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We can mine asteroids for space food
- api 2y agoThis reminds me of US research that was done during the Cold War about surviving a nuclear winter by producing food products directly from petroleum. It's theoretically possible and you could survive on it as a supplemental source of calories. 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.
- jvanderbot 2y agoI can't think of a single reason we wouldn't just eat algae sludge or synthetic protein mash or something else. Farming is not a space- or weight- optimized process.
- szvsw 2y agoTo be fair, people will still be people… if the sludge/protein mash can be mildly upgraded to diversity/quality comparable to MREs (not that I’ve ever had one) sure, but for long term space flight it seems plausible that the psychological/morale detriments of eating sludge every day (or any single meal for that matter) would be significant.
- stoneman24 2y agoIsn’t there a requirement for lots of fibre in the diet as well as vitamins, protein, carbohydrates and fats. As well as the psychological effect of eating good food and not mush.
- debacle 2y agoIf I'm in a fragile metal bubble in the deep black vastness of space, the texture of my nutrisludge will be the least existential of my worries.
- pixl97 2y agoIf Rimworld (the game) is to be believed, people that eat too much nutrisludge will eventually snap and eat the people around them.
- themaninthedark 2y agoAnd then turn them into hats....don't forget the hats.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> If I'm in a fragile metal bubble in the deep black vastness of space... ... maintaining your mental health is probably a significant concern, which may indeed be surprisingly impacted by the texture of your nutrisludge.
- whycome 2y agoSoluble fiber is broken down partially in the gut by bacteria/fermentation. Lots remains. Insoluble fiber passes through mostly unchanged. You see where this is going. You need only minimal new inputs and the rest can be recycled.
- stoneman24 2y agoTo extend D Rumsfeld there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And now things that we know and wish that we didn’t (ie spaceship recycling)
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- vegetablepotpie 2y agoI’m really curious about this. I did find one 2022 article about producing edible fats from petroleum [1]. 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/S0263876221004275 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02638...
- gibspaulding 2y agoApparently producing margarine from coal was actually done during WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine?wprov=sfti1#Coal_butter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine?wprov=sfti1#Coal_but... https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/brave-new-butter/ 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!
- dylan604 2y agoI was never a fan of margarine, but the more I learn tidbits like this the more I think it strange.
- dialup_sounds 2y agoI can't decide if this sounds more like a startup idea or a proposal from the coal lobby.
- miffy900 2y agoNo it couldn't have been, from wikipedia: > 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.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe British company ICI had a product called Pruteen, which was made by growing bacteria on methanol produced from natural gas as the energy source. It was intended as cattle feed; if people ate it there would be an excess of purines which could lead to gout. 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.
- Symmetry 2y agoALLFED[1] is an organization doing research into how we could keep most everyone alive if we have a decade of winder after a super volcano, asteroid impact, or nuclear winter. Processes that convert hydrocarbons into calories are certainly in their playbook. [1]https://allfed.info/ https://allfed.info/
- pavel_lishin 2y agoReminds me of the CHON factories from the Heechee Saga, by Frederik Pohl.
- yborg 2y agoMy brother in _Gateway_ (1977).
- m463 2y agoStill can't get this series on kindle
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoThere is this thing called "Ocean of PDF" which has all six of them, as either PDF or EPUB. Just a few clicks, no account necessary.
- doctorwho42 2y agoDon't leave us!!!
- twodave 2y agoI wonder if it would be possible for e.g. asteroid material to work as an indirect source of nutrition? I.e. carry a specialized yeast on board that can "eat" the asteroid, and, sort of like sourdough, use the yeast's excess growth as food for humans... Sounds nasty now that I say it out loud haha.
- andai 2y agoStarmite!
- pengaru 2y agoMinemite
- jareklupinski 2y ago> a specialized yeast on board that can "eat" the asteroid that's my 'retirement project' https://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-yeast-combo-kit/ https://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-ye...
- lupire 2y agoProblem is that the vast majority of material is metal, so your digester needs a way to saturate the metal to reach the CHON, and and then extract the digester. Is that really better than extracting the CHON directly and then processing it?
- lupire 2y ago"The asteroid mass needed to support one astronaut for one year is between 160k metric tons and 5k metric tons. " 10 to 500 tons per person per day.
- marcosdumay 2y agoWell, if you never recycle anything and rely only on the extremely low quality reserves you found floating around... I have no idea why the measurement unities even make sense.
- Null-Set 2y agoAsteroids which enter a planet's atmosphere will probably yield even better food, because they will be a little meteor.
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- tessierashpool 2y agounderrated comet
- nonethewiser 2y agostellar even
- bpodgursky 2y agoMy 3 year old used to think the dinosaurs are gone because a meat eater killed them all.
- pengaru 2y agoThe Dodo bird could probably be considered a dinosaur, not entirely wrong...
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- whycome 2y agobecause they will be a little meteor, right? How did you comet o that conclusion? And a hungry mouth will approach: "please sir, armageddon some more?"
- donaldihunter 2y agoTitle should really be "How we might be able to ..."
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- criddell 2y agoWe're just lucky the HN title ruiner bot didn't change it to "We can food"
- zelias 2y agoFor my Factorio friends out there, this sounds like grounds for a mod that let's you "mine" nutrients in space
- Wingy 2y agoThis is roughly a thing in Space Age!
- Filligree 2y agoReally? Can you make spoilage somehow?
- cortesoft 2y agoSpoilage is a thing in Factorio now https://wiki.factorio.com/Spoilage https://wiki.factorio.com/Spoilage
- Filligree 2y agoYes, but I’m not aware of a way to make it from asteroids.
- ivanjermakov 2y agoIn unmodded Factorio, there is no way to make spoilage and nutrients soley from asteroid mining.
- goda90 2y agoThe space version of this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock
- ivanjermakov 2y agoThere is one already: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/spaceblock https://mods.factorio.com/mod/spaceblock And a playthrough I enjoyed watching: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqiMv9sOILsrYve0aG200HTQVwBVbsb_O&si=NqpofsDWrO9_3YWj https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqiMv9sOILsrYve0aG200HTQV...
- butlike 2y agoLisa Simpson: "Look (the boar) is licking the slime off that rock! That's what he's been eating: slime!"
- coding123 2y agoI can't wait for us to start mining asteroids and my bank account has $123,456,789,101,123,500,700!!!!!! And then use that to buy $80 trillion dollar cheeseburgers at McD's!
- jmcmaster 2y agoI am a layperson for astrochemistry but IIRC comets have much higher hydrocarbon content by an order of magnitude or more (and obviously more water, fewer metals to contend with for extraction energy requirements). 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
- pavel_lishin 2y agoI think comets are significantly harder to get a hold of; they're in long-period orbits, and changing their trajectories - or even catching up with them! - is significantly harder than catching something that circles the sun inside the orbit of Jupiter.
- Teever 2y agoBut could you use the hydrocarbons on the comet as fuel to change the orbit to a desirable one?
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- JumpCrisscross 2y agoVoyager, with with deflection nukes.
- tlb 2y agoThe relevant comparison is the energy needed to turn asteroids into food vs. the energy needed to turn exhaled CO2 and poop back into food. Astronauts live in closed ecosystems, so you don't need to bring in additional mass. Just close the cycle.
- metalman 2y agoAs a young child I was filled with hope, and some other mixed feelings, as it was anouced that the lunar astronoghts would be testing to see if the moon was made of blue cheese.My hope was that this would be brought back to feed all of the hungry people, but as I didnt want any myself, I had mixed feeling of not sharing there lot.And was quite disapointed to hear the anouncement from the moon, that it was not in fact made of blue cheese. No one is going to be disapointed if the astroslime cakes dont work out.
- jamieplex 2y agoI know this whole thing is just a thought experiment, but I had to wonder about not only the cost of all of this per "astronaut" (off the cuff - $10M per person per year), but the massive amount of energy needed for "life and food production". Just a single line item on my list of "doubtful, but not impossible" is the three quarters of a million Joules of energy needed to melt just 1000 grams of asteroid ice inside your protective environment. And you are gonna need a LOT of liquid water to accomplish all of this out in space...
- ttyprintk 2y agoIf we can talk long term, then a survey of the asteroid belt would reveal two special bands of density: close to ice, and close to gold. Returning a gold asteroid to Earth orbit has straightforward economics. Build a small cylinder or globe around an ice asteroid and melt just enough of it to kickstart the greenhouse effect.
- bee_rider 2y agoGold is only really valuable because we agreed it is; it has industrial applications (good conductor, malleable) but mostly it is priced based on its prettiness. If we were suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the price would go down. 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.
- christophilus 2y ago> If we were suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the price would go down. 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.
- PaulHoule 2y agoEuropeans stole so much gold from S America it messed up the economy in China.
- Terr_ 2y agoI suppose the next step beyond vegetarianism and veganism will be mineralism: Food using molecules certified never to have been part of any known living organism. I remember there was a fictional advertisement for such a product in a sci-fi story, but not exactly where.
- ada1981 2y agoI think such a technical advancement would parallel a moral one. I’ve been vegan 25 years and would be happy to silence the “but what about plants” people once and for all.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoI’m vegan too. Someone will say “what about the microorganisms in your gut” or something. People often have a negative reaction to vegans and that’s not going to change.
- throwawaycities 2y agoObviously some plants die and others don’t in harvesting. 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.
- luqtas 2y agolike all meat we produce is grass fed... livestock lives out of grains in a high % and if you want to take all meat production to free-roam practices, good luck destroying the entire planet for that
- spookie 2y agoI don't think the aim would be to be able to achieve the same level of production that way :)
- pugworthy 2y agoThis seems like the ultimate in ultra-processed / factory food. Kind of interesting to read the comments on the other recent post on ultra-processed foods (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246739) and consider the arguments made against there and whether they would apply here.
- adastra22 2y agoYou would likely use this “food” to feed more traditional agriculture for human consumption. A better way of positioning it is processing the content of abiotic asteroids into a biological system capable of providing nourishment to astronauts and space colonists.
- roughly 2y agoThe article says the cost of feeding one astronaut for one year is around 5,000-160,000 tons of ore per year. My understanding is the rule of thumb is about an order of magnitude nutritional drop off each step - that is, to produce 100cal of meat requires 1000cal of plant food. Bumping those yield estimates, especially the pessimistic end, up by another factor of 10 is just a phenomenal amount of material to process for one person for one year.
- Teever 2y agoThat's just the mass you need to extract the resources that make up the food that one person consumes in a year. Assuming you don't just space the human waste and instead reuse it you'll be accumulating material that can make up the biomass that will comprise a large and intricate food web that will eventually make up the biomes of large O'Neill cylinder stations.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoI didn't read the paper in depth, just skimmed it, but it seems like their assumption is that the astronauts will be eating some sort of microbe slurry; so I think that the cost includes only that, not using microbes to feed higher-order life or growing plants.
- 4b11b4 2y agostill need fiber though
- pyrolistical 2y agoWouldn’t it be simpler to do what the Martian did? Bring low mass items: seed and bacteria. Mine high mass items: dirt and water. Concentrate sunlight
- pavel_lishin 2y agoWhere exactly do you mine "dirt" from on a planet that hasn't had any sort of biosphere to create it? Dirt isn't just "stuff you're standing on" - it contains a lot of stuff that's been decomposing. 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.
- saaaaaam 2y agoTurns out you can grow plants in lunar regolith: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-in-lunar-soil/ https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...
- PaulHoule 2y agoFrom the viewpoint of a space colony food is a renewable resource as after humans “consume” the food the food is now CO2 and other waste products. Martians may vent CO2 but I’d think asteroid colonists would seek to recycle every bit of volatile that they can.
- schiffern 2y agoI expect especially resource-limited colonies could eventually use a double hull, with vacuum pumps to actively re-capture leakage. 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.
- lm28469 2y agoThat's good sci fi, meanwhile we're not even sure a human could live on mars for any extended period of time given it has 1/3rd the gravity and may completely fuck up our internal processes such as vision, blood pumping, maintaining bone density, risks of hernia, &c. 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
- ForOldHack 2y agoYes, but without a proper replicator, how does it taste? Burnt toast? Three week old socks? Munster cheese?
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoVelikovsky hypothesized that the manna of the ancient Israelites was hydrocarbons from meteors magically transformed into carbohydrate. It's good to see that his important research is being continued ;-)
- fenollp 2y ago> The asteroid mass needed to support one astronaut for one year is between 160 000 metric tons and 5000 metric tons. Even these orders of magnitude are correct, this is still 14t-438t of material to process /per day/ just for one person.
- miohtama 2y agoEating like an elephant, I see
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- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoReading these threads, I am reminded of a short story I once read, where we invented transporters, but every time you went through one, a copy stepped out, and left you in this weird limbo world, like in The Langoliers. You couldn’t actually eat or drink anything, so transportees became cannibals, and killed and ate newcomers.
- Animats 2y ago"but there are substantial areas of future work." 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/S0924224424002851 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09242... [2] https://www.darpa.mil/program/cornucopia https://www.darpa.mil/program/cornucopia
- gus_massa 2y agoTheir plan is to use the asteriod material to feed bacterias (it's hidden in the introduction, but explained in the main text). The advantage of using something more complex than air and water is that he bacterias can get energy from it, interad of using light like plants. I guess it's more similar to the method used to cultivate fongus. --- 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.
- hansvm 2y agoVariations of that idea definitely work. Light is optional for plants with adequate nutrient uptake from mediums like agar.
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- jojobas 2y agoYour tax dollars at work. By the time we're ready to fly to deep space we'll no longer be a protein life form.
- coldtea 2y ago"We can have a pie in the sky solution that's not going to happen even in 100 years to very real, very pressing problems, so don't worry too much that we're not doing enough to handle them with the actual practical means we have"
- smb06 2y agoI bet we mine asteroids for minerals-to-sell before we do for minerals-to-eat.
- rajamaka 2y agowhy not minerals-to-sell-to-eat?
- JohnMakin 2y agoThe title is "How we can mine asteroids for space food" not "We can mine asteroids for space food." This seems like a pretty major difference to me on a site that suggests against editorializing titles.
- teraflop 2y agoThat's not OP's fault. In spite of the policy saying you should use original titles, HN automatically strips leading words like "How..." or "Why..." from those titles, because the moderators consider such words clickbaity. Same with leading numbers, e.g. "10 Ways to Do X" automatically becomes "Ways to Do X".
- ashoeafoot 2y agoAnd then once that runs out we will once more turn on each other with the same stoneage instincts and railguns. 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.
- avhception 2y agoI think you're right. 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.
- consf 2y ago[dead]
- JoeAltmaier 2y agoI for one embrace the brave new world of printed eFood! 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?
- zaphar 2y agoPerhaps ironically the collapse of agricultural state economies would mean considerably less dust since the fields would recover within a few years after not being over farmed.
- JoeAltmaier 2y ago...until drought. 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.
- lm28469 2y agoLooks like we'll be sucking rocks before solving climate change, the future is bright!
- foundry27 2y agoThis is straight out of The Heechee Saga! The idea of synthesizing human-edible food from asteroid hydrocarbons is literally what Pohl described with CHON food. Breaking down carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen to create sustenance for ships, stations, even whole planets. 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
- bcherny 2y agoAlso, Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky
- johnea 2y agoBuck Rogers sure is alive and well at HN 8-/ 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!