Current Leaky-Refrigerator & Solar-Array Tech for Easily and Readily Producing Storable Liquid Water on Mars, in Its Subsurface and on Its Surface I'm sharing an off-the-shelf water-making technology with any sci-tech folks interested in the human settlement of Mars and readily harnessing its environment for producing water perhaps anywhere there on its surface and subsurface cavities, natural or engineered. This may be done by exploiting deliberately the appliance-malfunction situation of a continuously leaky refrigerator. In general terms, the leaking refrigerator continuously produces leaking water oozing to its bottom, its internal floor, unless and until the leak-causing mechanism/s is/are repaired to stop the leak, which has to be cleaned up by hand and sponge, etc., daily, in the absence of a leaking-water catching and drainage pan to do this automatically or on a longer periodic basis. To produce the water, the leaking, otherwise operating refrigerator only needs to be plugged into a sufficient source of electrical energy delivery, which on Mars could be an electrical socket from an on-site installation of rooftop solar panels or microgrid of solar panels and wind turbines for generating electricity and electrical-energy power-wall storage units fed by these for later supplying electricity at night or when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow on Mars, of which the latter is unlikely. Indicatively, if a leaky refrigerator on Mars could produce water by its leaking malfunction, drawing on the aerosol or otherwise H2O, hydrogen and oxygen chemicals naturally in its environment, it could also produce water as normal from its exterior freezer panel feature for doing this. Also, as a backup source of electrical power generation to that of solar panels and wind turbines, human settlements on Mars would use biodigesters to convert humans' toilet, food and other biomass waste into environmentally sequestered methane gas for conversion to electricity generation and for gas for fire cooking and internal-combustion-engine vehicle propulsion -- methane gas from these sources even if released into the Martian environment would be beneficial, as a greenhouse gas, toward warming and thawing physically frozen, freezing Mars and liquifying much of its vast natural stores of water ice into liquid standing and running water and atmospheric moisture and precipitation for making it respiratorily and otherwise directly highly functionally habitable for the humans and human-selected lifeforms of Earth, free of the need for radioactively hazardous and poisonous nuclear reactors#1, and much fossil fuels and fossil-fuels extraction technology and operations, especially environmentally ruinous and biologically harmful coal and fracking hydrocarbon extraction, the latter also dependent on and extremely contaminating and wasteful of valuable water, for electrical and gas fuel energy generation. (Benign geothermal, solar, wind-turbine and biomass-biodigester technology, and even frackless natural gas and oil operations, for generating fuel energy for human technological-industrial needs will continuously improve and evolve in inconceivable for us better ways that make these other industrial fuel energy production alternatives or options irrelevant and obsolete. Iceland on Earth might make a good nation to learn from for harnessing electrical energy from a cold, icy environment, in which it as a nation is expert, and emulating this to the extent possible for human settlements and geothermally-based electrical energy production on cold, icy Mars, https://www.geothermal-energy.org/geothermal-pushes-iceland-to-top-of-the-green-future-index-2021/.). The leaky refrigerators would passively extract the gaseous, aerosol and airborne H2O, hydrogen, oxygen and other oxides, from their subsurface environments, underground and inside of hills, mountains and within the walls of craters as well as on the surface of Mars to produce their own ice and cooling, in addition to water, whose production might be calibrated and which could be drained into leaking water catchment tanks for human use. Probably they could also be used to produce breathable oxygen for vegetation, humans and other select organisms. Modest height and width craters could be domed with, or domed by a roof of, solar-panel, anti-cosmic-ray shielding, mounted on something like an end-to-end, in all directions, total-aerial-crater-span square-area (covering the full area of the aerial-space of the crater) crisscrossing bridging via roof-construction and/or bridge-engineering methods, using, in part, robot drone-helicopters, with lighting on both sides of the crater covering and the craters themselves made into human habitats, garden parks, greenhouses, farms, micro-forests, lakes, etc. The refrigerators could be placed or 3-D printer manufactured or assembled all over, as needed, in the subsurface of Mars and in buildings, greenhouses and other architectural facilities for or serving humans. The following mouse click-on hyperlink articles on IA 3-D printer mobile robots by industry and scientific researchers conclude and demonstrate that IA 3-D printing will be able to build, fabricate and manufacture virtually all human settlement material needs for and on Mars and Earth's moons: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-rover-bringing-3d-printed-metal-parts-to-mars, https://spacecoastdaily.com/2020/10/nasa-looks-to-use-3d-printing-construction-for-future-infrastructure-on-mars-and-the-moon/, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/3-d-printing-on-mars/, https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/3d-printing-habitats-on-mars, https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/3d-printers-could-build-future-homes-on-mars. I know this potential application because my refrigerator began to leak during the COVID-19 pandemic and I decided to build a dam with plumbers' waterproof tape at the bottom of my refrigerator to shore up the leak from flowing onto my bamboo-wood kitchen floor and clean up the leak buildup daily or twice daily until after I've had my two COVID-19 immunization vaccine shots and then request professional repair services for my refrigerator's water leak. I noticed that the water puddling was rapid and large hours later on days I opened and closed the refrigeration compartment door a lot, meaning that inside that compartment of the refrigerator it received and absorbed a lot of air (oxygen) from its exterior environment compared to the days, and hours following, when I opened it a few times, resulting in slow and at times modest to quite modest puddling, whereupon on each occasion I opened it to prepare my day's one-meal supper, some days an elaborate supper and some days not. The point and evidence of this insight are that refrigerators may be ready-made for producing water in subsurface cavities on Mars and the Earth's moon where the water-related chemicals are present in the environment. Both worlds have been confirmed to possess large stores or deposits of water ice at least in their soil and in or extending down to their subsurfaces, quite possibly in their cavities, where, with electrical power, working refrigerators might automatically be able to produce water from the water-related chemicals in the environment, thawed somewhat and aerosolized by light heating if necessary for the refrigerators to interact with them for water making. If a refrigerator can produce a permanently ongoing leaking flow of water in its refrigeration compartment and water on demand from the outside panel of its freezer compartment without its having to be filled with water but by keeping it plugged into an electrical socket, then, firstly, it must be obtaining its water-making chemistry from its surrounding environment, of which the oxygen, a component of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms and gases it would synthesize to make H2O molecules that are the basis of its freezer's ice and its external freezer panel's drinking water as well as the source of its malfunctioning refrigeration compartment's persistently leaking water, and then, secondly, refrigerators generally should also easily be able to be enabled and manufactured for supplying on-site water and a breathable oxygen atmosphere for habitations on Mars and Earth's moon. Minor engineering adjustments of refrigerators by their manufacturers should be possible to make them able to produce, in addition to water, and continuously to output breathable oxygen into their surrounding environments automatically and continuously from the oxygen they extract or harvest from the environment. Solar-array installations that extract water-basis chemicals and molecules from air to manufacture water should also be adjustable by engineering to be able to produce and then route breathable oxygen into human habitations on Mars and the Earth's moon. Past news articles have been published on existing solar tech that can produce water from the air; for example, mouse click on https://news.mit.edu/2020/solar-extracts-drinkable-water-1014 (Solar-powered system extracts drinkable water from “dry” air Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have significantly boosted the output from a system that can extract drinkable water directly from the air even in dry regions, using heat from the sun or another...), which is in use at least among some village people in Africa presently. (Also check out the article 'Kite-Flying Robots on Mars to Generate [Hybrid Wind-Solar Electrical] Energy on Mars' for human settlements by mouse clicking on the following hyperlink: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/kite-flying-robots-could-generate-160000107.html. Ground-level solar-array power for generating electricity can be greatly amplified and enhanced on Mars with magnifying glass that can be made in situ on Mars from the vast abundance of seemingly endless Martian sand, and it could do the same for such solar arrays in orbit around Mars. In addition, wind turbines at ground level would be more than sufficiently productive there for this purpose with the everyday, everywhere natural windiness of planet Mars. But the wind-solar kite idea may indeed be a simplifying and maximizing wind-and-solar electrical energy production source in collaboration with the generation of electricity with ground-based solar arrays and wind turbines, apart from ground-based geothermal and biodigester converted toilet, food and biomass waste sources of electrical energy production.). What is better herein, is that the solar[-wind] tech and water-leaky refrigerator tech for on-site water, and possible breathable oxygen, production can be integratively coordinated to do this work on both the subsurface and enclosure surfaces of Mars, maybe even in the subsurface cavities or more of Earth's moon, and in the subsurfaces of the deserts of Earth, so as not to disturb or to minimally disturb the surface areas of the deserts of Earth for their denizen vegetation and animal species.
Because water in any of its chemical states (ice, liquid, gas) would be extremely valuable to human settlements on Mars and the Earth's moon, to systemically budget its expenditure thereon, for most of its plumbing (including personal hygiene and all sanitation applications) and agricultural uses, it can be dispensed in the form of fog and steam, including from faucets/spigots, for which there is already existing technology. And since in-situ wood for building would be highly desirable for construction of human settlements on these worlds, NASA and DARPA biotech contractor companies should be working on artificially mass producing and manufacturing real but sci-tech industrial wood of all natural types, a potentially endlessly trillions-of-dollars industry, with lots of good-paying jobs from bottom to top, that would largely spare the Earth's forests from deforestation for wood harvesting and super boost the USA economy. Footnote 1. As regards their radioactive waste and long-term tremendous and extensive radioactive contamination of the environment and ecology from major nuclear reactor accidents (Three Mile Island in the USA, 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine, 1981, Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, 2011), in addition to their multi-billions of dollars of cost, primarily at taxpayers' expense, for their construction, their dependence on large quantities of valuable cooling water and the routine high cost of their operation and maintenance. Public Domain
