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> Ideally, you'd seal a lava tube and put in air and you could live in it with the plants being natural oxygenators. There's a LOT of oxygen on the Moon (basic
by ajuc 2y ago
> Ideally, you'd seal a lava tube and put in air and you could live in it with the plants being natural oxygenators.
There's a LOT of oxygen on the Moon (basically in every rock). There's effectively no carbon. If you want to grow plants there - you need to take carbon with you (probably in the form of coal you'll burn once there to generate the CO2 needed for plants).
1 person eats about 1000 kg of food per year, which is about 500 kg of carbon. If you grow plants in a yearly cycle you need to sent half a ton of coal for every colonist. The ones born on the Moon too.
- Filligree 2y agoHow hard would it be to find and de-orbit a carbonaceous asteroid or two?
- projektfu 2y agoThose humans are also producing CO2 so it will have some self-sustainability. The 5% CO2 of human breath is a lot more than the ~0.04% in the atmosphere. I have no idea how to calculate the steady state or what the losses would be.
- imtringued 2y agoThis sounds very off. Dried rice is 400 kcal per 100g. That is 500g of uncooked rice per day or 180kg of uncooked rice. What you are counting as "food" is the cooking water being absorbed into it.