Am I the only one thinking that Elon should already be testing some beta Mars habitats on Earth by now? Why aren't we seeing more Biosphere-style experiments?
I once created a system of vertical and hydroponics build for underground ‘farms’ to grow food on Mars for a ‘Crops on Mars’ hackathon.
The key feature would be an inflatable ‘mattress’ on the surface above that will freeze and thaw.
I still think that it will be useful for underground farms on earth. I was really thinking of ‘hostile environments’ rather than growing on Mars.
Powering my underground Mars farm was a challenge but I sorted that out with a nuclear battery. Whatever. Shouldn’t be a problem for earth tunnel farms.
HST: I think if we are to colonize space and start living out there, we could convert earth into a ‘garden of Eden’ ..a work in progress, as it were..with a skeleton farming team tending and supplying food to the space earthlings.
Or if we are to colonies a planet, it would be in the form of a cluster of sealed habitats or environments. And each habitat will be vacated as it regenerates ...in a way, a kind of progression of seasonal changes. Only..on earth, the seasons change. Up there, we will simply move to a seasonal module. This way, we can regenerate and deal with waste/recyclables etc.
This was almost three years ago. I only went to see what’s new out there..was curious about vertical and hydronics tech.. and also there were people from nasa and ibm..so it was interesting to check out the available tools.
There is definitely more scope for automation and robotics and AI with indoor Ag and can be implemented easily compared to traditional Ag. I think I have some PowerPoint version of it somewhere. I will have to look for it. Soil Ag and robotics is my area..not indoor Ag.
Same. Former Biodynamic farmer (horticulture) and did a stint at the MDRS, I was asked by the director to come back as an Executive Officer under her for another mission with more focus on the Green Hab.
If you can find that PP and repost I'd definitely check it out.
Are you working on anything right now in robotics with automating Ag? One of the things that I think we've seen during COVID is the mass acceleration of automated processes in many fields, but I haven't seen as many in Ag then prior to this--mainly in harvesting, weeding but as you know maintenance, pest control and irrigation play a much bigger part in day to day operations and was wondering what has been done in that regard.
I wonder if there is anything for those of us with backgrounds in Ag and tech to do something at places like Biosphere 2 or at the Eden Project.
I've had to go back to Supply Chain since COVID derailed my plans to go to SpaceX and then hopefully come back and work at a more mature Squared Roots if it had a focus on Mars food production, but I definitely like to see something like that happen and maybe even get involved if I'm still useful.
I am working on small acreage automation and robotics with the stated goal of swarming cobots and pairing them with farmers who work no more than 20 hours/week. Small acreage = 100 acre hubs with 20-25 swarming cobots.
I am skeptical about growing Terra produce in space and even about us consuming them out in space. How do we even digest food in space? I want to know more about that. I want to know what happens to our internal organs. How we age and how we process calories etc.
We are likely better off 3D printing our food and nutrients and calories in space. And some significant space ready body modifications would be required.
Having said that..keeping it technical..I am more interested in growing food in hostile environments here on earth. Or Mars like environments here on earth for wool gathering purposes.
Eventually some produce like lettuce and strawberries will be exclusively grown indoors. But forests and orchards and creating eco systems ..and soil food web is more important. And we need tech to assist us with that to regenerate our earth systems. As we automate them for earth, many of them can be tweaked or exported for space environments. Maybe.
Growing for Mars or space pushes my imagination and many good things have come from that. My email is my hn handle at gmail. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat further.
There are many problems that will have to be solved to have viable Martian habitats, and a lot of those can just as well be solved by someone else. It could be that maintaining a self-sufficient and productive ecosystem outside of Earth's atmosphere is a harder problem than building a reusable rocket, but it's also research that has fewer obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to contribute.
I do think that after many decades of Mars being sort of within reach but just impractically expensive to go there, now that it's almost time to start packing our bags we're not really prepared. Maybe SpaceX (or Tesla with their solar panels and batteries and EVs) will fill some of that gap, but it makes sense for them to put most of their focus on what they're best at.
Not sure why we don't have more non-Elon-associated organizations doing closed ecosystem testing, but I don't follow space-related news that closely and maybe it's already happening in ways that aren't highly visible like Biosphere-2 was.
> There are many problems that will have to be solved to have viable Martian habitats, and a lot of those can just as well be solved by someone else.
Someone else? Who? Governments aren't seriously working on this problem, and there's no money in it for the private sector.
Vertical farms growing organic lettuce and arugula in warehouses are not solving this problem, by the way. They are solving a much simpler, much less interesting problem.
My understanding was that Elon was interested in providing the bus service (so to speak) of getting people and cargo there. Less interested in the colony building aspect? But, I believe The Boring Company tunneling machine will fit inside a launch vehicle and the Tesla truck will function on extraterrestrial world's with a pressurized cabin so I could be completely mistaken.
He's focused on the critical path to colonizing mars. If an sustainable ecosystem becomes the critical path, he'll focus on it. There's so much else that is more important now though, and funding is limited.
Nobody is going to fund it after sustainable transport to Mars is feasible, either. Because there is no path from 'spend billions of dollars on this' to 'make your investment back'.
Which is why IMHO the next logical step is to establish orbital autonomous manufacturing. There’s no way an experimental artificial habitats can be built on Earth by manual labor let alone launched by chemical rockets.
Note that manufacturing anything useful to our technological society currently requires a supply chain of tens of thousands of factories, worked by millions of people, requiring mountains of input ingredients, and producing mountains of waste.
Doing that in orbit would be quite a trick, even if you didn't restrict yourself to only being able to use found-in-orbit resources.
Aren't Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both interested in this and their combined wealth around $200Billion? Seems like they have plenty of money to throw at this company even without outside investors/governments.
> Why aren't we seeing more Biosphere-style experiments?
There's plenty of fundamental research going on. There are BIOS-3 and Yuegong-1 based on it (AFAIK probably the most successful ones in terms of closing the loop), also MELiSSA, CESRF, and many other labs.
