Professor Blue

The desert might not be the ideal place to live and work for most peo­ple because, well, it’s a desert.  No offense to the Bedoin peo­ple.

Lots of sun and end­less sand are two things that pre­vent most peo­ple from say­ing, “Let’s go have din­ner with the Sahara,” or even, “I build wid­gets in my desert factory.”

Artist Markus Kayser and his inven­tion, the Solar Sin­ter, might be chang­ing all of that.

This video shows a per­for­mance of his solar sin­ter, there in the mid­dle of the Sahara desert.  Its power source comes only from the sun that gets directed through a heavy lens onto a 3d printer, melt­ing the sand and shap­ing it into glass objects.

What does sin­ter mean?  Markus Kayser explains:

“This process of con­vert­ing a pow­dery sub­stance via a heat­ing process into a solid form is known as sin­ter­ing and has in recent years become a cen­tral process in design pro­to­typ­ing known as 3D print­ing or SLS (selec­tive laser sintering).”

It’s excit­ing to see the cre­ation of stuff that does not cre­ate CO2 or pol­lu­tion for landfills.

We make a lot of stuff out of plas­tic these days because it’s light and easy to trans­port, and because it doesn’t break.

But plas­tic is a huge a prob­lem because it doesn’t break down eas­ily when buried or tossed out at sea.

don’t dump us!

And it’s made up of a resource that’s becom­ing more and more scarce (hint: it’s made out of petro­leum / oil!).

What’s also excit­ing is that the Solar Sin­ter is a chal­lenge to other inven­tors out there (hello, inven­tors!) to dream up more appli­ca­tions for glass other than glass slippers!

No offense to glass slip­pers.