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Jeff Walther's avatar

Exxon spent about 15 years on a biofuel from plankton program and gave up relatively recently.

No surprise. The energy density was always going to be poor. The amount of water that would have to be processed to collect a usable amount of plankton is always going to be self defeating.

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Jeff Walther's avatar

Long before Elon saved Twitter and Free speech, he was already nutty about solar power. Remember the HyperLoop transportation tubes and pods? He planned to solar power it? So it doesn't run at night?

The only way to settle Mars is with nuclear power. You can import all the Methane in the world from Triton, but you'd have no oxygen to burn it with. Want to get oxygen from iron oxide on Mars? Oh wait, that requires energy. That oxygen is already "burnt".

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