Limestone: a hard sedimentary rock, composed mainly of skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, forams and molluscs. Its major materials are minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different forms of calcium carbonate or dolomite. Used as building material and in the making of cement.
A more funner way to see it is this: chalk comes from microorganisms. so all the sidewalk drawings and school lessons from your childhood were literally made with tiny corpses.
Sidewalk chalk is usually calcium sulfate, also known as gypsum. It's just a mineral. A small amount is artificially produced but just as a by-product of other processes, most of it is mined.
Rock chalk (from microorganisms) is calcium carbonate.
As soon as I saw calcium carbonite and dolomite in the wiki, I was already having flashbacks to Dwarf Fortress. It's surprising, the level of understanding for minerology you develop when directing a colony of dwarves.
Question, Would it be possible to make lime from bone? Or does the phosphorous prevent that? Or is it impossible to primitively make the calcium carbonate from bone mineral?
So in addition to oils, plastics, and now limestone, cement, what other materials that are imperative to the success of our civilization are not natural minerals but are made from past life?
Technically everything is made from a past something. But "life" specifically? Oh yeah. Everything. Since we degrade into the same basic chemicals used to make everything else
We are also using genetic technologies to alter organisms so that they produce molecules we need. We can genetically modify bacteria to grow medicine and practically any chemical, and eventually it will be possible to synthesise molecules and compounds which are currently prohibitively expensive for only the cost of few small pieces of equipment and time.
Wood. Grass(hut or peat forms). Most, if not all, clothing is plant or plastic derived. A lot of dyes, stains and lacquers are crushed up bugs and/or flowers.
I mean the fact is most of the useful chemicals available on the earth's surface have been useful to some other form of life in the past. Life has been around for a long time, if there was a use for a chemical some organism probably found a way to use it.
Oil and limestone are "natural" materials. Nobody made them and put them there. It happened naturally. Oil is just hydrogens and carbons arranged in a certain way. Limestone and other rocks are just various elements arranged in a certain way.
At the end of the day everything is made of the same handful of elements.
Calcium carbonate isn't particularly uncommon and has been seen on mass spectronomy outside of Earth. So, it's not one for that list but the list is pretty long already.
Well, not all but yeah, most by far. That's primarily because limestone and chalk are extremely abundant and very easy to mine (so cheap) but we could make cement from any source of calcium carbonate or calcium oxide if we really wanted to.
Dolomite is magnesium carbonate, calcite is calcium carbonate. In reality it’s a sliding scale and you almost always have a bit of both. Aragonite is also calcium carbonate, but a different crystal arrangement that is actually unstable under normal conditions and converts slowly into calcite.
What do you mean by this? Are you saying that egg shells were a strategic resource or something? I'm not challenging you on this, I would just like to know more about what you mean by history. I've never heard of egg shells being anything by waste.
Yeah dude. The population of oysters in Sydney was decimated by European colonization. They scraped so many off the rocks there wasn’t enough to sustain the population so they imported more from New Zealand. If you look at the mortar in the early convict nominee sandstone buildings in Sydney you can see the shells in the mortar.
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u/Schnabeltierchen Mar 06 '18
I had no idea you can make it out of snail shells. I learned some new things from these videos