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The Last Egg
- focusedone 3y agoFantastic blog on infrastructure at the bottom of the world from the perspective of an IT guy. Super cool stuff!
- beefman 3y agoNovember?! How hard could it be to supply the station with fresh food once a month?
- david2ndaccount 3y agoSee one of their previous posts: <https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out>
- idlewords 3y agoIt's really hard! Reasons include: - Ambient temperatures too low for most fuels and lubricants, and out of spec for most other parts of the aircraft - No hope of rescue if the plane goes down or gets lost - No reliable way to light the runway. In the past they've used gasoline filled drums, but it can get so cold that the gasoline vapor pressure is too low and it won't light. - Extreme isolation—there's really nowhere a flight can divert to south of New Zealand apart from McMurdo, which has its own problems Remember that the South Pole station is just a small structure on top of a featureless high plateau. There are no paved runways, navigational aids, no heated hangars, no infrastructure of any kind to support aircraft arriving in the dead of night. The risk has been worth taking for urgent medevac flights, but no one is going to gamble with aircrews' lives over a bunch of eggs.
- PettingRabbits 3y agoI wonder if a one-way UAV cargo plane could make the trip. Might not be worth it for eggs, but maybe something more important.
- bacon_waffle 3y agoPlanes like C17 can overfly and airdrop stuff. https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/up-on-the-roof/ https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/up-on-the-...
- lmm 3y agoIt's not hard, just expensive. Airdropping supplies through winter was routine until it was cut for budgetary reasons.
- wpietri 3y agoI find that a weird comment when he just explained why it was hard.
- idlewords 3y agoAt the South Pole? A 2011 midwinter airdrop of emergency medical supplies was treated as a big deal; when did it become routine?
- lmm 3y agoIt was routine up until IIRC 1996-1999 (which lines up with when they switched over from Navy to National Guard operation).
- jitl 3y agoI wonder how much trouble keeping chickens in the greenhouse would be. I feel like some partially agua culture setup that’s closed loop and consumes the compost could work well, but is probably too expensive in terms of heated square footage to make sense.
- gnfargbl 3y agoI'd be concerned about the health risks. Poultry can spread a few nasty bacterial diseases to humans, and in a closed and isolated environment like this contagion is surely something to be strenuously avoided.
- tantalor 3y agoSure but these chickens would be isolated from the outside world, like a lab setting, so how would they come in contact with something that could harm humans?
- kleer001 3y agoOh, like raised from the egg kind of situation? I think there still an issue of cross contamination with things that don't grow on humans or objects, but love chickens in the air or incidental dusts.
- saulpw 3y agoclassic paper from 1973: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3862013 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3862013 "An Outbreak of Common Colds at an Antarctic Base after Seventeen Weeks of Complete Isolation" There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- jwilk 3y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ has the full text.
- 3y ago
- karaterobot 3y agoI want to know who got that egg, and how they decided. Egg lottery?
- LeonenTheDK 3y agoAlways love when this blog is posted. Seeing the day-to-day in one of the least mundane places humans exist is a special kind of interesting.
- echelon 3y agoIt's such a special treat! I really love it.
- jcranmer 3y agoThe author has the same curiosity I have in how the mundane is provided, in perhaps the least hospitable inhabited place on the planet.
- mfragin 3y agoI see these and I say "oh yeah, that Antarctica blog that I tell everyone about." I have always loved reading about people who live in extreme environments. It's also a great topic in science fiction. Not sure how to explain my attraction to these stories, but as someone who lived for many years in the San Luis Valley ( https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149599/san-luis-valley https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149599/san-luis-val... ) it's easy to relate.
- sixstringtheory 3y agoI spent a year in the SLV, what a cool place! Great rock climbing, mountain climbing, skiing, biking, at such high elevation. The deer everywhere. Gorgeous weather (usually). Cool junk yards. Some great gems hidden away… Definitely want to spend more time there.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoWeird they don't stock UHT milk. I buy milk for 6 months and keep it in my pantry. I honestly can't tell the difference between modern UHT milk and mass-produced "fresh" milk (at 2% anyway). They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. It would be fun to make your own cheese down there as a hobby! Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting, I think. It forces you to expand your gastronomic horizons, explore the cuisine of different regional cultures. Some cultures don't use milk (and thus cheese or butter), some don't use much oil, some are vegetarian while some are nearly all meat. There's preservation by fermentation, by drying, by salting, by burying, by sealing in hardened butter. Some just eat a lot of soup. There's really an infinite number of dishes that express flavor, aroma and texture. If you ever get bored of your food, you can fix that.
- jcranmer 3y ago> They could in theory ship in UHT milk instead of fresh, and stock enough extra to last a few more months in winter. From a prior post [1], the no-flight period for the South pole is ~8 months, which really stretches the shelf life of UHT milk. [1] https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out https://brr.fyi/posts/last-flight-out
- ComputerGuru 3y agoIf you ignore the "best by" label on UHT milk, it can easily (safely) last 8 months. Especially if you store it at 32/33° F. But more practically, there are different types of containers for UHT milk hermetically sealed to different extents. The more expensive kinds can last years. The US Military says 10 months for "normal" UHT milk stored under "normal" conditions [0]. The more expensive kinds can go much longer. [0]: https://www.dla.mil/Troop-Support/Subsistence/Operational-rations/UHT/ https://www.dla.mil/Troop-Support/Subsistence/Operational-ra...
- thewopr 3y agoI'll also add, most food products down there are "expired" already. When I was down there, it was often a challenge to find the oldest piece of food. I think we found 5 years + beyond the Best By date. Best by dates for shelf stable/frozen food are often not safety related, so the antarctic program just charges forward with whatever they have.
- everyone 3y agoI thought the link was gonna be this... https://egggame.org/ https://egggame.org/
- wizpig64 3y agoI was not expecting the last egg to look like that.
- cubefox 3y agoI like the blog being called "brr".
- JohnMakin 3y agoAnd people think we're gonna colonize mars. We can't even colonize the south pole, a much more hospitable environment.
- tekla 3y agoThe south pole IS colonized. There is literally a colony there since 1956
- idlewords 3y agoA colony implies sustained long-term habitation by the same people; that's not true for the South Pole station, which is a research facility where people rotate out. As far as I know, the only country to try colonizing Antarctica proper has been Argentina, with a small number of families settling at Esperanza Base (at the north end of the Antarctic Penninsula) and a big fuss made about the first kids born on the Antarctic mainland. Chile maintains a little civilian settlement called Villa Las Estrellas on an offshore Antarctic island with similar motives as the Argentines. Everyone else just ignores this embarrassing rivalry.
- dredmorbius 3y agoChecking via Wikipedia, the entire population of the continent (not just ASSPS) is 4,000, in the summer. It drops to about 1,000 in winter. As you note, there've been several births (Wikipedia states 11), with those listed being Argentine. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Antarctica>
- gumby 3y agoI interpret the OP's use of the term "colonize" to mean "permanently relocate to"
- mkaic 3y agoI'd argue that we absolutely could colonize the south pole if people were as excited about it as we are about colonizing Mars. I think it's less that we "can't" and more that governments don't really care about it as much.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoThat second greenhouse picture is a nightmare! If it were anywhere else on the planet, I'd say someone needs to trim the tomatoes and give them some breathing room to avoid fungal infections but the low humidity and the carefully cultured environment probably take care of that.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThat tomato plant looks like something out of a pulp-era comic book - It Came From The Greenhouse!
- sixstringtheory 3y agoI remember when I first learned about pruning. Tomato plants were way more organized after that! Before that I was optimizing for growing as much and as fast as possible. It’s fun but it’s a mess.
- tantalor 3y agoWhat about penguin eggs?
- jefftk 3y agoThis is the south pole, near the center of the continent. Penguins are coastal.
- pimlottc 3y agoThe penguins are also protected. You’re generally not even supposed to touch them, let alone eat them.
- jefftk 3y agoThat's also a reason, but the closest penguin being 500+ miles away through the Antarctic winter seems like a much larger barrier.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoDoes eating an egg count as eating a penguin?
- wahahah 3y agoLet's not get all political here
- resolutebat 3y agoI don't think even the most rabid pro-choicer would consider an unfertilized egg alive.
- pimlottc 3y agoLet's not get all philosophical here
- AlbertCory 3y agoThere was a Googler who spent some time at the South Pole station and gave a talk about it. I won't name him here, but maybe he's reading this? What I recall was him walking around and over the actual Pole and trying to get his GPS to register 90.0 degrees. It wouldn't go beyond 89.999.
- system2 3y agoWhy wouldn't you name him here?
- AlbertCory 3y agoWhy do you care?
- shepherdjerred 3y agoWell, I personally would be interested to see the talk/learn more about those in tech who have gone to the pole.
- AlbertCory 3y agowell, since someone else named him (and btw, I just thought it was rude, that's all): I think this is the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 3y agoGlad you're being conscencious but why would it be rude to name somebody who wants to share their amazing experience? In fact, I think in today's world or would be rude not to promote their name and story link to their video.
- 3y ago
- yboris 3y agoMicro-related: A Place Further than the Universe - a lovely anime about four high school girls going to Antarctica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_Further_than_the_Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_Further_than_the_Unive...
- davidhaymond 3y agoOne of my favorite anime series! It is one of my top recommendations for newcomers to anime. I'm looking forward to the long-overdue Blu-ray release in North America by Anime Limited.
- geuis 3y agoThanks for recommending this. It's on crunchyroll and I just started watching. Couple episodes in and loving it.
- bombcar 3y agovarious places say you can keep unwashed eggs in a fridge for up to six months: https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-long-do-farm-fresh-eggs-last/ https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-long-do-farm-fresh-eggs-l... > Unwashed farm fresh eggs last for two weeks to a month at room temperature. After that, you must store them in the fridge. If you refrigerate freshly laid eggs, they should last for three to six months in an airtight container. However, Americans have an obsession with washing eggs, which makes them not last as long. I wonder if they could get permission to have unwashed eggs.
- proto_lambda 3y agoThe last flight was 4 months ago, a washed egg probably wouldn't have survived this long.
- goda90 3y agoUnwashed eggs can also be stored in a water-lime solution for potentially years. It's called water glassing.They might not taste as good as fresh eggs, but like for an omelet with flavorings, you probably wouldn't notice, and you definitely wouldn't notice for baking, but I guess there are powdered eggs for that.
- Symbiote 3y agoIt would be interesting to know where the supplies come from -- do the American ship everything halfway across the world from the USA, or buy things from New Zealand?
- bizzyb 3y agoboth. (for mcmurdo/south pole) most of the dry/canned/frozen food is procured in the USA and loaded on a vessel in port hueneme for the once a year resupply vessel. "freshies" are ordered from new zealand and flown down on available flights.
- dottedmag 3y agoThis expedition gives us a peek at the future life of habitats outside of Earth. It makes one very thankful for the planetary environment we live in.
- 3m 3y agoThere's something comical about having freezers in Antartica, even when you understand the reason why they are there.
- progbits 3y agoTechnically they are warmers :)
- bacon_waffle 3y agoThe freezers are in the heated main station, however since the "waste heat" from the generators is put to use it's not as inefficient a system as one might assume. The comical part of the food storage situation is that the station was basically built without anywhere near enough of it. The main "dry store" is in a room on a different level from the kitchen, labelled "Science Storage", and most of the near-to-hand frozen stuff is on an outside loading deck near the galley.
- progbits 3y agoI have no insights beyond what I read in the OP, but my point was that those freezers are actually warmer than outside. So "anywhere near enough" might in fact be enough if you can store deep-frozen things outside on the loading deck. You only need enough freezer capacity to "warm up" the outside stuff to normal freezer temperatures (the article mentions this). This only depends on the warm up time, and number of people / consumption rate. Mission duration only impacts how much outdoor space is used.
- bacon_waffle 3y agoMy observation is based on spending over a year in that station, and being close with someone who was a chef there. It really isn't as simple as those "only" statements. There are other uses for freezers than warming stuff up to normal freezer temperature. The on-station food storage situation is a real hack. Shoveling snow off boxes of food in your too-small outdoor deep-freeze doesn't need to be part of the chef's job. Reading red printing on those cardboard boxes, is rather difficult under the red light that tends to be preferred outside in winter.
- bpodgursky 3y agoImagine how many fresh vegetables they could have with a miniaturized nuclear reactor on-site! The limit right now is how much diesel they want to waste. Imagine the alternatives!
- marssaxman 3y agoNo need to imagine; it's been tried - McMurdo installed a nuclear power plant back in 1962. The reactor proved to be expensive and unreliable, so the Navy removed it a decade later. Cleaning up the mess took another seven years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThat’s annoying. It’s the perfect place for a reactor. Infinite heat and running water would make a real difference.
- muhammadusman 3y agoThis is the sort of content that makes the internet so amazing, someone sharing a slice of life from so far away and so remote that 100 years ago this would've been unimaginable!
- droopyEyelids 3y agoHow do people deal with zero humidity? Does everyone use a CPAP to sleep?
- teh_klev 3y agoI'm fairly certain the air will be conditioned and inside humidity kept to an acceptable standard.
- wpietri 3y agoFrom the article: "The greenhouse is a volunteer affair, and it yields enough for herbs and the occasional salad! It’s also the only place on station with humidity! Since the rest of the station has near-zero humidity, it’s a treat to spend time in here."
- teh_klev 3y agoI'd have to question what "near-zero" actually means. I don't doubt that outside the humidity is super low, but inside I have my doubts. Super low humidity increases the risk of ESD which wouldn't be fantastic for any electronics. You'd need to walk around with a grounding strap all day otherwise you'll be zapping every bit of metal you encounter. I worked in a newly built data centre where the air conditioning (not the chillers) wasn't tuned quite right and the humidity dropped so low that we were being zapped left right and centre. So I'd love to see the actual figure they're using as "near-zero".
- dredmorbius 3y agoAmong other factors: humidity, even at modest levels, means frost and ice accumulation in any spaces with a thermal gradient. Given that there's a roughly 150F / 85C temperature differential from the inside (assuming ~70F / 20C interior temperature, and -70F / -55C exterior), and that it never thaws, this means frost/ice accumulation is probably a major structural hazard. Even if it was possible to humidify interior spaces, it might be avoided for that reason. (I'm of course speculating, though based on discussion of PassivHaus designs in Fairbanks Alaska and the attention paid to moisture, vapour barriers, and frost accumulation, as well as an earlier article I believe linked to HN showing the cold food storage at ASSPS which included massive amounts of accumulated frost, and that I suspect just from moisture contributed by the breathing of occupants / workers within the cold (ambient) storage structure.)
- poulsbohemian 3y agoI'm surprised the greenhouse isn't larger and/or there isn't significant research there about growing under man-made conditions. I would think for example NASA might be able to use it as a research center while also benefitting the diets of the rest of the researchers there.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoWouldn't a larger greenhouse require more power and therefore more fuel for the generators? I would figure that's a major reason why. I was wonder why they don't have chickens somewhere so that they can have fresh eggs/meat/etc. It could potentially be a good way to re-use food scraps, although I'm sure they're already doing something useful with those.
- teh_klev 3y ago> I was wonder why they don't have chickens somewhere It's probably a bio security thing. If these chickens escape into the wild there's the risk of infecting the local bird life with new diseases or viruses that the local population have no defences against.
- cwkoss 3y agoIf the chickens escaped, wouldn't they be frozen solid in minutes and effectively biologically inert?
- ceejayoz 3y agoYou'd be OK at the pole, but somewhere like McMurdo? It's often mild enough for a chicken to survive in the summer for a while, certainly long enough to interact with local wildlife. Plus, scavengers would still be an issue with dead birds.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago[dead]
- krupan 3y agoI learned that powdered milk makes perfectly fine yogurt and after that keeping some as emergency storage hasn't seemed so depressing
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- Annebananne 3y agoWhat a cool blog!
- quickthrower2 3y agoFresh milk can be frozen but I think it is only good for 6 months. And it has low calorific density so probably not ideal for (the south pole I am guessing?)
- bandrami 3y agoI remember reading that the range of nuclear subs isn't limited by air or water or power (obviously) but by the need to restock fresh food.
- xupybd 3y agoI was going to suggest they do what they did in Vietnam when the couldn't get milk for coffee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_coffee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_coffee But then I remembered I'm reading an article about the last egg getting used up.
- zerobrainwash 3y agoDoes anyone know how to get a foot in the door for jobs in places like this? Not necessarily Antarctica, could be Greenland or other remote, harsh places. I am a regular software engineer from the EU, would be over the moon to pursue something like this
- detaro 3y agoLong-term stays is going to be a lot harder than shorter visits. Need/option for such travel tends to be explicitly called out in job descriptions by scientific agencies/institutes running such things. If you're not at it from a scientific angle, expect it to be technician roles (and thus adjust year salary expectations accordingly)
- zerobrainwash 3y agoWhat about short-term stays? Is it usually only as a visitor, or there might be volunteering opportunities?
- Paul_S 3y agoWhy can't they keep chicken??? Chicken need water and layers pellets (which store fine). You get fresh eggs every day and free manure to use in your greenhouse! I really don't understand why they don't do it.
- ciabattabread 3y agoWell, there's bird flu...
- jollyllama 3y agoInteresting idea but there might be some issues. I think this would dramatically increase ventilation needs. How many people are on base? Remember, you're not even getting 1 egg per chicken per day. At that point, you're in the chicken farming business, not the science base business. Also, how long would the chickens last with zero exposure to natural sunlight and cramped conditions? It could be hard on them.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThat’s literally what a factory farm is so there’s no issue with that.
- jollyllama 3y agoThere's no other factory farms in Antarctica that I'm aware of, I think it's exponentially more difficult to establish and conduct such an operation there is my point.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThis is what it will be like in a mars colony. I hope I get to visit and experience that one day.
- silexia 3y agoThey could easily have a few chickens running around in a small area and have fresh eggs year round. Feed the chickens table scraps plus free choice chicken feed. Gets rid of a lot of the waste.
- arendtio 3y agoIt feels to me like all the described problems should be something we will encounter in space. If we want to grow beyond this planet, isn't that a good motivation to solve them down here?