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I don't see what is so absurd about this. If we are growing crops on the moon we are going to add water and air. The success here means we wouldn't have to lu
by jandrese 5y ago
I don't see what is so absurd about this. If we are growing crops on the moon we are going to add water and air. The success here means we wouldn't have to lug tons of soil to the moon in order to grow crops, we can use the available regolith as a base.
Granted, it's not something I expect to come up in my lifetime, but research doesn't have to be immediately practical.
- chitowneats 5y agoExactly. We've all been there: "It's just a one line change. I know I didn't really test it, but it's bloody obvious that it's going to work..." Redoing a moon landing mission is a bit more expensive than a short outage at a SaaS company.
- interestica 5y agoAnd there will be lots of humanure to augment it all that they can produce on site. In fact it may become a scarce resource.
- oneoff786 5y agoThere’s not really any reason to grow crops on the moon though. A lunar base could be useful but never a self sufficient settlement of any sort. The moon cannot support a real atmosphere.
- toast0 5y agoMoonberries could be tasty? Some form of agriculture could improve morale on a base; fresh food is nice. Possibly helpful for processing waste (although bag it and ignore it seems pretty viable too).
- oneoff786 4y agoMoon dust is extremely dangerous. The taste would likely be just a function of nutrients. Seems like it would be a big risk. The ISS and subs do just fine without growing food.
- tshaddox 5y agoGrowing crops on the moon wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with being self-sufficient, right? Wouldn’t it just be a straightforward matter of whether sending the water and nutrients to grow crops would be cheaper than sending food grown on Earth?
- oneoff786 4y agoIt will be orders of magnitude cheaper to send food from earth. Growing crops requires time, water, nutrients, warmth sunlight, labor, and a lot space. I would wager that last one is the biggest issue but the others are non trivial. A starship heavy launch filled with food is ~$10M and is wayyy overkill.
- a_t48 5y agoCouldn’t the CO2 be turned back into O2 + C? Understandably the tech to do so efficiently might not exist right now, but from a materials perspective I don’t see why not, with enough recycling. (Putting aside that Earth would still have to supply spare parts and some smaller amount of materials)
- popcube 5y agothis will prove that at least environment modifying can work
- oneoff786 4y agoIf you mean terraforming the moon, that won’t work. This is only for indoors experiments.