Since the dawn of agriculture, few things have troubled farmers more than clouds in
the sky when they want none or their absence when they're desperate for a drop of rain.
But things change when you're doing your farming above the clouds, in space.
Last time in the series we discussed power satellites, a way of potentially bringing
vast amounts of renewable and cheap energy back to Earth.
A point we made at the time was that electricity is what fuels modern civilizations.
Of course it's not what people run on, and it's good to remember that people still
run on food, and civilization remains dependent on it too.
That is our topic today of course, food and the farming to make it, and how to do that
on other planets or in space.
Since we'll be talking about food for the next half-hour, it might be a good idea to
grab a snack and a drink before continuing.
In the grand scheme of survival, getting dinner is basically priority number one, followed
shortly thereafter by not becoming something else's dinner.
The vast supermajority of cells in your body are devoted to this.
Indeed most are actually bacteria unrelated to you, growing in your digestive system,
and most of the remainder are red blood cells running down a vast supply highway taking
oxygen and nutrients to your other cells.
Only a tiny fraction of your cells are actually neurons, the bits presumably doing all the
thinking that makes you, you.
Civilization is a lot like that too.
Only a fairly small fraction of the land we use is for people to live in, far more is
cultivated farmland, highways, factories, warehouses, and so on.
Needless to say, any portions of that we can add more verticality to, or get off the planet
entirely, and free up space for stuff down here, either for more people and our other
projects, or reforestation and native ecology, is a good thing.
So that will be our other focus later today, whether or not we could realistically bring
food down to Earth to feed folks living in an ecumenopolis, for example.
It should be noted before we jump into discussing the idea of space farming that we have a few
extra considerations.
First, we are only interested in farming today, not generalized ecology, which we'll look
at more in a couple weeks in Exporting Earth, but at the same time, even when we think of
a given crop as growing by itself, it's not typically monoculture, it's just the
dominant species of a fairly simplified polyculture.
Everything evolved to a certain amount of mutual reliance, like needing insects for
pollination and soil aeration, and so any space farming will generally need to incorporate
these too or you'd end up with inferior growth or even none at all.
The other side of that though is that this is a futurism channel, and it isn't unusual
for us to discuss genetic engineering or cybernetics as pathways forward.
I want to mostly bypass that today, but we shouldn't ignore possibilities like getting
people to run on electricity, outright manufacturing food calories without using plant growth,
or highly engineered organisms that are vastly more efficient at producing calories or able
to do it in peculiar environments.
Those are topics for another time though.
Finally, while plants as food will be our focus, it's worth remembering that farming
isn't just growing corn, its growing livestock and luxury or medicinal crops too.
We often skip meat when discussing food in space, and one of the reasons for that is
because it isn't too efficient.
That's a good place to begin, because efficiency is very important to farming and it's also
quite variable.
One might say an efficient farm is the one that grows the most calories per acre, another
might say it's the one that produces the most calories per man hour of work, another
the most dollars of revenue and profit, and so on.
Each of these is entirely valid, and will vary a lot by crop and market.
Incidentally, since we normally stick to mostly metric here, there are two-and-a-half acres
per hectare.
Even land itself is a pretty iffy term, which is in part why it's often hard to get crop
yields from historical sources.
We've standardized a lot of these as we've moved into the modern era, but for instance
the Hide, one of the better known old land terms, was actually the term for the amount
of land a single family could survive on and work, rather than a set area.
Which is appropriate since "Hide" was the old word for family.
That varied a lot by local soil fertility, generally somewhere between 60 to 120 acres.
In modern terms it's far less, a Hide would be well under 10 acres while a family of farmers
might work thousands of acres.
You can often get yields vastly higher, in terms of space, by adding more resources or
manpower.
A typical heated greenhouse with a tailored environment can produce some staggering quantities
of food, typically boosting yields by a factor of 10 or more, and going vertical or adding
supplemental lighting makes this even better.
This isn't really economical yet, but it has been getting there, particularly for things
that don't keep well and already need a lot of manpower for harvesting, like tomatoes.
As automation improves we'll see more of this too, as if you can have robots doing
most of the construction of greenhouses and most of the work in harvesting them, you'd
hit a tipping point where it got cheaper than keeping traditional farmland under till.
It's one of the reasons I and some others always handwave away the food concerns about
more people, we could easily support a vastly larger population than now on existing cultivated
land by going this pathway, saves a lot of water too, it just requires a lot more manpower.
So long as one person can produce the food for several people though, this is not a bottleneck
on technology.
Nowadays we only use a couple of percent of the population for farming, but if you need
20 billion people working to make food for 100 billion, that still leaves an enormous
workforce for other things.
You wouldn't though, agricultural automation can be rather tricky, especially for some
crops, but we're getting there.
The same issue applies to vertical farming, even ignoring the lighting issue, a skyscraper
devoted to growing plants is flat out absurd economically at the moment.
As we get better at construction that will probably change.
That manpower issue is a big one for space missions though.
You send a team of six people to Mars to explore the place, and you can grow some food on the
ship or the planet to supplement their supplies – particularly the ones that don't store
well or compactly – but that means one or more of your team members is devoting a lot
of their time to growing food, not exploring or maintaining the ship or base.
Hydroponics also adds mass to the mission, you're not saving yourself any cargo if
you need more equipment and space for growing food than simply storing it would take.
At a current cost of thousands of dollars per kilogram to escape from Earth's gravity
well, that adds up to a lot of mass when you factor in the water requirements.
Another problem, though more with quality of life, is that your menu isn't just controlled
by what you can easily pack with you or grow on spot, but what tastes good.
Food in space generally tastes awful, and we've got this problem on airplanes too.
Your taste buds and smell get all messed up by changes in pressure and humidity, and we
actually pressurize planes to be closer to sea level.
On spaceships or Martian bases we'd likely keep the pressure even lower to minimize leaking.
This is not a big deal for farming, just a little food for thought.
Dietary preferences will probably vary off Earth in unexpected ways and challenge our
culinary specialists in equally unexpected ways.
However, in the long term it just makes sense to grow your food off-Earth, so we might as
well start looking at the advantages and disadvantages.
The two big advantages are obvious, it cuts down on supply costs and problems when you
can grow your food near at hand, and the very nature of extraterrestrial habitats means
you have a very artificial and controlled environment.
You don't have to worry much about disease, pests, or invasive species ravaging your crops.
You can alter temperature and humidity and nutrient content very easily since you have
to create them all from scratch in the first place.
The disadvantages though are that you have to create it all from scratch in the first
place, and this includes a lot of factors normally not in play on Earth.
I obviously can't just toss some seeds onto Mars or the Moon or dump them out the airlock
on the ISS and expect them to grow.
We should start with two things we don't normally have to worry about on Earth, lighting
and gravity.
Light itself isn't in short supply anywhere closer than Jupiter, but the specific spectrum
and duration is another matter.
The only place in the solar system with anything like a normal Earth Day is Mars, and since
that tends to be target number one for colonization, this topic gets skipped a lot.
Coincidentally Mars' has a day just a little longer than Earth's, 24 hours and 37 minutes,
your next closest match would be Saturn's Moon Mimas at 22 hours and 36 minutes, and
that's about it for anything that is vaguely close to our natural circadian rhythm.
Most moons are tidally locked to their planet, and take a lot more than 24 hours to orbit
and complete one day-night cycle, the ones that don't tend to be radiation blasted
and have very little gravity even compared to our own Moon.
Asteroids, on the other hand, typically have day lengths much shorter than our day, with
the majority rotating several times a day.
Plants don't need much gravity, and many seem to do just fine with none, since they
mostly use it as a way of orienting themselves and many can do that with light instead.
How they handle changing day lengths is a little harder, and varies a lot by plant.
The good news is Mars at least is just fine for plants.
Stick a pressurized dome up on Mars and you can reliably grow food there, and chances
are decent the gravity will be just fine for people and animals too though that's educated
guesswork for now.
It's possible many animals would be fine in such environments, or even thrive, one
could imagine in lower gravity chickens might even be able to fly, which might be rather
irritating for chicken farmers, but it is possible even a small change in day length
might have bad effects on things, especially complex ecosystems.
The light level is fine too, like Earth it varies by latitude, but Mars is about half
again as far from the Sun as we are and gets about 43% of the light Earth gets, though
its thin atmosphere means more light gets through, including some harmful frequencies
a dome would need to screen out.
Ignoring the atmospheric effect for the moment, and axial tilt, that means that Mars in its
tropic band near the equator gets lighting more like Earth's more northern regions,
Canada or Scandinavia.
That's a big deal for temperature but not for light itself.
As mentioned in the episode on Colonizing Ceres, even out in the Asteroid Belt, where
light is much weaker, most plants would get enough light to thrive just fine.
Light concentration, in the visible ranges plants work in, is measured in a unit called
Lux, some plants prefer shady light, which can be as little as 1000 Lux, what you could
get way out at Saturn, others would struggle a bit even on the Martian equator.
Possibly unsurprisingly, a lot of our key food crops are very light-intensive, able
to soak up a ton of light to power a lot of biomass creation which we can eat.
Of course Mars may be fine in lighting and gravity but temperature is another story and
so are seasonal concerns.
Mars has a much longer year than us, and everything else in the solar system further out has even
longer ones.
This is a pretty big deal for ecosystems, when a lot of animals have their life cycles
very tuned up to seasons, but isn't much of a concern for crop farming.
Like a lot of magic, the trick is to use smoke and mirrors, or at least mirrors.
A lot of growing stuff in space is likely to involve using mirrors and parabolic dishes
to create the ideal lighting level and duration, and possibly gases to absorb certain frequencies
of light we don't want, where we can't just filter them out easily with films on
the mirrors or domes.
One problem with a lot of those frequencies, like ultraviolet, is that they damage us because
of the sheer energy in those higher-frequency photons, and generally that applies to materials
as well, which can seriously shorten the life time of structures in space.
It's one of your approaches though, you can build something that is more of a lens
than a typical dome and concentrates light onto a smaller area, to keep it warmer and
better lit, and you might be able to use tricks like that do to farming even way out at Pluto,
where only the most shade-loving plants could even barely grow under the native lighting.
One can imagine igloo-like structures made of ice with a tiny insulated growing section
in the middle, with light concentrated there.
Of course Pluto is another example of very long days, and while nowhere near as bad as
Mercury or Venus, or indeed even our own Moon, the Sun only rises there once a week.
Many plants can handle perpetual lighting, like they'd get in space, but really long
dark periods is another story.
You might be able to do some genetic tweaking so something could handle the two weeks of
light and then the two weeks of dark that the Moon gets, but your alternative is supplemental
lighting, either by light bulbs or orbiting mirrors that keep a beam of sunlight on a
spot.
That sounds kind of high tech but isn't, and works pretty much anywhere in the solar
system.
Odds are good just about every decent sized rock out there has enough gravity for plants
to be okay, indeed a lot of taller, vining varieties might thrive in low-gravity, but
almost none have the right day length or ideal lighting levels.
But a lighting satellite is actually a very simple device, especially around lower gravity
places with no atmosphere of their own.
You really just need your locations to have a small beacon to make them easy to target
and a small computer to track conditions and relay requests to a grid of simple satellites
that can rotate their big parabolic dishes to lock onto whoever needs some light and
is in their current window.
It's frankly child's play compared to Earth's current satellites and launch costs
are barely noticeable, after all on many of these the gravity is so low you can chuck
a cubesat into orbit like a baseball.
And it's just a mirror, probably thin aluminum foil, with some guidance and a flywheel for
power storage and attitude control.
They only have to be as big as your orbital height requires for keeping a good focus on
a dome, and the only reason something can't orbit an asteroid a meter off the ground is
that they are generally only very loosely spherical so an orbit would be prone to running
into things and getting trashed.
On many of these, a precise and highly elliptical orbit could have them fly by a given high
rocky outcropping low enough, and slow enough, you could catch one too.
Strange image, we usually talk about colonizing smaller asteroids by sticking a rotating habitat
in them, but you might have one a dozen kilometers across that started off with just a small
cylinder hab embedded into it to provide spin-gravity for some people and animals, and with the
various domes scattered nearby growing food in those domes, getting supplemental lighting
from solar panels or orbital mirrors.
This would be home to a family of farmers who go out into the field in a spacesuit and
rover rather than overalls and a tractor.
A nice thing about smaller asteroids is their circumference is small enough you could drive
around them to get home rather than needing to loop back, and most have a polar region
where you could stick up solar panels on towers that have perpetual sunlight.
You could also do vertical farming in those spots too, with towers under perpetual light
that rotated every 24 hours.
After all, in that negligible gravity, building tall is easy, you could walk on floors made
of tissue paper without ripping them.
Now the mirrors can also solve another problem and that is seasons.
A lot of plants rely on changes in seasons to flower, fruit and ripen.
Even on a planet like Mars with a very similar day/night cycle to that on Earth, you definitely
do not get the same seasons.
We can fix that, though, by simply reflecting more or less light into the domes from our
mirrors, depending on which season we are trying to emulate.
We can lengthen or shorten the days simply enough by programming a cycle into our controlling
computers.
We don't even need to keep the seasons constant for the same planet and you wouldn't want
to do that anyway.
One dome could be in the middle of summer while another dome next door is experiencing
a winter.
The difference could simply be that we are interchanging mirrors from the one dome to
the other as the season changes.
This means that seasonal vegetables get produced all year round and we can condition our soil
with the right mix of microbes by recreating Earth-like seasons in our domes.
Speaking of soil and microbes, you will never take your growing soil off Earth with you.
Instead, you'd make that everywhere you go and generally, even ignoring the microbes
and organic content, there won't be a good native mixture for growing soil and it would
be toxic if you simply dumped some Martian regolith into a dome and tried to grow plants
in it.
Fortunately, the key ingredients for life are rather common, but you will have to mix
them up and probably grow your soil in vats full of microbes like you were brewing beer
or yogurt.
This is another reason why hydroponics tends to be preferred, mass being arguably the bigger
one, dirt is heavy.
Anything we do in space is either a ship, in which case you want to keep your mass to
a minimum so it's cheap to move it, or a station that is getting its supplies from
Earth.
Let's move onto those stations though.
As we can see, most of the celestial objects in space aren't really suited for plant
growth, it's doable but a pain, and you have to basically build everything from the
ground up, literally, again there's no natural dirt to start with.
So it might be easier just to build a farm in space as a space station.
Space is perpetually lit, unlike planets, moons, and asteroids which spend half their
time in the dark, and again most plants handle perpetual light and low or no gravity just
fine.
However, same as you can spin a space station to produce gravity, you can also spin it to
rotate every 24 hours.
It doesn't have to spin in the same direction either, it can be spinning fairly rapidly
to produce the necessary spin-gravity, but still rotate around once a day to provide
light to each side, or just have a shutter that closes.
Space is rather big and the Sun gives off more than a billion times the light Earth
gets, plants don't need that much lighting, so you hardly have to be worried about wasting
light, but we have a ton of different geometries and multi-purpose paths that could optimize
lighting them, which is always a good idea.
And again, plants don't need full gravity so we're not nearly as constrained in our
structures as we are with a classic cylinder habitat producing normal Earth gravity.
You can make some very large structures, probably donut shaped toroids, that need very little
structural support since they are low gravity and presumably only have a few people, if
any, actually in them.
Those folks might be wearing spacesuits inside anyway, as those plants will likely be kept
in conditions optimized to them, not people, which would often be rather miserably high
on temperature, carbon dioxide, humidity, and so on.
Or maybe they'd just be piloting robots inside these structures instead.
I would actually tend to guess most rotating habitats would do most of their food production
off-site in nearby space farms instead, reserving normal gravity and more hardened structures
for themselves and more complete ecologies like forest and gardens, possibly even bringing
in food to supplement the critters living in those to allow higher densities of wildlife
than that ecosystem might otherwise allow, kind of like having a bird or squirrel feeder,
just scaled up a bit, with robots depositing food here and there for them.
This lets you subsidize an ecosystem so it can be smaller while still having a good amount
of genetic diversity in the wildlife.
For instance, an elephant back on Earth might need many hundreds of square kilometers to
feed itself, but probably needs far less to be comfortable and happy if it's getting
additional food trucked in from space farms.
The same concept applies to livestock in general.
Animals need space, but they likely need as much gravity as people, so you can minimize
their living space by supplementing their food supply rather than grazing them completely.
We'll talk more about trying to maintain an actual ecosystem in a couple of weeks in
Exporting Earth.
So growing food in space for people living in space is not an easy task but certainly
doable.
Economically, it's probably going to be a lot cheaper to build those space farms up
there than to export food up there, even if launch costs drop quite a bit.
The question remains though, could we grow food up there and bring it down to Earth?
And could that ever be economically viable?
Surprisingly yes, though as with doing greenhouses here on Earth, it's the sort of thing you
do when you're getting kinda crowded or really want to free up farmland space for
other uses.
But space farming also gives us the option of growing genetically modified crops in isolation,
to prevent contamination of Earth's ecosystem, or because the crops have specific advantages
to being grown in space.
Indeed, industrial-scale bio-reactors could be used to grow more than just food.
Much of our current agriculture is already used to produce industrial feedstocks and
products, not just food.
We already discussed, way back in the Arcologies and Ecumenopolis episodes, how you could support
hundreds of billions of people on Earth, in great comfort, without having to use most
of our land for farming or housing, by going vertical.
As we saw there, the big constraint isn't land area but really energy, or rather heat
and getting rid of it when you're done.
The thing about vertical farming is that it's very like space farming, you are building
everything, and while, on the one hand, the construction and sourcing the resources is
easier on Earth, the energy and lighting are harder on Earth too.
You also still have to use all that energy down on Earth and get rid of the heat, whereas
if you're just importing the final product, you don't.
Economic viability is always about your core bottleneck.
For farming, that can vary a lot.
Land costs, especially good land, transport costs and storage costs, the price of fertilizer
or manpower and so on.
On the extreme end of packing people onto Earth that bottleneck is heat rather than
space or even energy or money, though you could easily end up with a system where heat
was taxed to pay for getting rid of it.
In that very specific context, it could be cheaper to bring stuff down.
Indeed bringing food down is cheap enough, as you can aerobrake food pods rather than
needing fuel, though that makes some heat too.
This is one of those examples where launch systems like the Orbital Ring can demolish
our traditional view of space since you can bring stuff up and down those for transport
costs reasonably similar to modern freight.
And almost as importantly, return your waste back up to space for recycling.
You can harvest asteroids and comets for all the raw materials you need, but if those are
just collecting on Earth you've got a bit of problem.
It's a very long term one to be sure.
You shouldn't need to import more than one ton per person per year, and even a trillion
people are only adding 10^15 kilograms a year at that point, which would take over a billion
years to build up enough waste to raise the Earth's gravity by a percent and you'd
only be adding around a millimeter a year to the Earth's radius.
You probably ultimately would want to lift out as much as you take in, same as cities,
farms send food to them and cities ship fertilizer right back, but there's no real rush or
concern about a mass deficit either.
It's an interesting way to counteract rising sea levels too, and we'll talk about a lot
of these kind of mega-engineering approaches to Earth itself in our upcoming series, Earth
2.0, which I decided was a better name for the topic than Downward Bound.
Indeed you might even hang your farms right down from an orbital Ring, what we call a
Chandelier City or in this case a Chandelier Farm, and such things might be pretty common
in terraforming other planets too.
Terraforming is a very destructive process and you'd always start building your orbital
infrastructure first, so you might grow your way down to a planet.
To fully terraform a planet, you will be pulverising it a lot!
You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs and terraforming is not a gentle
process.
This could involve nuking it and smashing comets, asteroids and other payloads from
elsewhere into it.
This would cause shockwaves, high winds, massive dust storms, Tsunamis, and sudden and dramatic
chemical changes in the atmosphere and soils.
These actions would wreak havoc with any settlements on the planet and particularly with agricultural
domes, so rather than try to protect or recreate farm space on that planet while bombarding
it, it's just easier to grow stuff in orbit.
We'll also see it's a handy approach when dealing with gas giants when we look at colonizing
Neptune next month.
A great many of our ideas today relied on vastly cheaper launch costs, and of course
that is what this series is mostly about, how to get into space cheaper and safer and
what we can do once we're there.
In this episode, and the last one on power satellites, we've talked about how we can
harness the power of radiation in space to benefit life on the surface of a planet or
on a spaceship.
In other words, how to harness the power of star energy — or Solar Energy as we say
locally.
There happens to be a great course of that same name over at Brilliant.org that steps
through everything from how much energy there is in sunlight, to how to collect it, to how
to engineer the solar energy harvesters themselves.
So many of the topics we discuss here can seem impractical or even utterly fantastic
when someone firsts hears about them, but with a solid understanding of the math and
science behind them, we can see a pathway to making them not just a reality, but the
future foundations of our society.
To truly understand these concepts, it helps to have that math and science background,
and at Brilliant you can pick those up, learning at your own rate about the topics that interest
you, with user-friendly graphical quizzes and explanations.
If you want to get a better and more complete understanding of the science behind so much
of what we discuss here, you can go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free.
And also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premium
subscription Next week we'll be returning to the alien
civilization series to consider the idea of Parasitic Aliens, like the Goa'uld from
Stargate, or the alien from John Carpenter's film: The Thing, based on the John Campbell's
classic novella, "Who Goes There?", our book of the month.
The week after that, we'll be taking a deeper look at ecology in space, as we consider how
you would move large and complete colonies on interstellar ships to colonize other worlds,
in "Exporting Earth".
For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like button and share it with others.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
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