Is that Moonsanto’s patented corn that is genetically modified to grow in a vacuum? Maybe in the future, all the HFCS, hydrogenated soybean oil, etc. will be produced on the Moon, leaving Earth’s land for more suitable purposes like strip mining coal and data centers that manufacture AI slop.
Lunar regolith is pretty nasty stuff that is sharp and sticks to everything. It’s pretty damaging to lungs, equipment, etc. I’d imagine using it as a raw material for cultivation would bring about some challenges.
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That’s true—water is abundant in the solar system, but soil is magical stuff. The perchlorates in Martian regolith are especially nasty. Not going to be growing ‘taters like Matt Damon does in The Martian anytime soon.
Perchlorates are water-soluble, and there is lots of ice on Mars. But people won’t live there sustainably, so there is no point to it.
because hot damn, that shit doesn’t exist anywhere else that we know of. Soil is a product of millions of years of complex interactions between plants, bacteria and water and fungus and other life forms.
Actually, you only need ground bedrock, some organic matter and some bugs & and worms and a few years (like, 2 to 6). And Mykorrhiza and water of course, for most plants.
But the Moon is special in that it doesn’t have erosion, the “dust” is in the form of microscopic shards, sticky and abrasive.
While dry desert planets like Mars – with erosion — have mostly the Australian kind of fine dust, which also sticks to everything, but is not abrasive.
Btw, there’s also Orsol farming; growing them on a sponge, with nothing but some fertilizer juice. Though they are usually more bland, since they lack some micronutrients (due to the lack of Mykorrhiza, among others).
Funny I didn’t know that word “Orsol”. Guess it’s another word coming directly from the French : “Hors-sol” (literally “out-of-the-ground” or “off-ground”) which is used for growing plants in an artificial substrate.
we’d be the compost planet. we’d live on their food scraps, and they’d harvest the results
Sure, but the alternative is to stop destroying our own soils and respect our ecosystem, and humanity has proven it will take on any challenge except cleaning up after ourselves
Look at a Saturn V. Look at a bag of chickpeas. If you think somehow launching a Saturn V (at a minimum) to get back a bag of chickpeas is somehow better for our ecosystem, I think I see why humanity is doomed.
Space Nuttery is not the solution to anything.
That’s exactly what I mean - we come up with all sorts of madness to grow food and obtain resources from further away. And society completely glosses over how impractical and wasteful it all is.
Meanwhile, what we could use is treat our planet properly and succeed with the amazing gifts it already provides. We are the only species that seems hell bent on sh*tting where we eat, and we come up with these inefficient strategies all to avoid cleaning up after ourselves
Oh, you’re right, I didn’t register your meaning, I get so upset whenever I see Space Nuttery I lose all civility.
I was thinking this was future planning for the other direction. While actually having a permanent colony of civilians on the moon is unrealistic, having a layover/fueling station on the moon that will have a small population of researchers, engineers, etc. is actually pretty feasible, and any mass sent up there will still be expensive. Shipping seeds is significantly cheaper than shipping food, and dirt is heavy, so you want to ship as little of it as possible. If it’s possible to grow stuff in lunar soil, that drastically decreases the amount of mass that needs to be sent.
I’ve also learned about it being sharp. What I haven’t heard answered is this. It’s sharp because there’s no weather to wear it down. If there were, how easily would it wear down? Does it crumble the second anything touches it? Being sharp and staying sharp are two different things. How much of a threat is this stuff, actually?
It’s coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere.
Now all they need are some daal and rice
Hydroponics can grow plants too
i cant wait to eat Lunar Falafel.
Moon curry when?
Now grow beans!
Oh god, even in space there’s no escape from those bland awful little balls of mundanity. Surely it would be cheaper and less resource intensive for the astronauts to just roll up little balls of cardboard and eat them. The effect would be the same
No idea what you’re on about, chickpeas are GOAT. Tasty, full of good stuff for you, brings lots of vegetal protein, and, like, hummus??
Don’t forget our GOAT falafel!
Hummus is acceptable, if it’s got so much garlic in it that it burns
I bet this will be the cheapest protein available in space in the future.
I see someone needs to try some just out of the oven pita bread with freshly prepared hummus.
FFS… You can’t grow anything without an atmosphere.
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No but it does mean we don’t need to ship up potting soil if a base were to be established.
Mmm, moon hummus 😋
You need humus to grow hummus ;)
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I heard it’s out of this world!
imagine it was way better then earth chickpeas
and it made the hummus betterTastes like mochi.
Haha, Good one.
Mixing vermicompost into the regolith seems a bit like cheating.
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[…] then once plants get started it will work towards making even more compost/soil.
Compost is biomaterial so it manly consists of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. The only part of that you can find on the moon is oxygen, so you can’t expand beyond the amount of air and biomass (manly food) you ship from earth.
You can also find hydrogen in the water at the poles. Nitrogen, yep, that’s a big one.
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Yes, but this means you don’t have to take dirt with you as well. Dirt is heavy.
What would you propose, then?
We use organic amendments all the time when reclaiming historically mined lands that did not salvage soils.
Soils take millennia to form, and you’re not going to get fertile soils without either kickstarting the process or waiting.
Another commentator points out that using arbuscular mychorrizhal fungi is also cheating. Again, how?
To have a functional soil and not regolith you need the following:
- An organic matter source - regolith lacks this
- A moisture retaining media - regolith usually has this but its ability varies widely
- Enough rooting depth for your desired plants
- A method to transform organic matter to nutrients - regolith generally lacks this
Organic matter is your pool of nutrients and microbes and fungi are what mineralize this pool into plant available forms, so saying they are cheating doesnt hold water (like a shitty regolith).
But I can grow plants in glass beads! Sure you can, but you’re supplying chemical fertilizer to do it and constantly replacing that - so in this case you’re the organic matter pool and the transformation vector.
Vermicompost is something you can readily make on the moon, meaning with this it proves you can take a resource available on the moon and grow in it.
Big deal IMO.
Well. “Proves” since it’s simulated regolith, not real regolith, and it was done on earth.
I started out wondering if this simulation would work again in lunar gravity, and now we also need vermiculture to work in lunar gravity.
We’re already working on worms in space!
https://www.esa.int/kids/en/news/Worms_in_space
Granted these aren’t the works we’d make vermicompost from … but still steps in that direction
Cool. Sadly it doesn’t seem like it was even a goal for those worms to survive.
The article seems to imply the compost was added to both the plants with/without the fungi?
Definitely cheating in the “can we grow plants?” department, but still useful information.
That’s nothing, I can grow plants in almost pure silica (i.e. a glass plant pot full of soil).
How would the moons gravity affect the growth of crops?
That’s what you don’t get from this simulation.
My uneducated guess is that 1/6th gravity would still be a great deal more like earth than 0 gravity.
Low and zero gravity can affect how roots spread/dig and later can cause issues with how water and nutrients circulate through the stalk since they evolved to circulate with Earth level gravity. Space station experiments have proven it’s not impossible, the plants can adapt, they’re just a bit different. Trees would probably struggle, most crops would be fine. What’s really difficult is pollination. You’d probably have to hand pollinate, set up a wind system in your greenhouse, or get self-pollinaters. Bees would struggle to adapt because low gravity would mess with their flight, their dance communication, and probably their honeycomb structure and larval development.
I imagine they would grow taller, possibly faster
That makes me think that we shouldn’t bring potatoes there. They’ll become too strong, unstoppable.
We will send Irish astronauts to tame the tuber threat
Irish astronaut
This made me ask “has there ever been such a thing?”
The answer is apparently “not yet,” but Dr. Norah Patten will potentially be the first, sometime within a year or so.
For sure don’t bring kudzu.
Kudzu isn’t as virulent as people think. It looks like it eats entire forests when seen from the highway, but it’s actually only covering the trees on the edge.
What capitalization rules are being applied in this headline? Seems like it’s out of The Art of the Style by Trump & White.
Holy fuck you stacked the diss
The post title has been edited to strip me of all joy.
That’s okay, the masterful takedown persists.
Did they poop in it?
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this looks familiar, whats it from…craig ferguson?
Triumph the Insult-Comic Dog, a bit from Conan.
FINALLY, I mean come on it is embarassing it took them this long, we were all waiting don’t tell me you weren’t.
