects of weightlessness... then slow it back down again just before wake-up time. The transition between a weightful and weightless environment can be disorienting but I presume one could reasonably adapt in low gravity to no gravity.
2. Carbon Monoxide. For the colony on Mars itself, nobody (not even NASA) seems to be talking about the CO risk. CO will inevitably find itself way into habitation chambers and at some point, silently kill. Mars CO levels are trace gas but in deadly percentages. CO is very small and is not easily contained--it will seep through most containment materials.
My solution would be to standardize on hydrogen combustion for heating, cooking, smelting, and other activities requiring high heat. The ambient air will draw in the CO with the oxygen destroying it. Of course, CO monitors must be kept in working order at all times. Hydrogen is easily obtainable through electrolysis of water--which is plentiful in the soils of Mars.
3. Oxygen Toxicity. This criticism has been made of the Mars One project's published plans. In order to grow enough food to feed a certain number of people, you will inevitably also create more oxygen than they can consume and convert to CO2 through breathing. When too much oxygen builds up, it ultimately freezes the lungs from which the crystalization causes irreparable cellular damage... and death.
My solution for Oxygen Toxicity is the same as for Carbon Monoxide--combust hydrogen to create heat. Any combustion will consume large amounts of oxygen but combusting hydrogen also solves the CO problem. Mars is very cold and heat it needed for many things.
4. Heat Dissipation. Most seem concerned with generating and retaining heat in Mars' cold environment. However, heat loss on Mars will not be as rapid as it is on Earth because the atmosphere is thinner. Yes, thin atmosphere equals cold. However, exchange of heat requires molecules to come in contact with each other and when the air density is 1% or even a bit less than on Earth, don't expect the freezing to happen within seconds. A well insulated habitat is likely to over-heat, if no cooling system is available... even perhaps from body heat.
I propose running cooling coils spread out into the Martian regolith, with ammonia as the heat exchange liquid. The regolith will be fully cooled and, mostly of silica, will very rapidly move heat away. Ammonia will not freeze at Martian temperatures and is readily made by the human body--in pee.
5. Mental and Emotional Well-Being. Elon Musk's claims that the voyages will be fun seems hopeful but naive. Zero-G games, crew quarters, movies, and lecture halls, and a restaurant (aka glorified cafeteria) will all become old, quickly. Although the privacy of personal quarters, the challenges of games, and various forms of leisure are highly saught after on Earth, that is because we work so much. The truth is, having the stress and feeling of importance of your activities are more essential for human happiness.
For free? As in, there is some expectation that one would have to pay for Musk's position paper?
Assess slashvertisement due to artificial inducement through unwarranted use of "for free".
Does Musk remind anyone else of S.R. Hadden from Contact?
See my post on Slashdot from 2005: https://slashdot.org/comments....
"So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements)."
If Elon Musk wants to get to Mars, he should invest in projects like OSCOMAK (my idea, but other people have similar ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The OSCOMAK project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."
Build that first, then deploy automated seeds to Mars and the Moon and Asteroids, and they will come... Because there will be a reason to go there...
CATS (Cheap Access to Space) is the technological equivalent of supply-side economics.
Supply side economics is the dumb (yet brilliantly marketed) idea that if we give all out money to rich people, then stuff will trickle down eventually because they will invest in businesses and hire people. That totally ignores that anyone with provable demand for a producible product can already get a bank loan based on booked orders (as well as of course angel investments and venture capital). Give the money to people to spend, and immediately you will see businesses pop up to service that demand. What really happens when you give rich people more money is that they either do the financial equivalent of stuffing it in a matters or they gamble it in high stakes poker games with other rich people and none of it ever reaches the real economy.
CATS is about supply. The idea goes that if we can make launching people into space cheap enough, if we can make getting to Mars cheap enough, then people will go there. CATS is a dumb idea for the same reasons as supply side economics. We don't go to space because, except for a few scientists studying it and a few tourists on thrill rides, there is nothing of obvious human interest there right now.
I'm not saying cosmology or astronomy is not interesting -- it is fascinating. But if you want to study cosmology, you will almost certainly be much much happier studying such things on Earth right now than by yourself and maybe a few others cooped up in a tiny buried shack on Mars after having been irradiated for months on the way there.
If we can build great settlements on land, underground, in Antarctica, and in the oceans -- then soon enough we can build them anywhere including Mars, the Moon, and the Asteroid. Then people will move to space habitats for the same reasons people move to New York City or Austin or Paris or Amsterdam -- because they are interesting places to live around lots of interesting people doing interesting things. And once there are interesting places to go in space, then people will figure out cheaper ways to get there -- including by beaming power to Earth if needed and building space ships in space to shuttle people up from Earth.
I once calculated that we could evacuate the Earth in about ten years if we switched all our industries to the effort and accepted a 1% - 5% fatality rate (same as ocean voyages to the "New World" centuries ago). So, the issue is not the cost of getting into space. The issue is that there is no pl
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I laughed because its all rocket jock talk
Physics is simple
?! I don't think that you have got right my position regarding all this and/or interpret those quotes in the way that I thought that virtually anyone would have done. Well, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised at all.
Here you have references to some of my previous comments about this matter to help you and future readers (for whom statements like "physics is simple" makes sense at all) get the context (= what I consider basic knowledge) and my intention right:
- What I think of the generic-talking, video-based approach of Musk (sarcastic remark, although I included a clarification expressly highlighting that point. BTW, I see you in one of the comments below, did you get my intention right that time or not?).
- Generic ideas Musk/Mars (+ was I whooshed?).
- Explaining someone that there will be no trip to Mars.
- Clarifying that, without being too interested in any outside-earth option, the moon seems the only acceptable alternative.
Just in case you are still not getting it: I laughed a lot after reading those quotes (found particularly funny "The current situation is summed up in a Venn diagram" + “What we need to do is to move those circles together,” which seems to reflect the understanding of a 5yo) and was expecting other people to find them very funny too.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
You can't terraform Mars. You can't terraform Mars. You can't terraform Mars.
Get it?
You can't terraform Mars. Stop thinking you can because of some stupid sci-fi bullshit movie or TV show you saw, or book you read. You simply cannot.
You can't terraform Mars. Mars is about ONE TENTH as massive as Earth. (Ref: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html)
You can't terraform Mars. Mars is about 70% the density of Earth, which means not only is it less massive, but standing on the surface you are farther from the core than you would be if the density were the same. The surface gravity therefore is much less, about 40% of Earth's, meaning the atmosphere, even if you put the same elements as on Earth there, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., the pressure would NEVER be high enough for you to be able to breathe it in and stay alive, let alone conscious.
You can't terraform Mars. The highest atmospheric pressure on Mars' surface is about nine millibars. On Earth it's a little over ONE THOUSAND millibars. The atmosphere on Mars, which is mostly carbon dioxide, by the way, FAR and AWAY, even if you converted it to 100% oxygen, (bad idea, btw,) would still not have enough pressure because there isn't enough gravity, because the planet isn't DENSE enough, AND it doesn't have enough MASS. (Sure, if you compressed Mars to be very small, the concentration of mass WOULD increase the surface gravity, meaning you could have a planet the size of say... Texas? with an atmosphere with a pressure like Earth's but it would be MOSTLY CO2!!! (If you 'd like to know what THIS looks like, see: VENUS, a planet with a surface so hot lead would be, and STAY molten. That's pretty fucking hot.)
You can't terraform Mars. Since we don't know for sure if there was EVER life on Mars, the odds of finding complex carbon compounds, methane, etc., or the oxygen to REACT it with, that can be harnessed there to make things go is pretty remote. Counting on being able to find enough radioactive ore to make into fissile material is a bit like needing a billion dollars and checking change-slots of payphones or newspaper boxes, (remember when those existed? ah, those were the days...) hoping one will have, instead of maybe a dime or a quarter, a billion dollars! As for fussile material, (lol) we can't make a sustainable fusion reaction to power something HERE on Earth yet. Don't imagine that somehow it'll be magically easier to do on Mars. Wind power is not an option with an atmosphere less than 1% of what Earth has, and wave-energy on a planet with no standing water is going to be impossible. "So," they say, "well, we'll use SOLAR POWER!" No, you won't. We don't even rely on it here on Earth, where we could and should. Also, SLIGHT complication on Mars. Guess what? Remember the expression "My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies?" It's a mnemonic for remembering the names of the planets, (and/or Trans-Neptunian Objects,) Mercury, Venus, Earth, MARS, Jupiter... etc., and what order they're in, in terms of distance from the sun. Note that Earth, (along with Mercury and Venus,) comes BEFORE Mars. This is because the Earth is much closer to the sun than tiny, barren, barely-air-there Mars.
You can't terraform Mars. The surface of The Red Planet gets a small FRACTION of the light the same surface area gets on Mars. This means there'll have to be either MUCH LARGER panels (and batteries to store their power,) to do the same work as they could on Earth, or a lot more OF THEM. We can't even get people to do this on Earth where a much higher amount of solar energy per unit area falls, and you wanna build GREENHOUSES there? HA!
You can't terraform Mars. Humans would NEVER be able to live outside, so "colonizing" Mars really just means having spaceships and/or space-stations, stuck, for NO good goddamned reason, at the bottom of a gravity well, many months of flying AWAY from Earth. (If you're so gung-ho about it, why not do it on the moon? It's CLOSER, for starters.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland
When the island was first settled, it was extensively forested. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise described it in the Íslendingabók as "forested from mountain to sea shore".[68] Permanent human settlement greatly disturbed the isolated ecosystem of thin, volcanic soils and limited species diversity. The forests were heavily exploited over the centuries for firewood and timber.[65]
Why make such extreme claims without checking them first?
Here is one that is merely informative without being condescending:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting
Note a requirement of a little more than "just add energy".
I have taught some stuff on this topic a couple of years before this site existed. And no, that doesn't make me any more special than any other postgraduate engineering student with a metallurgical focus at the time, you just happen to have hit something I was doing.
Perhaps you should look up some melting points of molten oxides and then consider if your electrodes are going to survive, let alone have your metal of choice plated out on them.
I'm sure that you are extremely good at coding or something, but there are a lot of people on this site and the odds are when you bring up something where you are out of your depth that you will hit someone who has had to actually put some work into that topic. Perhaps instead of feeling threatened and getting insulting you should consider a different reaction.
It truly is a bad combination. Seriously, do some research before bragging about teaching on a subject you clearly know nothing about. Just because you're familiar with one particular way of doing things does not mean it is the only possible approach.
Yes, the temperatures are high. Guess what, the people developing these systems figured that out pretty early on, and electricity turns out to be pretty good at heating things to high temperatures, with several experimental designs being heated by the current used for electrolysis. The material difficulties with the electrodes and crucibles are also areas of current research, but workable solutions already exist. The fact is that molten oxide electrolysis can produce large quantities of reduced metal and oxygen with the only inputs being oxides (typically a mix of silicates and metal oxides, as in molten basalt rock) and electricity. No reducing agents required.
Consider aluminium oxide (alumina), you've got to heat it up to a bit above 2000C before it is molten.
Assuming your electrodes can survive how are you going to actually get the aluminium out?
Hence the process I linked to above instead of "just use energy".
Are you getting yet why your "just use energy" is coming across like "just use a Star Trek matter replicator"?
I'm not suggesting impossibility, just that it's not so trivial as you are suggesting.
I'm not bragging, merely pointing out that I know more than nothing about the topic (and that nothing point is sadly where you are arguing from for some strange reason).
Of course it's impractical. It's not just impractical for that metal oxide situation, it's impractical across the range which is why the "just add energy" approach is ridiculous - other things are done before adding energy.
I certainly have done so, far more than you on the topic given what I was doing for a living.
Well no, technically possible does not seem to be coming into it at all.
As for getting iron out of an iron oxide in a silicon rich molten mass - assuming the electrodes survive how are you going to get the iron out at the electrode? It's going to be far too hot to plate out isn't it?
Do you have a citation (instead of an insult) on that which you have come across as part of what you are calling your "research"? If you do I suggest you actually read it and I'm sure you'll find that the only one saying "just add energy" is you.