Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Making steel things out of some mineral somewhere isn't out of the question but you won't be able to do it out of any old patch of sand. Most sand is just silicon dioxide.
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The running assumption seems to be Australia, as in Mad Max - and Australian sand, earth, rocks etc in the Red Center are pretty lousy with iron oxides (thus the Red part). Even many of the more lush areas are pretty iron-y.
The sand also contains not-insignificant amounts of organics (it's powdery dehydrated dirt, really) - you can see this when it rains and suddenly there's plants everywhere. Briefly. Regardless, you can also feed the Goo actual plants and animals.
The Center is also pretty lousy with ochre clays, which are
mostly iron oxides but there's other metal oxides too (copper and aluminum, in your usual modest quantities). Uranium oxide clay would be... colourful but I'm pretty sure it's not a big thing in the Outback normally.
Another question is plastic: beaches are already a surprisingly high percentage of microfragments of plastic. The Red Center isn't going to be so much because its the wave action that helps grind up the plastic into grains, but there's plastic crap blowing around
anywhere, and many of the attempts at making "biodegradable" plastic have resulted in bags that disintigrate into little airborn flakes when exposed to UV light (which due to the hole in the ozone layer, Australia has in
spades) but don't actually
go away. Depending on how post your post-apocalypse is, and prevailing winds, there could be enough plastic in the soil to compliment other materials.
And of course water, although feeding it your water might be a bit desperate.
This should make at least simple electronics possible - either glass or plastic as insulators for copper wiring and as circuit boards. Power source could be provided by a simple wet-cell battery created by the Goo -
not a very easily transported high-power thing, so no lasers.
If you feed it water, the Goo might use solar power to generate hydrogen and create a hydrogen-burning engine to provide power. It could also use the oxygen to provide the oxidizer for explosives (other materials required for basic explosives can be sourced from animals and plants and earth/stones, although probably in big quantities).
More mundanely, it could make coal coke, charcoal, or gasoline given enough quantities of organic material, but that might require a
lot of Assembler Goo.