Press release by University of Bremen, Author Christina Selzer

“We are entering the race with two very strong cluster applications,” says President Jutta Günther convinced. “Both the ‘Martian Mindset,’ which deals with the scarce resources on Mars, and our climate and marine research are dedicated to extremely relevant topics of our time. I thank all my colleagues who have worked hard on these two proposals in recent weeks and months. Now it’s time to continue our first-class research and keep our fingers crossed.”

The Martian Mindset: A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm

The full proposal is “The Martian Mindset: A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm,” which successfully made it through the first application stage in February.

Seemingly unlimited resources have enabled humanity to geographically and demographically expand humankind, which has gone hand in hand with a massive exploitation of fossil fuels. This has set humanity on a path toward a rapidly deteriorating environment and an impending age of scarcity, which will challenge the very fundamentals of nearly all production technologies. Accordingly, various research efforts now focus on how to make production more sustainable, efficient, and automated.

In this cluster, researchers of the University of Bremen take a radically new perspective, aiming at a long-term paradigm shift. They place themselves on Mars, a potentially habitable but inhospitable world with scarce resources, and rethink the production of materials and parts from scratch.

The Cluster will establish the Martian Mindset as a new, scarcity-driven paradigm to produce materials and parts that are sufficient in quality for use. The Martian Mindset is guided by scarcity constraints in four dimensions – natural resources, electric power, human workforce, and information. The research will focus on three goals: First, developing (bio)electrochemical methods for the synthesis of raw materials from low-grade resources. Second, designing and demonstrating low-energy process chains that use these raw materials as input to produce a variety of enough-to-use parts. Third, devising concepts for production facilities operated by small human teams assisted by robots and digital representations of the processes. The fundamental knowledge gained through the Martian Perspective cluster will lay the foundations for a fossil-fuel-free production of materials and parts from scarce resources in a highly automated and resilient way.

Exploring the Ocean Floor: MARUM Submits Application for Continuation Together with the University of Oldenburg

The team from MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen has submitted an application for continuation. MARUM is already home to one of the 57 Clusters of Excellence currently funded nationwide. This time, the researchers at MARUM have submitted the application for continuation of “The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Uncharted Interface” cluster as a joint application together with scientists from the University of Oldenburg.

The researchers investigate the ocean floor as an important, dynamic interface that has a wide range of functions for the entire Earth system. They analyze how geological, physical, chemical, and biological processes in and on the ocean floor interact with each other, thus influencing the climate system, the global carbon cycle, and the biological productivity in the world’s oceans. The researchers want to better understand the processes in order to include the ocean floor in detailed global mass budgets. This involves deciphering the transport processes of biogenic particles to the ocean floor and their transformation under changing environmental conditions, recording the transfer of carbon and other elements between the ocean floor and seawater, and understanding how ocean floor ecosystems react to environmental changes. Because of their scientific and technological complexity, these goals can only be achieved through interdisciplinary research.

The scientists at the University of Oldenburg make an important contribution here. In a future joint cluster, the universities want to pool their expertise in order to decipher further the role of the ocean floor for material cycles and biodiversity under changing climatic conditions. Another important goal is to provide a scientific basis for the protection and sustainable exploitation of the oceans.

A decision regarding the cluster applications will be made in May 2025. The successful Clusters of Excellence will be funded for a period of seven years starting from January 1, 2026. Universities that are successful with two Clusters of Excellence or university alliances that are successful with at least three clusters can apply for the title of University of Excellence in 2025. To achieve this title, a comprehensive future concept for the entire university or the alliance must be presented.

Further Information:

https://www.dfg.de/en/research-funding/funding-initiative/excellence-strategy

https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/humans-on-mars-initiative

https://www.marum.de/en/The-Ocean-Floor.html