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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you define "technical problem" if you ignore the cost of the inputs to your system?
Is this a distinction without a difference, or am I missing something?
I remember there was a fictional advertisement for such a product in a sci-fi story, but not exactly where.
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl
The artificial food was called CHON.
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.
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.
I don’t think there are enough current or future vegans in the world to negate anything at all.
Nah, you can never be 100% sure, its one of those situations reachable only on paper.
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 been vegan 25 years and would be happy to silence the “but what about plants” people once and for all.
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals -- I'm one because I hate plants.
As a human being, if you avoid eating plants, or things that eat plants, you die.
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.
Edit: had the wrong Sterling book.
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.
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.
There are neither enough aeons (10-20 billion years of universe), nor enough living creatures for that.
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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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A rabbit probably ate a lot of carrots, you are better off eating just the carrot directly if you want to reduce the killing :-)
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Some have indeed wondered about plant rights. There is even a vegetable rights protest song, "Carrot Juice is Murder" [1].
And a playthrough I enjoyed watching: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqiMv9sOILsrYve0aG200HTQV...
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.
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!
> 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.
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...
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.
You see where this is going.
You need only minimal new inputs and the rest can be recycled.
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 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.
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
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
"...and they wield GREY GOO that turns *everything* it touches into nutrients they lap up in their flappy appendages..."
> 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 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").
that's my 'retirement project'
https://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-ye...
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
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.
Even these orders of magnitude are correct, this is still 14t-438t of material to process /per day/ just for one person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
10 to 500 tons per person per day.
I have no idea why the measurement unities even make sense.
Same with leading numbers, e.g. "10 Ways to Do X" automatically becomes "Ways to Do X".
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!
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?
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.
Bring low mass items: seed and bacteria.
Mine high mass items: dirt and water.
Concentrate sunlight
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.
How did you comet o that conclusion?
And a hungry mouth will approach: "please sir, armageddon some more?"
And then use that to buy $80 trillion dollar cheeseburgers at McD's!
