Soil as a resource

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Extraction difficulty

Soils are chaotic aka non-ordered aka non eutactic environments. This makes direct atomically precise disassembly very difficult if not nigh impossible. In most but a very few exception cases (like e.g. perfect salt crystals maybe) it will likely be easier to somehow dissolve the solid resources into a liquid form and continue further processing from there.

So we are at conventional thermodynamic chemistry pre-processing here that has nothing to do with APM. The destructive split-up chemistry needed here may be managed in (compared to today) very small compartments in a special desktop refinery. that is also an gem-gum technology artefact. We are talking about an hermetically sealed system of chemical reactors with just a few centimetres in size instead of many meters. Some inefficiencies due to scale-down may be compensated via taking more process iterations. No complex constructive chemistry needs to be done, greatly simplifying things.

Destructiveness

Unlike in the case of air as a resource soils come with more or less structure. If it comes to really excessively large planetary scale mining operations in the lithosphere then one might want to start thinking about preservation of geological structures, despite geological structures stand pretty much on the lowest rung when it comes to things worthy of preservation. Same for other bodies of the solar system.

The biosphere as a resource

Humic substances as a resource

Yes, carbon rich humic substances found in various types of organic soils could be used as a resource. Given some nontrivial pre-processing. This may not be a good idea though, since this may further disturb the equilibrium in the biosphere. We may rather want to do the reverse. Use the carbon dioxide in the air as a resource, and turn it into some simple molecules like sugar that can serve as food for the microfauna which eventually turns the carbon back into diverse humic substances. (TODO: investigate how much the total biomass of earth would increase if all the man made CO2 would be converted into it -- which other problems could that potentially cause)

Sugar and "friends" as a resource

For small quantities of product, yes this could work.

There could (and likely will) be designed different molecular mills that are specialized on the synthesis of a specific sugars each (mannose, fructose, glucose) Note that this is a more advanced skill using the polymer chain stretching trick and strong cooling during mechanosynthesis to keep thermal motion in check.

Pro:

  • Sugar is easily at hand in every kitchen.
  • An advantage is that sugars can be dissolved and easily broken up exactly identical into monomers that can after filtering be processed pretty much right away.

This is very much unlike humic substances, those have a great deal of random structure and wildly crosslink via strong covalent bonds.

Con:
Biologically produced sugar is rather cheap but still expensive when compared to the cheapest materials say concrete or asphalt or crude oil. (TODO: check ratios) Remember: We don't wanna eat it here but just use it as a carbon and hydrogen supplying resource.

You could use mechanosynthesized sugar but why would you do that when you then just disassemble it for its carbon content again? You'd rather synthesize sugar mostly as food for living organisms that cannot digest unnatural petrochemical organics.

Similar considerations apply for:

  • cellulose (and lignin) -- this is one of the biggest biomass sources of today.
  • other sugars (sugar replacement substances)
  • eventually starches

essentially all biological molecules that

  • (1) occur in large quantities
  • (2) can be easily purified
  • (3) and can easily be split into monomers

The lithosphere as a resource

While biological life has rather limited use for lithiospheric rock forming elements (carbonate clam-shells, phosphate bones and enamel, silicate diatoms and maybe some gypsum) Core functionality of life is all provided by stuff that is made up from volatile elements (elements that when burnt produce only gasses and no slacks). Same goes with our todays plastic industry, this stuff burns with almost no solid ash left behind.

Given APM uses gemstones as main building material for APM lithospheric rock forming elements are a perfect match.

Dissolving rather than cutting

  • Most Silicon oxoacid salts (aka silicates) are not soluble in water
  • Most Sodium oxoacid salts are soluble in water. Even sodium silicate.

A problem with silicates and aluminates (the most common stuff in earths crust) is that almost all of them do not like to dissolve in watery solutions. But we need to get our crude resource materials dissolved in a liquid structureless state for easy pre-processing into a suitable feed-stock for gem-gum factories.

In that regards sodium could be used as a rock dissolution agent.

An idea here might be to use very high intensity and very low energy sodium ion beams, and with them inject big quantities of sodium in a desired cut plane. Then wash the cut out with water. (TODO: investigate whether this has been tried with current day technology -- is this idea reasonable?).

Weapons and malicious intent

More food for replicators

With increasingly growing capabilities of processing of diverse resource materials the resource availability part reproduction hexagon gets increasingly fulfilled. So one might worry about soil assimilating replicators. That is: This way the niche of potentially unbounded unchecked replication could grow.

Less mobility for replicators

By the intoduction of the necessarily deeply macroscopic desktop refineries. the mobility part of the reproduction hexagon counteracts that though.

Replicators revert back to conventional warfare

A full soil consuming self replicating system unconditionally needs to include this macroscopic refinery element that is more vulnerable to a counterattacks than much smaller system elements. It is a fat sitting duck that "just" needs to be collected and isolated. Well that's only easy unless the evil designers haven't added advanced propulsion and guns. At which point we are back to advanced but conventional macroscopic warfare.

If there's an attack for "eating" your opponents machinery than this will be about breaking physical code seals and recomposing already pre-made general purpose microcomponents. But often better even just reprogram the whole war machine thing and use it as is, which is the fastest thing to do.

Other

When restricted to the topic resources from soils a more likely and more effective weapon might be software based mining supply blockades.

Related

External links

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