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We know what all that stuff is and how it works, making a fresh supply chain in a new place isn't handled by magical mystery cult of the gods… oh, Plutus, and Mercury are the gods of wealth, that's a coincidence.


How a lot of that stuff works on Earth is using abundant fossil fuels for mining, refining, and fossil fuels and biological material as feedstocks. In particular, it’s not obvious how to make volumes of virgin steel from iron ore without coke. (Electric arc remelting is fine for recycling steel to steel.)

Much of the plastic supply chain starts as oil or gas. Wood is a major building component as well.


> In particular, it’s not obvious how to make volumes of virgin steel from iron ore without coke.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322275580_Electroly...

> Much of the plastic supply chain starts as oil or gas. Wood is a major building component as well.

If we really needed those things (why would we even want to use wood as a structural element on a space habitat?), we can build bioreactors from metal, glass, and water.

Oil and gas do occur non-biologically e.g. Titan, but they can also be made from algae grown in a transparent tube exposed to sunlight and provided with the necessary minerals and CO2, which is trivial to make.

IIRC the two limited resources if you needed biology and couldn't do it all with a clanking replicator are nitrogen and phosphate, everything else is easy to find basically everywhere.




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