[HN Gopher] We can mine asteroids for space food
___________________________________________________________________
We can mine asteroids for space food
Author : reinaldnaufal
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-11-26 09:29 UTC (13 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.cambridge.org)
| api wrote:
| This reminds me of US research that was done during the Cold War
| about surviving a nuclear winter by producing food products
| directly from petroleum. It's theoretically possible and you
| could survive on it as a supplemental source of calories.
|
| I think optimizing farming for space flight is probably better,
| especially if you have always-on solar power (as you do anywhere
| near the sun) or nuclear power. Hydrocarbons from asteroids and
| comets are probably better suited for things like plastics
| manufacture and petrochemicals, since you would not have biotic
| oil sources in space.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I can't think of a single reason we wouldn't just eat algae
| sludge or synthetic protein mash or something else. Farming is
| not a space- or weight- optimized process.
| szvsw wrote:
| To be fair, people will still be people... if the
| sludge/protein mash can be mildly upgraded to
| diversity/quality comparable to MREs (not that I've ever had
| one) sure, but for long term space flight it seems plausible
| that the psychological/morale detriments of eating sludge
| every day (or any single meal for that matter) would be
| significant.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| Isn't there a requirement for lots of fibre in the diet as
| well as vitamins, protein, carbohydrates and fats. As well as
| the psychological effect of eating good food and not mush.
| whycome wrote:
| Soluble fiber is broken down partially in the gut by
| bacteria/fermentation. Lots remains. Insoluble fiber passes
| through mostly unchanged.
|
| You see where this is going.
|
| You need only minimal new inputs and the rest can be
| recycled.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| To extend D Rumsfeld
|
| there are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
| We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we
| know there are some things we do not know. But there are
| also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't
| know.
|
| And now things that we know and wish that we didn't (ie
| spaceship recycling)
| whycome wrote:
| Pee is largely recycled right now on the ISS. It's mostly
| water.
|
| And nitrogen is good for growing plants - the cellulose
| of their structure is the ideal insoluble fibre for us.
| Though, cows turn it into usable sugars.
| api wrote:
| I heard someone call the ISS closed water system the
| infinite coffee machine. Yesterday's coffee becomes
| today's coffee.
|
| It sounds gross but if we get good enough at it it'll
| work.
|
| Like any settlement on a frontier the first people in
| space aren't going to eat well. They'll survive. After a
| long time I imagine we will get good at growing and
| manufacturing food up there. It's honestly not even close
| to the hardest problem. Full recycling and modular
| manufacturing for complex items is a lot harder.
| debacle wrote:
| If I'm in a fragile metal bubble in the deep black vastness
| of space, the texture of my nutrisludge will be the least
| existential of my worries.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If Rimworld (the game) is to be believed, people that eat
| too much nutrisludge will eventually snap and eat the
| people around them.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| And then turn them into hats....don't forget the hats.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If I'm in a fragile metal bubble in the deep black
| vastness of space...
|
| ... maintaining your mental health is probably a
| significant concern, which may indeed be surprisingly
| impacted by the texture of your nutrisludge.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| I'm really curious about this. I did find one 2022 article
| about producing edible fats from petroleum [1].
|
| It does cite two articles from the '60s one about building
| acids from petroleum, and building long chains of fat from
| biological sources. I've found that people may have been
| thinking about it at the height of the Cold War. Do you have
| any links you could point me to?
|
| [1]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02638...
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Apparently producing margarine from coal was actually done
| during WWII.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine?wprov=sfti1#Coal_but...
|
| https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/brave-new-bu...
|
| Edit: The more I read on this the more doubtful I'm becoming
| that this was actually produced at scale. If anyone has a
| better source I'd love to see it!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was never a fan of margarine, but the more I learn tidbits
| like this the more I think it strange.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| I can't decide if this sounds more like a startup idea or a
| proposal from the coal lobby.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The British company ICI had a product called Pruteen, which was
| made by growing bacteria on methanol produced from natural gas
| as the energy source. It was intended as cattle feed; if people
| ate it there would be an excess of purines which could lead to
| gout.
|
| Pruteen was followed by the more successful product Quorn,
| which is made from a fungus grown in fermentation tanks with
| glucose as the energy source. It is intended for human
| consumption as a meat substitute.
| Symmetry wrote:
| ALLFED[1] is an organization doing research into how we could
| keep most everyone alive if we have a decade of winder after a
| super volcano, asteroid impact, or nuclear winter. Processes
| that convert hydrocarbons into calories are certainly in their
| playbook.
|
| [1]https://allfed.info/
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Reminds me of the CHON factories from the Heechee Saga, by
| Frederik Pohl.
| yborg wrote:
| My brother in _Gateway_ (1977).
| m463 wrote:
| Still can't get this series on kindle
| twodave wrote:
| I wonder if it would be possible for e.g. asteroid material to
| work as an indirect source of nutrition? I.e. carry a specialized
| yeast on board that can "eat" the asteroid, and, sort of like
| sourdough, use the yeast's excess growth as food for humans...
| Sounds nasty now that I say it out loud haha.
| andai wrote:
| Starmite!
| pengaru wrote:
| Minemite
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > a specialized yeast on board that can "eat" the asteroid
|
| that's my 'retirement project'
|
| https://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-ye...
| lupire wrote:
| Problem is that the vast majority of material is metal, so your
| digester needs a way to saturate the metal to reach the CHON,
| and and then extract the digester. Is that really better than
| extracting the CHON directly and then processing it?
| busssard wrote:
| that depends so much on the kind of asteroid i thought.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Carbonaceous Chondrite asteroids have carbon in the form of
| coal but also carbonate rocks as well as moderate amounts
| of water as well as stony minerals (silicon, aluminum) as
| well as iron.
| gus_massa wrote:
| That's the actual plan. It's not explsined in the introduction,
| but in the middle of the article they explain that they will
| food bacterias with the proceced material, and later people
| will eat the bacteria.
| speerer wrote:
| This is very close to the subject of the article. In the
| following quotation, "consortia" means (I think) globs of
| algae:
|
| > After comparing the experimental pyrolysis breakdown
| products, which were able to be converted to biomass using a
| consortia, it was hypothesized that equivalent chemicals found
| on asteroids could also be converted to biomass with the same
| nutritional content as the pyrolyzed products. This study is a
| mathematical exercise that explores the potential food yield
| that could be produced from these methodologies.
| twodave wrote:
| Ah, thanks. Exposing my non-academic reading comprehension ;)
| mkl wrote:
| Yes: "A group of symbiotic microbes" -
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consortium#English
| perihelions wrote:
| We're the scary aliens other ETI's make sci-fi horror movies
| about.
|
| " _...and they wield GREY GOO that turns *everything* it
| touches into nutrients they lap up in their flappy
| appendages..._ "
| benpacker wrote:
| We always have been
| josefresco wrote:
| I could have done just fine without learning about "grey goo"
| today thank you very much.
| roughly wrote:
| "They're Made out of Meat" https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolica
| r/writing/prose/text/think...
| vizzier wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
| lupire wrote:
| "The asteroid mass needed to support one astronaut for one year
| is between 160k metric tons and 5k metric tons. "
|
| 10 to 500 tons per person per day.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, if you never recycle anything and rely only on the
| extremely low quality reserves you found floating around...
|
| I have no idea why the measurement unities even make sense.
| Null-Set wrote:
| Asteroids which enter a planet's atmosphere will probably yield
| even better food, because they will be a little meteor.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| underrated comet
| nonethewiser wrote:
| stellar even
| bpodgursky wrote:
| My 3 year old used to think the dinosaurs are gone because a
| meat eater killed them all.
| pengaru wrote:
| The Dodo bird could probably be considered a dinosaur, not
| entirely wrong...
| whycome wrote:
| because they will be a little meteor, right?
|
| How did you comet o that conclusion?
|
| And a hungry mouth will approach: "please sir, armageddon some
| more?"
| donaldihunter wrote:
| Title should really be "How we might be able to ..."
| criddell wrote:
| We're just lucky the HN title ruiner bot didn't change it to
| "We can food"
| zelias wrote:
| For my Factorio friends out there, this sounds like grounds for a
| mod that let's you "mine" nutrients in space
| Wingy wrote:
| This is roughly a thing in Space Age!
| Filligree wrote:
| Really? Can you make spoilage somehow?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Spoilage is a thing in Factorio now
|
| https://wiki.factorio.com/Spoilage
| Filligree wrote:
| Yes, but I'm not aware of a way to make it from
| asteroids.
| goda90 wrote:
| The space version of this mod:
| https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock
| butlike wrote:
| Lisa Simpson: "Look (the boar) is licking the slime off that
| rock! That's what he's been eating: slime!"
| coding123 wrote:
| I can't wait for us to start mining asteroids and my bank account
| has $123,456,789,101,123,500,700!!!!!!
|
| And then use that to buy $80 trillion dollar cheeseburgers at
| McD's!
| jmcmaster wrote:
| I am a layperson for astrochemistry but IIRC comets have much
| higher hydrocarbon content by an order of magnitude or more (and
| obviously more water, fewer metals to contend with for extraction
| energy requirements).
|
| Anyone have more insights? Did I miss mention of comets in my
| skim of the paper?
|
| Ps usually HN not a punfest, but kudos for the Starmite(tm)
| @andai
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think comets are significantly harder to get a hold of;
| they're in long-period orbits, and changing their trajectories
| - or even catching up with them! - is significantly harder than
| catching something that circles the sun inside the orbit of
| Jupiter.
| tlb wrote:
| The relevant comparison is the energy needed to turn asteroids
| into food vs. the energy needed to turn exhaled CO2 and poop back
| into food. Astronauts live in closed ecosystems, so you don't
| need to bring in additional mass. Just close the cycle.
| metalman wrote:
| As a young child I was filled with hope, and some other mixed
| feelings, as it was anouced that the lunar astronoghts would be
| testing to see if the moon was made of blue cheese.My hope was
| that this would be brought back to feed all of the hungry people,
| but as I didnt want any myself, I had mixed feeling of not
| sharing there lot.And was quite disapointed to hear the
| anouncement from the moon, that it was not in fact made of blue
| cheese. No one is going to be disapointed if the astroslime cakes
| dont work out.
| jamieplex wrote:
| I know this whole thing is just a thought experiment, but I had
| to wonder about not only the cost of all of this per "astronaut"
| (off the cuff - $10M per person per year), but the massive amount
| of energy needed for "life and food production". Just a single
| line item on my list of "doubtful, but not impossible" is the
| three quarters of a million Joules of energy needed to melt just
| 1000 grams of asteroid ice inside your protective environment.
| And you are gonna need a LOT of liquid water to accomplish all of
| this out in space...
| ttyprintk wrote:
| If we can talk long term, then a survey of the asteroid belt
| would reveal two special bands of density: close to ice, and
| close to gold. Returning a gold asteroid to Earth orbit has
| straightforward economics. Build a small cylinder or globe
| around an ice asteroid and melt just enough of it to kickstart
| the greenhouse effect.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Gold is only really valuable because we agreed it is; it has
| industrial applications (good conductor, malleable) but
| mostly it is priced based on its prettiness. If we were
| suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the price would go
| down.
|
| It is fairly dense, so maybe the best application for gold if
| you have lots of it in space (and not many morals) might be
| to threaten to drop it on people/cities/whatever.
| christophilus wrote:
| > If we were suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the
| price would go down.
|
| Yes, and this has happened at least twice in history: when
| Europeans discovered the Americas and moved a bunch of gold
| into Europe, and when Europeans discovered World Wars and
| moved a bunch of gold back to the Americas.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Europeans stole so much gold from S America it messed up
| the economy in China.
| MetallicDragon wrote:
| In space, assuming you're not too far out, heat is abundant.
| Literally just put the ice in an insulated room with a window
| facing the sun. If you want to get fancy, use mirrors to focus
| the sunlight.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I suppose the next step beyond vegetarianism and veganism will be
| mineralism: Food using molecules certified never to have been
| part of any known living organism.
|
| I remember there was a fictional advertisement for such a product
| in a sci-fi story, but not exactly where.
| ada1981 wrote:
| I think such a technical advancement would parallel a moral
| one.
|
| I've been vegan 25 years and would be happy to silence the "but
| what about plants" people once and for all.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I'm vegan too. Someone will say "what about the
| microorganisms in your gut" or something. People often have a
| negative reaction to vegans and that's not going to change.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| Obviously some plants die and others don't in harvesting.
|
| Mostly the "even broccoli screams when you rip it from the
| ground" is a joke more often than actual trolling.
|
| I think the valid moral argument is that as a result of
| modern agricultural practices substantially more animals are
| killed than animal husbandry. Usually the counter-arguments
| involves moving the moral goal posts by valuing farm animals
| over "pests and insects", or blaming the modern agricultural
| practices and suggesting organic farming cures those harms.
| mmooss wrote:
| There's a distinction - between obvious BS that is a
| philosophical puzzle to rebut on one hand, and genuine issues
| on the other. You don't really have to play the game of the
| former, unless you don't like philosophical puzzles of
| course.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| What about the atoms?
| Teever wrote:
| I've wondered about this too and if in our quest to colonize
| the solar system and mine asteroids we will inadvertently
| destroy remnants of dead extraterrestrial life or artifacts of
| alien species such as defunct sentinel probes that were hidden
| in an asteroid.
|
| It would be tragic if the only proof of alien life in the solar
| system was gobbled up by some automated asteroid miner that
| turns asteroids into shitty consumer goods.
| m463 wrote:
| Is mined food processed food?
| jaydeegee wrote:
| Every* food is processed food the amount of processing
| varies.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| This actually makes sense to me in terms of logical coherence.
| I understand and support people who follow ethically-motivated
| diets but the fact is a line is always drawn somewhere. Plants
| are alive. Why is a carrot's life less important than a
| rabbit's?
|
| I don't think we're good at making claims about where
| particular organisms sit along a gradient of consciousness we
| can't even properly define.
|
| I like to imagine other civilizations in the universe might use
| this basic distinction to evaluate how sophisticated a culture
| is -- do they still needlessly eradicate life for more
| convenient consumption? Akin to asking, are they still a pre-
| warp civilization?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I draw my line based on units of consciousness that I half-
| arbitrarily assign to different animals. I think most people
| do so, the assignment seems to be a sort of emergent property
| of the local society within which any individual is brought
| up.
| wruza wrote:
| In my book about distant civilizations they eradicate all
| life except the forms that are able to function as you
| described. Because it's pointless to just avoid participating
| in a meat grinder that life itself is naturally. The point is
| to stop anything that suffers from suffering. They dream
| about visiting every world and eradicating unascended lifes
| there for that same reason.
| mmooss wrote:
| > it's pointless to just avoid participating in a meat
| grinder that life itself is naturally.
|
| We've revolutionized human life over a few generations, and
| even more over a few hundred years. One outcome is that you
| can communicate freely - politically and technologically -
| with people all over the world. And you use that to say how
| pointless it is to try to improve.
|
| Think bigger and better. People did all that work to get us
| to this point; what will we do? How will we pull our
| weight?
|
| The only thing you have to fear is trendy contempt itself.
| jraph wrote:
| > Why is a carrot's life less important than a rabbit's?
|
| A rabbit probably ate a lot of carrots, you are better off
| eating just the carrot directly if you want to reduce the
| killing :-)
| Terr_ wrote:
| A trolley hurtling down the tracks towards a rabbit, and if
| you pull a lever it will go on to a different track that
| kills the same number of carrot plants that the rabbit has
| already eaten in its lifetime...
| labster wrote:
| And then the rabbit pulls the reverse lever, and the
| trolley is speeding back towards Elmer Fudd.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Many years ago my lecturer, Professor Stevan Harnad drew the
| line at backbones, if you have a spine or similar arrangement
| it's not OK to eat you. These days Harnad is a Vegan, which
| entails prohibition against a much larger array of animals
| being eaten or indeed taken advantage of in any way for your
| benefit.
|
| There is no reason to imagine that if there was alien life it
| would be able to comprehend us at all, for fictional
| convenience it has been usual to depict aliens as basically
| just humans in Halloween costume and there is every reason to
| assume they would be entirely incomprehensible instead. Even
| in soft SF, try say Iain M Banks' repeated reference to other
| forms of life which show essentially no interest in the scale
| of events that our human-like characters are engaged with.
| The Stellar Field Liner, a vast entity living in the
| magnetosphere of a star, the Excession, seemingly a living
| portal to other universes, or even just the Dirigible
| Behemothaurs which are island sized creatures that think a
| Galactic Cycle (225 million Earth years) is not very long.
| ben_w wrote:
| Mm.
|
| So, are The Affront the literary equivalent of a human in a
| halloween costume? Extreme sadism as the only definiting
| trait I can recall, so they probably count as Planet of
| Hats* even if the physiology is too different to be a
| costume department's job in a TV show.
|
| * https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats
| tialaramex wrote:
| Sure, it's really hard to do SF where you have aliens and
| keep them alien, because they no longer fulfil ordinary
| plot parameters. The key characters in the parallel story
| in Greg Egan's novel "Incandescence" aren't humans, never
| have been humans, and they live somewhere that humans
| would immediately die horribly and we'd need an XKCD
| "What if?" discussion to figure out how they die exactly
| 'cos they're much too close to a collapsed star and
| there's also no Oxygen and you can bet everything is
| totally saturated in radiation... They're probably...
| tiny? Nevertheless, they're our protagonists for fully
| half of a novel, so, they're going to get humanized.
| lkbm wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you draw the same line:
|
| * Pealing a carrot: not cruel
|
| * Skinning a rabbit alive: unnecessarily cruel
|
| For all the nonsense about plants experiencing "pain", they,
| uh, don't. Animals do. Outside of bad philosophical
| arguments, everyone behaves broadly in accordance with that
| belief.
| ben_w wrote:
| I certainly behave as though plants do not experience pain.
|
| However: plants are only noticeably animate in time-lapse
| footage, and have no mouth with which to scream.
|
| I have no idea why the particular electrochemical
| properties of the neurotransmitter exchange membranes in my
| body are able to give rise to qualia, so without that I
| can't rule out plants doing that but _very slowly_.
|
| Of course, if they do, then my skin may have an independent
| qualia to my kidneys let alone to what I call "me", so as
| you say, I don't live my life as if it were so.
| aylmao wrote:
| I know a lot of people choose to draw lines, but I personally
| don't think it's necessarily a "line" one has to draw. I
| think this is best thought of as a gradient. A rabbit is more
| like us, than a carrot. It has eyes, a backbone, moms take
| care of their babies, etc. We look at a dogs and can clearly
| see loyalty, happiness, longing, etc-- emotions we associate
| a lot with humanity.
|
| Where these animals fall in the "they're similar to a human"
| gradient is highly subjective, especially since it may have
| an emotional component to it. But we don't have to all agree
| on the definition of this gradient when the consequences
| (what to eat) are very personal.
|
| I will say though I admire this in humans. We have achieved
| plentifulness to the point we can attach moral and emotional
| meaning to our diet if we wish to. It's a pretty unique
| expression of our empathy.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Where there's a gradient and a binary decision, there's
| absolutely a line.
| tripper_27 wrote:
| Hey, will say your right about "seems similar to human",
| but behavior such as moms taking care of their babies is
| found in many plant species, as is loyalty. Probably
| happiness and longing as well.
|
| Ask yourself how many of these feelings arise from the
| rational thinking part of your brain vs how they seem to be
| full body sensations, and realize that the central nervous
| system might allow such signals/awareness to propagate at
| mammal speed, but why would a plant need that speed?
|
| There really is no reason why a CNS is needed for these
| emotions to be active, just a way to distribute
| hormones/chemical signals throughout the body.
| otikik wrote:
| I think the distinction has always been between "alive" and
| "conscious", not between "alive" and "dead". A rabbit is more
| self-aware than a carrot, we think (because it has a central
| nervous system).
|
| If you dig deep enough, the frontier between alive and death
| is actually blurry. Things like viruses challenge the
| intuitive understanding of what alive means.
|
| The water cycle makes it so that any water that you consume
| today will probably have been part of some other alive being
| at some point in the past.
| flysand7 wrote:
| Well according to biological taxonomy, viruses aren't
| "life", so the terms "alive" and "dead" don't quite apply
| to them
| tayo42 wrote:
| Some creatures are really weird too. Cutting up urchins for
| uni made me think what is really alive or what animals really
| are
| tzs wrote:
| > Plants are alive. Why is a carrot's life less important
| than a rabbit's?
|
| Some have indeed wondered about plant rights. There is even a
| vegetable rights protest song, "Carrot Juice is Murder" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Well said a carrot and a rabbit are equal you can eat both.
| jajko wrote:
| But there will never ever be such guarantee that could be taken
| seriously. How do you know that 2 star generations ago (so say
| roughly 10 billion years ago), in our previous neighborhood, a
| massive hypernova wiped out advanced civilization and you are
| now just consuming molecules that were once part of sentient
| living being, even with IQ much higher than yours?
|
| Nah, you can never be 100% sure, its one of those situations
| reachable only on paper.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The phrasing "any _known_ living organism " already excludes
| that.
|
| Even if it didn't, a guarantee in product marketing is a
| promise and quasi-legal committment, not a certification of
| objective universal cosmic truth.
|
| In some cases, everybody _knows_ that statistically there
| will be at least one case where the guarantee is broken, but
| that doesn 't void anything.
| pugworthy wrote:
| This seems like the ultimate in ultra-processed / factory food.
|
| Kind of interesting to read the comments on the other recent post
| on ultra-processed foods
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246739) and consider the
| arguments made against there and whether they would apply here.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You would likely use this "food" to feed more traditional
| agriculture for human consumption. A better way of positioning
| it is processing the content of abiotic asteroids into a
| biological system capable of providing nourishment to
| astronauts and space colonists.
| roughly wrote:
| The article says the cost of feeding one astronaut for one
| year is around 5,000-160,000 tons of ore per year. My
| understanding is the rule of thumb is about an order of
| magnitude nutritional drop off each step - that is, to
| produce 100cal of meat requires 1000cal of plant food.
| Bumping those yield estimates, especially the pessimistic
| end, up by another factor of 10 is just a phenomenal amount
| of material to process for one person for one year.
| Teever wrote:
| That's just the mass you need to extract the resources that
| make up the food that one person consumes in a year.
| Assuming you don't just space the human waste and instead
| reuse it you'll be accumulating material that can make up
| the biomass that will comprise a large and intricate food
| web that will eventually make up the biomes of large
| O'Neill cylinder stations.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I didn't read the paper in depth, just skimmed it, but it
| seems like their assumption is that the astronauts will be
| eating some sort of microbe slurry; so I _think_ that the
| cost includes only that, not using microbes to feed higher-
| order life or growing plants.
| roughly wrote:
| Agree, but the post I was responding to was suggesting it
| be used as an agricultural feedstock to feed things the
| astronauts eat - that's where my order-of-magnitude
| calculation came from.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| still need fiber though
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Wouldn't it be simpler to do what the Martian did?
|
| Bring low mass items: seed and bacteria.
|
| Mine high mass items: dirt and water.
|
| Concentrate sunlight
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Where exactly do you mine "dirt" from on a planet that hasn't
| had any sort of biosphere to create it? Dirt isn't just "stuff
| you're standing on" - it contains a lot of _stuff_ that 's been
| decomposing.
|
| Plus, Mars is full of chemical compounds that we suspect are
| pretty terrible for you, and the Moon's regolith is full of
| jagged, sharp bits that aren't good for you or the plants
| they're growing in.
|
| Mining "dirt" from most of the places we can get to would do as
| good of a job of growing food as grinding up your windows &
| plumbing.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| From the viewpoint of a space colony food is a renewable resource
| as after humans "consume" the food the food is now CO2 and other
| waste products. Martians may vent CO2 but I'd think asteroid
| colonists would seek to recycle every bit of volatile that they
| can.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Yes, but without a proper replicator, how does it taste? Burnt
| toast? Three week old socks? Munster cheese?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Velikovsky hypothesized that the manna of the ancient Israelites
| was hydrocarbons from meteors magically transformed into
| carbohydrate. It's good to see that his important research is
| being continued ;-)
| fenollp wrote:
| > The asteroid mass needed to support one astronaut for one year
| is between 160 000 metric tons and 5000 metric tons.
|
| Even these orders of magnitude are correct, this is still
| 14t-438t of material to process /per day/ just for one person.
| miohtama wrote:
| Eating like an elephant, I see
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reading these threads, I am reminded of a short story I once
| read, where we invented transporters, but every time you went
| through one, a copy stepped out, and left you in this weird limbo
| world, like in _The Langoliers_. You couldn't actually eat or
| drink anything, so transportees became cannibals, and killed and
| ate newcomers.
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