With Donald Trump recently announcing his plans to have mankind on Mars prior to the end of his term, Scientists at The University of California in San Diego may have stumbled upon a solution to one of the greatest challenges to the proposed feat.
With resources on the vast planet nothing short of limited, the idea of sustaining any extended trip relies almost solely on the ability to create structures for both habitation and simulating earths atmospheric conditions for the growth of food.
Suggested solutions to the lack of building material on the arid planet have included a nuclear powered kiln to terraform stone and turning organic compounds into polymers capable of binding the iron rich soils into useable blocks.
With the bottom line being that transporting materials into space for construction is unfeasibly expensive, scientists have found the best solution to date in compressing the native Martian soil. With silicon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminium, calcium, and potassium, the substrate, when compressed with as little as 10 kilograms of pressure is able to form an interlocking structure that when in scale is capable of out performing reinforced cement, although this scale is approximately less than 2cm. O̶b̶v̶i̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ Hopefully there are no planned voyages to the red planet anytime soon, as much as we love bricks and the idea of them being used to construct the first colonies of the human race's future home, the theory has yet to be put into practise with actual Martian soil.