Space Opera Fans discussion

Greetings Space Opera Fans!

Since the weather is really CRAPPY outside right now (I'm snowed in with a blizzard), I thought we'd talk about a really CRAPPY subject, mainly, could you really grow potatoes on Mars using your own excrement as 'soil starter' like they did in The Martian.


I got the idea from this blog article I came across which outlined the research Andy Weir did when writing the book and how it was portrayed in the movie.

HERE: http://modernfarmer.com/2015/10/can-y...

One interesting fact was that they hadn't yet discovered was that the Martian soil is loaded with percholates which can be removed by rinsing the soil with water, but where do you get the water?

Anyways, with an interest in survival gardening, both on Earth and in space, who else has some really CRAPPY ideas to grow stuff in strange places? Mars? The Moon? A space station? Where else?

And... here's a picture of a real-life zinnia flower they grew on the International Space Station to kick off the conversation:

Well, I've been working on having a small biome in my spacecraft so I can grow lots of things and hide alien insects. And then they have to work out what contribution this is all making to the air-scrubbing. I reckon I could do the math if I got my notes and text books back out and added it to my composting knowledge :)

You could grow potatoes in any granular mix so long as you can adapt a permaculture approach to the problem (e.g.. get the nutrients to the roots through a damp mat or something). Hmm, I'm thinking aloud. I'd better work on this.

I dabbled some years back in intensive backyard gardening, not the same thing as growing potatoes in poo on Mars, but the amount of outside 'stuff' you have to haul in when Mother Nature doesn't provide it all naturally is pretty unsustainable. It would take some finagling to set up any kind of terraforming on another planet or space station.

The line I've taken on this in my novels is to assume that there are a reasonable number of exoplanets with a chemistry similar to the early Earth, but on which life never got started. The initial atmosphere is N2, CO2, CH4 and Ar and a few other reducing gases. By seeding this with algae and then "firstfern", a genetically modified bracken that can photosynthesise from methane as well as CO2, and then standing back for a few decades, the terraforming teams get an atmosphere which allows most terrestrial life to flourish. Also a lot of carbon gets trapped in biomass in the form of a thick carpet of firstferns on land and algae in the seas.

Then the ecologists move in and start putting together a complete ecosystem.

No bunnies!

Mindful of the Australian experience fast moving herbivores such as lagomorphs and cervidae (bunnies and Bambis) are strictly banned until the forests are well established.

Once the ecosystem is up and running the colonists move in, sign both the lease on the planet and the Protocol of Interstellar Law, then get on with building things.

Curiously since there has been no previous life there is no coal or oil and no limestone, but there is a lot of calcium in solution in the seas. Introduced shellfish grow with thicker shells than on Old Earth. Visit a seafood restaurant on Telemark, HKS or Zeghapo and beside the lobster claw cracker on the table you'll find a little shiny gadget wrapped in a napkin. You may need it to get the shell open.

It's a very discreet little power drill.

One side effect of this is that pockets of methane can get trapped underground and explode when exposed to air.

When they had ordered Alan said, ‘Jane, can I ask you a silly question?’
She smiled. ‘Of course, if you aren't too fussy about the answer.’
‘On Mercia, have you ever seen a ground explosion? Because New California is supposed to have them all the time and I've never seen one.’
Jane's smile became a grin. ‘I haven't. My family's been farming at Hallsfield for sixty years, and if there were any pockets of methane left by the terraforming, we'd have exploded them with the plough long ago. Outside the populated area, that's only about one percent of the planet, they might still happen.’
‘The problem is that I'm supposed to be burying cables. And I haven't a clue what might happen if I hit one.’
‘There's always a way of finding methane pockets. Look into the distance and see where the ground goes purple.’
‘Why? Firstferns?’
‘Yes. They should die after the first five years of the terraforming. But if there's an underground methane pocket they keep on growing. It's good fun to go out in the unclaimed land looking for one.’
‘You actually look for them?’
Jane giggled. ‘There's not a lot of entertainment on a recent colony. You have to make your own. It's all right, we don't explode them. All we do when we find one is open it up with a spade, light it and stand back for a few hours. If we do it at night we get a lovely blue glow as it burns off slowly. If it's a big one we can use it as a barbecue.’
‘Really?’
‘It doesn't work very well. They usually go out as soon as we've started cooking, and we have to look for another one.’

I love this!

Jemima wrote: "I love this!"

Thank you. The books are:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/... https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/...

As I was reading The Martian, it struck me how similar what some of what he was doing to build the artificial greenhouse sounded like Helen & Scott Nearing's experiments with growing food indoors in the winter in the not-too-hospitable climate of northern Vermont.



It seems, if we could master growing our own food on another planet or a space station and master the waste-to-food/water thing, a lot of problems with space travel would resolve themselves, such as the need for oxygen, or how much food you would need to carry.

We have a septic tank alternative test system on Cape Cod that tests feeding poop through various plants (both water and ground plants) as well as plankton, seaweed and fish tanks to result in drinkable water at the end.



HERE: http://www.barnstablecountyhealth.org...

And then there's the whole 'humanure' movement. Some people use their own in-house humanure composters to fertilize their own gardens.

Humanure: http://humanurehandbook.com/instructi...

Of course, scaling it up is a problem (though the humanure peeps are running village-size experiments in Haiti and North Korea). It's just interesting to see all these 'crappy' :-) components get jiggled together in a science fiction space travel novel :-)

I'm sure there was a biome experiment with people living in a closed environment with three habitat areas. But it didn't work - things ran down or something was missing from the equation.

Am I imagining this - or was it fiction?

This was pre- Eden Project, which does not claim to be closed-loop.

I think you mean this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphe...

Here is some new data on something mind blowing in the field of space travel an artificial leaf that uses natural processes to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which are two essential products for long distance space travel. having this capability would mean that not only would you be able to produce oxygen on demand but also a steady fuel supply would be available for chemical propellants.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/28/tech/in...

R. wrote: "I think you mean this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphe..."

Thanks! Brain like a sieve these days...

Matthew wrote: "Here's some new data..."

That hydrogen thing is pretty cool :-) We've built the 'kiddie' fuel cells for science experiments, but it's not house-generator ready by any means.

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Jemima wrote: "But it didn't work..."

I remember reading about that, but little by little they're figuring out all sorts of interesting things about the microbes that the earlier experiments missed. We know, in theory, it HAS to work because it, well, it WORKS here on Earth. We're just missing stuff. Limited water is a huge problem here on Cape Cod where I live (we're surrounded by the ocean) so we have a lot of experimentation going on with getting the bad stuff to not go into the water table. I suspect this solving these problems will eventually translate directly into the reasons the early biome experiments failed and long-term space travel.

Anna wrote: "little by little they're figuring out..."

Thank goodness some rich people realise that we have to try things to work out how they really work!

OTOH my favourite cartoon is of the mechanised Earth that has been engineered to do the stuff the natural earth would have done if we hadn't carried on polluting it. Must find that somewhere...

The Story of Stuff?

HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gorq...

No... I haven't found it yet - may have to search my text books or course notes. And I was thinking of throwing them out last week....