What useful materials exist on a lifeless planet?
Supposing you are trying to colonise planet that has no life what-so-ever but is otherwise an earth analogue.
First thing that I realised is that there would be no oil. So they would need to make bioplastic (assuming they could introduce plants to the inorganic dusty soil).
Then I thought that they could make cement from lime stone, but upon further research I realised that lime-stone is a product of coral and skeletal fragments.
This really got me thinking about how many useful materials are actually the product of living organisms.
Other than metal ores, what useful construction materials exist in the absence of life? What compounds can you synthesise from inorganic rock?
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