"but there are substantial areas of future work."
Well, yes.
Most plant mass comes from air and water, not the ground. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen all come from the atmosphere. This is why farms don't dig themselves into the ground. If air and water can be made from asteroids, that's most of the raw materials problem by quantity. Hydroponics already works.
Direct synthesis of food from hydrocarbons has never really caught on, although it's been done experimentally and is an area of active research.[1] DARPA has a project.[2] "To address vulnerabilities in food supply chains across a variety of operational and humanitarian scenarios, Cornucopia will demonstrate the capacity to produce all four human dietary macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fat, and dietary fiber) in ratios that target Military Dietary Reference Intake (MDRI) daily requirements for complete nutrition. Outputs will be in multiple food formats (e.g., shake, bar, gel, jerky) that meet military nutritional standards and palatability requirements in a system minimizing inputs, handling, and footprint."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09242...
Plants feed on oxidized compounds, i.e. water, carbon dioxide and dinitrogen, plus solar energy. Because carbon dioxide and dinitrogen are very volatile they must be taken from atmosphere.
Reduced organic compounds, like hydrocarbons, are not food for plants, but for fungi or similar organisms, which, like humans, need only dioxygen from the atmosphere.
There already are genetically-modified fungi that can produce the complete proteins required by humans (i.e. whey proteins or egg-white proteins) when fed with cheap carbohydrates and ammonia or a simple amino-acid. There are also fungi that can feed on hydrocarbons.
Creating genetically-modified fungi able to feed on hydrocarbons and produce glucose and proteins for human consumption is not far from the already existing technology. With a serious effort in this direction, this could be solved in a decade or so. The glucose and proteins produced by fungi would be used not only for direct consumption, but also for feeding other microbial cultures that are needed for producing vitamins and essential fatty acids, using the techniques that are already in use today for this purpose.
Do plants take nitrogen from the atmosphere? There's plenty of it available, but my understanding was that molecular nitrogen likes being molecular nitrogen and is difficult to react into a useful form.
If plants took nitrogen from the atmosphere, there would be no issue of fixing nitrogen in the ground. But instead, that's a huge issue. We also provide nitrogen fertilizer, which is another way of getting it into the ground. Why would we do that?
And similarly, I was pretty sure that most plants got their hydrogen and oxygen from water, which they draw out of the ground with special, purpose-dedicated organs called "roots". Their stylized interaction with the air is carbon dioxide in, molecular oxygen out. That's a source of carbon and maybe a little oxygen. The atmosphere doesn't even contain any significant amount of hydrogen.
Plants in the strictest sense, i.e. the terrestrial descendants of green algae, or even in some wider senses, e.g. all green plants or all eukaryotes that have chloroplasts whose origin is in a primary symbiosis or even all eukaryotes with chloroplasts, cannot take nitrogen from the atmosphere by themselves.
Nevertheless, some plants have symbionts that are various kinds of bacteria and which can take nitrogen from the air. The most important of these plants are the legumes, i.e. beans, peas, lentils and all their close relatives.
The ancestor of the chloroplasts, which are the parts of the plant cells that capture the solar energy, were free-living blue-green algae a.k.a. cyanobacteria, which had been able to take nitrogen from the atmosphere for billions of years.
However during the integration of the chloroplasts into the nucleate cells of the plants, when they have lost their ability to live independently, the chloroplasts have been simplified and among the lost features was the ability to take nitrogen from air. Thus the plants do not have this ability and they have remained dependent for nitrogen on bacteria that either live independently or in symbiosis with plants.
Before humans have started to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia, for fertilizers and other applications, all organic nitrogen came ultimately also from the air, through the blue-green algae or through other kinds of bacteria.
The nitrogen content of natural rocks is negligible. All the rocks with nitrogen, e.g. saltpeter, come from the decomposition of bodies or excretions of living beings.
In all planets that are not cold enough for ammonia to become a liquid or an ice, the nitrogen is almost entirely in the atmosphere.
> The nitrogen content of natural rocks is negligible. All the rocks with nitrogen, e.g. saltpeter, come from the decomposition of bodies or excretions of living beings.
That's fair, but it seems similar to noting that the oxygen content of natural air is negligible. It's not really relevant to where things get their oxygen/nitrogen.
The plants certainly don't. However there are certain plants that symbiotically harbor nitrogen fixating bacteria. Most notably legumes and the rhizobia bacteria that live inside root nodules. Common legume plants are alfalfa, peanuts, lentils, chickpeas, and bean species.
> Because carbon dioxide and dinitrogen are very volatile they must be taken from atmosphere.
I don't follow the logic. These two ideas are definitely compatible - oxygen is very volatile, and it's present in significant quantities in the atmosphere, and therefore can be (and is) taken from the atmosphere.
But they seem to me to be in tension rather than supporting each other. Oxygen is present in the atmosphere, but _because_ it is very volatile, it's constantly reacting with stuff on the ground, which is a process that tends to eliminate it from the atmosphere. What's the reasoning that suggests that the volatility of carbon dioxide means it has to be taken from the atmosphere?
> Hydroponics already works.
I read something on wired last year on why urban vertical farming never really took off, and one of the reasons was, if I remember, that these kind of environments increase the likelihood of plant disease and the density makes it difficult to arrest any spread.
So, I'm not too sure that hydroponics at scale is completely solved.
The big reason is growing food in wide open fields is almost always more economical. Urban farming is mostly advocated for by people who spend too much time in urban areas and don't have a solid grasp on the scale of the rest of the world.
> The big reason is growing food in wide open fields is almost always more economical. Urban farming is mostly advocated for by people who spend too much time in urban areas and don't have a solid grasp on the scale of the rest of the world.
While I agree on your conclusion, your reasoning is not entirely correct; urban farming is a byproduct, at east in MI, of a broken food chain wherein people left in the wake of financial disaster (2008) were left to fend for themselves and had to 'return to the land' while still being forced to stay close-by in order to just survive. Detroit was a food desert, the local, state and Federal government did nothing and corporate interests di-vested mainly from any real healthy options or grocery stores, what was left was what plagues the modern American diet (highly processed junk) and when the people of Detroit realized the help was never coming they took it upon themselves to create what has become the largest urban farming operation in the US.
Again, your conclusion may be correct, these people could not leave Detroit mainly for ecnomic reasons and were therefore 'Urbanites,' but rest assure this was not a hobby-farm approach they took, but rather the sullen and resentful resignation that they must feed themselves: what has since occurred has been amazing to watch, many chefs and artists returned back to Detroit and have made it an impact in self-organization and food security circles.
If I had more time I'd also make an argument for why the economies of scale tend to favor open field farming, but isn't that much better due to the vast needs of Govt. subsidies and the ever diminishing returns on investment when it comes to farming, conventional or organic, or in my case when I farmed: biodynamic.
You need only look to US/European farmers following the path of their Indian counterparts in mass suicides due to the unrelenting pressures and high debt loads in order to feed the masses.
Personally speaking, I think a huge missed opportunity was lost when many of the disillusioned in both West/East took to lying flat or quiet quitting etc... what should have been done was incentivize these people with low no interest loans and give them swaths of land to find purpose in regenerative Agriculture in order to remediate the soils and help offset climate control. Instead they just got chopped up in the meat grinder that is the depressing work force where they wallow in depression and suicidal ideation benefiting no one and making society more precarious day by day by making them gravitate towards extremism.
It's a price problem, not a technical one
More directly it is energy/electricity, which is the reason the cost is high.
You need atleast 35 watts per square foot of high quality grow LEDs to grow most crops outside of leafy greens. That is about 1.5 million watts per acre for 12-16 hours per day, which makes it pretty obvious why it isn't economical. And even if we could meet the theoretical efficiency limit of LED lighting technology, it would still take atleast half of that amount of electricity.
That's the big one. With hydroponics, you need to control every factor, if one grows stuff in nature, you get a lot of it for free.
> It's a price problem, not a technical one.
How do you define "technical problem" if you ignore the cost of the inputs to your system?
We can do it but it's an inefficient technology not because we haven't tried but because other methods are too good.
The sun is free, growing lamps aren't.
Hard to beat free energy.
Um. Doesn't technological innovation often make things cheaper?
Is this a distinction without a difference, or am I missing something?
It's a hard ask to make space in high-rises in cities cheaper than farmland.
It is, yeah for sure. No argument there.
I do wonder though... How much cheaper is it really? What if the externalized costs were factored in?
Currently all manner of costs are put onto the environment rather than the producer or consumer: Soil erosion, soil degradation, fertilizer and pesticide runoff, biodiversity losses, greenhouse gas emissions, etc... All of which are huge issues, which we can't keep ignoring like we are.
And even after ignoring all that), most of 'the West' still needs to heavily subsidize farmers to make them competitive with imported crops.
Uhm.
"cheaper than before" usually yes.
But we are talking about different production methods, maybe hydroponics could never be cheaper than growing stuff in dirt because the production method can be optimized only so much.
An "advanced" (different) production methods is not inherently cheaper than a "traditional" method.
Hydroponics usually isn't competing on cost, it's competing on other axes, such as having a greater amount of control. Just the same as greenhouses vs growing in the open. Farming is mostly about dealing with or preventing everything that could go wrong.
Their plan is to use the asteriod material to feed bacterias (it's hidden in the introduction, but explained in the main text). The advantage of using something more complex than air and water is that he bacterias can get energy from it, interad of using light like plants. I guess it's more similar to the method used to cultivate fongus.
---
Anyway, you made me wonder if we can feed plats with sugar instead of light. Can we inject sugar into a potatoe and keep the rest of the potatoe plant happy in a dark place?
Anyway^2, I don't expect plants to be happy with the mix from the asteriods. It's probably some weird combination of small organic molecules. But some bacterias may eat et gladly and produce more usual organic molecules that we can eat.
Variations of that idea definitely work. Light is optional for plants with adequate nutrient uptake from mediums like agar.
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.
> fictional advertisement for such a product in a sci-fi story
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl
The artificial food was called CHON.
veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend. no vegan is ditching transportation or plastic because it may contain by-products of the animal industry... thus if one day we can make food out of minerals, for sure that would be vegan; although i can't see ANY harm done to a fruit tree or a soybean/corn that dries out because of its short life cycle being a 'bad thing' but maybe minerals based food will avoid taking land of native species
> veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend
There is genuine debate around whether plants suffer. The answer seems to be “no,” at least not in a way we’d recognise as suffering. But that ambiguity is more than enough to spawn a movement. Ethically-harvested honey doesn’t harm bees, for instance, and family dairies can blur the line between animal husbandry and petkeeping.
"Ethically" harvested honey means not killing the bees in the process I guess, which is awesome, but there’s still stress induced by removing the food they make and stock for their hives, and the cage around the queen just to be sure she doesn’t go back to the wild. Im not sure how to define ethics anyway but surely I would’t like to be a farm bee, even an ethical one.
Familly diaries also comes with they own sets of abuse forgotten because "they love their cows". At the end it’s always a speechless being exploited to serve the dominant interest.
Sure. I’m not arguing that doesn’t exist. I’m saying it’s tough to argue someone couldn’t argue that plants suffer similarly if the option not to eat them existed.
Those are both sets of animals that are livestock. That is, animals that would not exist without their being kept for use by humans.
Which is just another data point to make the ethics tricky.
> veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend
I don’t think there are enough current or future vegans in the world to negate anything at all.
Bruce Sterling's /Islands in the Net/ has a character that is this kind of vegan (forget what they call it). He finds the idea of agricultural food disgusting and only eats sterile synthetic food.
Edit: had the wrong Sterling book.
I've been vegan since 2002 and would be down to go on a fully synthetic vegan diet. I used to be a heavy consumer of Soylent
Is mined food processed food?
Every* food is processed food the amount of processing varies.
Sure, if you want to be asinine about it. The term 'processed' is probably too broad, same as calling food 'healthy' or 'unhealthy'.
Does that apply to to self-harvested apples and berries, too? Is washing them with water a process which changes their structure and composition of nutrients? Less proteins because of less bugs and worms?
They’re selectively bred for one thing, and they start changing the moment you pick them. Just sitting on your counter changes a piece of fruit. Touching a berry with your finger introduces millions of tiny bioreactors onto its surface, some will go to work breaking cell walls, fermenting, fighting with the local and antecedent microscopic flora, and so on.
Or cooking it, for that matter.
Plus there's the "processing" of an enormous mobile smelter-factory of nanomachines we call the human body. Chop and grind, add peptides, acid-bath, add neutralizing agent, churn with fermentation bacteria...
Yeah, I know, people usually implicitly mean "artificial" processing, but that's often more about who is doing the processing, rather than what kind of process is going on.
Mined food would likely be considered "processed" in some sense, because the raw materials would have to undergo some form of alteration
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.
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.
> "but what about plants"
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals -- I'm one because I hate plants.
Some people do care about the plants though, such as Jainism. If you draw the line at plants - that's fine, but some others do not and are wondering why you arbitrarily drew that line where you did. Sure some may be joking around but its still a legit concern for some.
From what I understand, Jains are lacto-vegetarian [1]. Vegans draw that line further (because they also don't take milk).
As a human being, if you avoid eating plants, or things that eat plants, you die.
Jains don’t eat foods like onions and potatoes. But, so far as I know, this is on account of the bugs that may be harmed when harvesting soil-based plants.
I believe it's also as the onion or potatoe is the entire plant and when you eat it, it's gone. Verses eating a strawberry or Apple does not destroy the plant.
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.
What about the atoms?
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.
like all meat we produce is grass fed... livestock lives out of grains in a high % and if you want to take all meat production to free-roam practices, good luck destroying the entire planet for that
I don't think the aim would be to be able to achieve the same level of production that way :)
glad you answered.
what's your opinion on the dialogue between people producing eggs in battery-cages (those classic confined chickens) vs. free-roam ones? so far the discussion points out to _way_ more disease spread in free ones, leading to more suffering and death, specially when we are doing in a commercial scale. wild animals killing those free roam animals also occurs. so far the science on battery-cages went far as: sizing perfectly the cages so you don't have cases of cannibalism between them because they are stressed, decent ventilation........ red meat is also confined for a lot of months before their death to receive proper treatment to not screw the population that's eating their meat. that's also involves tons and tons of (insectoid murder) grains & please don't forget that free-roam practices, considering the amount of land they use, i wouldn't get surprised that the pesticides/herbicides used on the grass fields prior to cows introduction kills a comparable if not more amount of insects vs. plantae/fungi production
seriously, this insect rights argument is pure bullshit from people trying to justify their holocaust-like-inducing diet
This is such a great response that perfectly reflects the moving of the moral goal posts that deflects the moral culpability. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
> Food using molecules certified never to have been part of any known living organism.
Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature. There’s only a finite supply. And humans have come to monopolise it. We should worry less about killing individual creatures and worry a lot more about wiping out entire species.
>Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature.
There are neither enough aeons (10-20 billion years of universe), nor enough living creatures for that.
>There’s only a finite supply*
Finite supply doesn't mean all possible permutations have happenned. It's also not like an infinitely old universe (and even one like that wouldn't necessarily have permutations of molecule arrangements where thats statement is true).
> Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature.
That contains a very-unproven assumption that other biological life was present prior to the ignition of our Sun and formation of the solar system... Or that there are "living creatures" in solar plasma.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You haven't even read the book, yet it enticed such commentary. Not bad. :)
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.
Well according to biological taxonomy, viruses aren't "life", so the terms "alive" and "dead" don't quite apply to them
> 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 :-)
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...
And then the rabbit pulls the reverse lever, and the trolley is speeding back towards Elmer Fudd.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, my argument isn’t grounded in whether a carrot feels pain — the comparison is to underscore the idea that in each case a living thing is extinguished from the world, and that they’re equivalent contrary to metrics like pain or “more like us”, simply for having experience.
You can also take it in the opposite direction: Primitives don't have control over their own integrated ecological web.
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.
Some creatures are really weird too. Cutting up urchins for uni made me think what is really alive or what animals really are
> 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].
For my Factorio friends out there, this sounds like grounds for a mod that let's you "mine" nutrients in space
This is roughly a thing in Space Age!
Really? Can you make spoilage somehow?
In unmodded Factorio, there is no way to make spoilage and nutrients soley from asteroid mining.
Spoilage is a thing in Factorio now
The space version of this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock
There is one already: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/spaceblock
And a playthrough I enjoyed watching: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqiMv9sOILsrYve0aG200HTQV...
This is straight out of The Heechee Saga! The idea of synthesizing human-edible food from asteroid hydrocarbons is literally what Pohl described with CHON food. Breaking down carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen to create sustenance for ships, stations, even whole planets.
Judging by the study’s data, converting the organic compounds in an asteroid like Bennu could feed thousands of astronauts for decades. Even the lower estimate of 600 astronaut life-years is staggering when you consider how much food we’d otherwise have to launch from Earth (even with SpaceX’s cost reductions, Elon). If we can refine these processes to work efficiently and reliably, which is a very big if, we’re looking at a future where asteroid mining could fuel spaceships AND feed the crew without being tethered to Earth
Reminds me of the CHON factories from the Heechee Saga, by Frederik Pohl.
My brother in _Gateway_ (1977).
Still can't get this series on kindle
There is this thing called "Ocean of PDF" which has all six of them, as either PDF or EPUB. Just a few clicks, no account necessary.
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
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.
But could you use the hydrocarbons on the comet as fuel to change the orbit to a desirable one?
And then once that runs out we will once more turn on each other with the same stoneage instincts and railguns.
Or.
Or we take a brewk. Spend a thousand years fixing what evolution couldnt, turning inward, instead of using up the environment to build ever larger wheel chairs for the sprawling tribal mess.
Maybe that dreams of unchanged infinite growth are a madness in themselves , a madness necessary for now, as we fall apart without surplus. But it cant last forever, either we change or the fever dream burns itself out.
I think you're right.
I also think convincing the rest of the world will be impossible.
Humans will, like any other life form, stretch to the maximum population possible and then collapse.
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.
That's good sci fi, meanwhile we're not even sure a human could live on mars for any extended period of time given it has 1/3rd the gravity and may completely fuck up our internal processes such as vision, blood pumping, maintaining bone density, risks of hernia, &c.
We're talking about solving the n+100 problem while we're not even sure n0 is possible. It's cool to talk about terraforming Mars but we fucked up our 100% human compatible system in 200 years of industrialisation, idk if people realise how completely disconnected from reality they sound
I expect especially resource-limited colonies could eventually use a double hull, with vacuum pumps to actively re-capture leakage.
A standard mechanical vacuum pump can reach 1/1000th of an atmosphere, so in theory this scheme should be able to reduce leak rates to only 1/1000th that of an equivalent single-hull design.
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.
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..."
“They’re Made out of Meat” https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
I could have done just fine without learning about "grey goo" today thank you very much.
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.
I wanted to paste the very same paragraph and bring up my own dream (for which I hope someone is working hard).
I am a Trekkie. I dream of the day that (in the future, unfortunately far beyond my lifespan) someone will create a Replicator[0] and people will be able to order a burger with a side of fries, a large soda drink to wash it down, and it will be full of vitamins and useful nutrients (minus the garbage/sugar) (or any food from any culture on the planet what will give them the flavor but not the diarrhea)("I wonder how a cockroach tastes").
> 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ;-)
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...
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.
This sounds wrong. Firstly, it is generally around -450 degrees F in space (not toward the sun obviously), and to get that asteroid to continuously point toward the sun on one side is probably not gonna happen, and then that "insulated room" built on the asteroid is exorbitantly expensive by itself if it is of any consequential size, and finally, it is impossibly expensive (from energy cost to time cost to equipment cost) to 'mine' that ice from the asteroid. It ain't just sitting out there in cubes... (not to mention there aren't any asteroids hanging out around the Earth anywhere close, so you WILL be far away)
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.
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.
> 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.
Europeans stole so much gold from S America it messed up the economy in China.
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2008/1/7/cngold106bi...
This is a neat chart.
Yet 75% of all gold was mined after 1965, and that chart doesn’t seem to notice.
In space, ices are valuable than gold. But, as part of private financing for a survey of the asteroid belt, Earth should prepare for disruptions to precious metals.
In fact, a disruption from even the whiff of effectively returning a glut of precious metals to Earth. Even a lie about such a mission.
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.
That article states that we don't conclusively know how much the "processing" itself leads to bad health outcomes, versus the nutrient content / hyper-palatability / etc.
But in any case, the situation in space is going to be very different. You'll be eating a highly tuned macro & micro nutrient profile down to the individual calorie. There is no room for junk food or mindless eating. So most of today's problems with processed food will be irrelevant.
Whatever contribution the "processing" plays will eventually be isolated and mitigated with yet further inventions. Yes it's the pinnacle of the scientific reductionism hubris that many people find objectionable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Biomass is recycled. You would only need the replacement rate for losses, which would be nonzero not negligible, but much smaller.
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.
Lisa Simpson: "Look (the boar) is licking the slime off that rock! That's what he's been eating: slime!"
Looks like we'll be sucking rocks before solving climate change, the future is bright!
The title is "How we can mine asteroids for space food" not "We can mine asteroids for space food." This seems like a pretty major difference to me on a site that suggests against editorializing titles.
That's not OP's fault. In spite of the policy saying you should use original titles, HN automatically strips leading words like "How..." or "Why..." from those titles, because the moderators consider such words clickbaity.
Same with leading numbers, e.g. "10 Ways to Do X" automatically becomes "Ways to Do X".
Yes, but without a proper replicator, how does it taste? Burnt toast? Three week old socks? Munster cheese?
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.
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!
I can't decide if this sounds more like a startup idea or a proposal from the coal lobby.
No it couldn't have been, from wikipedia:
> The process required at least 60 kilograms of coal per kilogram of synthetic butter.[23] That industrial process was discontinued after WWII due to its inefficiency.
I was never a fan of margarine, but the more I learn tidbits like this the more I think it strange.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
If Rimworld (the game) is to be believed, people that eat too much nutrisludge will eventually snap and eat the people around them.
> 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.
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.
I for one embrace the brave new world of printed eFood!
Perhaps appliances on your kitchen counter that use electricity and the air (CHON) to product sugar, or protein, or oils, directly and avoiding the whole agricultural, transportation and storage infrastructure. The savings!
Of course our agriculture state economies will collapse - a sort of second 'Dust Bowl'. Perhaps the CHON Bowl?
Perhaps ironically the collapse of agricultural state economies would mean considerably less dust since the fields would recover within a few years after not being over farmed.
...until drought.
Apparently there's an algae bloom (right now?) off Madagascar, sterilizing ocean life in the vicinity. Due to South African drought dust blowing into the ocean.
Buck Rogers sure is alive and well at HN 8-/
Add this to the list including Mars habitation and nucleat fussion, of lease valuable and most expensive ways to piss away money.
But for sci-fi brain damaged kidults, this is so neato!
"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.
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.
"We can have a pie in the sky solution that's not going to happen even in 100 years to very real, very pressing problems, so don't worry too much that we're not doing enough to handle them with the actual practical means we have"
Your tax dollars at work. By the time we're ready to fly to deep space we'll no longer be a protein life form.
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
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.
Asteroids which enter a planet's atmosphere will probably yield even better food, because they will be a little meteor.
My 3 year old used to think the dinosaurs are gone because a meat eater killed them all.
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?"
Title should really be "How we might be able to ..."
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!
