We wrote before about the possibilities of glass as a buidling material. In the US a carefully neutered project of Smart roads already concluded there’s no reason why glass could not be a road surface, it all depends on the thickness you give it. The second project we will be writing about on fridays is about melding sand into glass using sunlight, and shaping that glass into usefull objects, tools and machines. IT is an example of a fossil fuel free method of building, which means it is not restricted by credit, moeny, only by the existence of the necessary tools where the sand is. It is likely Google lauched it’s Glass product just to hide this topic from search results. It is huge.
We want to find a test spot to do our experiments. This can be somewhere in Spain, Italy, Protugal, Greece or Turkey, where there’s plenty of sun to work with. There we want to install a small mirror to do experiments with. We are not alone, the british artist Markus Kayser turned out to be ahead of us when we first seached for examples of melting sand using the sun. But let’s not pretend it’s a creative hack we are dealing with, it is not, it is a revolution staring us in the face. The possibilities of glass are endless.
Glass can be used in many ways:
- Pipes
- Road surfaces
- Walls
- Wheels
- Canals
- Ships (glass fiber)
- Engines
- Chemical processing
- Wave devises
- Mirrors
- Desalination installations
The sand is there, all we need is a shovel and a magnifying glass, one that can be made of cheap plastic, or formed with glass molds. This is a type of technology that once it is known and doable, it can not be stopped. As we have written before it can be used to green the Sahara, pave roads at next to no cost (only time), all the things we now do with steel materials, even refine solar grade silicon.
Where to start
Glass conducts electricity when heated. There are also ways to mix glass with aluminium and calcium that yield new materials that behave a lot like metals. It is exiting to think what can be done with materials like that, but we need not look far to find applications for glass tubes or pipes, or simple bricks. The steps forward will begin with finding a way to melt the glass, getting the materials to do that, like the 4 m2 fresnel lens used by Markus Keyser.