Scientists have suggested we could create housing on Mars for future settlers using an Ancient Roman technique of making concrete.
If humans ever want to set up a home elsewhere in the Solar System, Mars seems like the most viable bet, beating off the competition by not being a hell world, having a surface we could actually stand on, and being at the edge of the habitable zone where liquid water can exist.
But it isn’t exactly ideal. It lacks a lot of the key materials we need for survival on the planet, such as those to build homes, and breathable air. While the latter may require terraforming, a new paper suggests for the former, we may already have part of the solution pumping through our veins.
“Ancient Romans utilized organic additives, including animal blood, primarily to improve the durability and workability of their mortar. However, it is possible to create high-performance concrete using blood as a primary component,” the team explains in their paper. “Although it is a bit strange, blood can be utilized to create strong concrete or bricks for onsite construction on Mars.”
The team outlines a number of options for making concrete on Mars. Humans landing on the Red Planet could find a supply of calcium carbonate, which the team notes has been detected at the site of the Phoenix Lander. They would need to remove the carbon dioxide within it by heating it to make lump lime. However, this – and concretes made from sulfur, also suggested by the team – would need the addition of water to make concrete.
The team also looked at “AstroCrete“, which uses fluids from humans and Martian regolith to make a strong concrete with impressive compressive strength. The idea is as simple as it sounds, with the advantage being that most the ingredients we need are either on Mars or inside astronauts.
“After the arrival of the first Martian inhabitants and their placement in primary structures, which can include inflatable structures, the combination of tears, blood, and sweat from the inhabitants, along with Martian regolith, can be used to produce a concrete known as AstroCrete,” the team explains. “The production process is simple. Aggregates (Martian regolith) bind together through contact with human serum albumin (HAS), a protein found in blood plasma.”
The team notes that in just 72 weeks, an astronaut could generate enough human serum albumin to create a habitat for a whole new crew member. As well as this, it’s possible to make the material less brittle and increase its tensile strength with the addition of a compound found in urea, which can be extracted from astronauts’ tears, sweat, or (probably more conveniently) their urine. The benefit of this method is that it requires no water, other than that which has already traversed its way through a human, though the team found that concrete made from sulfur was also a viable option to look into.
Similar ideas to the blood house have been proposed before, specifically the pee house on the Moon, which utilizes urea as a plasticizer. We may be headed for the stars, but before we do so we may have to do a lot of living in houses made of blood, sweat, tears, and good old-fashioned human pee.
The study is published in Acta Astronautica.
