u/Simon_Drake

Do you think people who voted to leave the EU might be more open to rejoining if the UK could negotiate membership without having to accept free movement of people?

You're all a bunch of angry bitter Apuffists who secretly believe in Puff The Magic Dragon but pretend that you don't because you hate him.

Do you have any evidence that Puff The Magic Dragon doesn't exist? I bet you can't prove he doesn't exist. Therefore he does exist. Checkmate Apuffists.

An arkship left Earth carrying frozen embryos and bacteria samples for most of Earth's biome and all the crew in cryosleep for the long voyage to a nearby star system. Something went wrong and the ship has gone off course, rescued by an alien craft after unknown eons.

The alien ship is crewed by robots, leftovers of a war between their insectoid creators. They're peacefully mapping the galaxy hoping to find an arkship of their own ancestors so they understand our struggles and want to help. They will allow the humans access to their telescope network data and radio data logs to look for trades of humanity.

But in the interim we need food and these aliens are robots with no food to share. Short term they can provide the hardware for hydroponics grow tanks but long term we should set up a self sufficient colony. There's a nearby planet with about the right temperature and gravity and liquid water but the atmosphere is entirely nitrogen and there's no trace of life anywhere. This planet is of no interest to the robots who are using an asteroid field for minerals and have factories on the moons of gas giants where the lack of an atmosphere is a benefit to them.

So the aliens give us whatever tools and technology we need to modify the planet. They can give us specific minerals or resources if we ask but there's practicality issues, we can't just ask for a quintillion tons of complex hydrocarbon compounds. We need to plan tactically in how to turn a lifeless world into an ecosystem.

Ok, so how do you make soil? Machines can drill the rocks from the ground, sift and separate the minerals and extract the specific compounds we want. Silicates and sand grains are useful. Carbonate compounds can be processed to make graphite, that's a good starting point. Small amounts of iron oxides, aluminium oxides, magnesium oxides. Inorganic salts, potassium nitrate, ammonium salts, traces of phosphates, chlorides, sulphates. That's all a good foundation.

But the biggest part of soil that is hard to replace is obviously the organic components. We have stockpiles of soil bacteria but with no biodegradable materials for the bacteria to break down they can't establish a proper lifecycle.

Then what? Glycerol is relatively simple to make chemically, is that enough to feed bacteria on? What about the Miller Uray Experiment? Could we use something like that to generate amino acids to add into our mix of inorganic grains and mineral powders? Once things are up and running we can Mark Watney it to mix the poop and plant waste back into the soil but getting started would be tricky.

Rejoin all the composite agreements slowly and one by one to avoid a simple referendum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Slovakia

I've seen documentaries about sewage treatment plants and the different stages of filtering out large debris, toilet paper scraps, going through finer and finer meshes to remove all the poop. Then the water goes through several decontamination stages to make it safe to drink.

But what happens to the poop? There must be a significant volume of miscellaneous solids. I don't think it's used as fertiliser on fields, is it compacted into fuel pellets and burned? Even if it's broken down completely into simple chemicals, that's still carbon and nitrogen compounds that aren't included in pure water and they need to go somewhere.