8 Crazy Futuristic Science Experiments Happening Right Now

1. 3D Printing Martian Soil

Futurists always live in hope that humans may one day colonise another planet, and we've nearly all got our sights set on one in particular (it's red and rhymes with "bars"). However, it would all be very well slinging a troupe of humans across the vacuum of space to an alien world, only for them to spend the first month assembling flat-pack.

To colonise a planet you have to have somewhere to live, but sending pre-fabricated materials into space is just so prohibitively expensive, costing around $100,000 per kilogram just to get to the moon, that it is essential we find a way to build structures with the local materials.

So, rather than taking a village of pre-fab houses, scientists are proposing we send just one 3D printer to build structures out of the Martian dust itself. Given the name Selective Separation Sintering (SSS), the process involves taking the ceramics in the Martian soil and super-heating them to form usable building materials such as bricks and tiles.

This kind of on-the-go material synthesis could be a key component in making space travel affordable enough to actually happen, perhaps in our lifetimes.

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