China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46873526

by echevil • 8 years ago

248 153 8 years ago

To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining.

You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization.

I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be. Would guess that electronics would be one of the last things you'd learn to make yourself.

baybal22• 8 years ago

Smallest scale fabs can fit the whole cycle in one building: wafer production, CMP, gases facility, front-end, back-end and etching/deposition/doping lines. Some 180nm level fabs are like that, and rely on equipment unification in between back-end/front-end/etch/deposition/doping lines.

Big questions:

1. How to make wafers in low/no gravity? Without convection, you can't purify silicon. May be you will rely on an entirely chemical process to grow a crystal?

2. Expensive gases will have to be recycled, not neutralised and disposed.

3. How will you do wet etch in zero/low gravity? Will you go plasma only?

cperciva• 8 years ago

If you want gravity, you use centrifuges. Not really a problem.

simion3143• 8 years ago

But why should you have a 100% complete industry, a colony can trade with Earth like countries trade with each other, a colony could trade some rare resources and buy high tech stuff.

The main obstacle a colony will have is the initial buildings/bunker with all the life support and safety tech, plus extra redundancy and a backup plan if something bad happens there or on Earth .

If the colony would manage to generate enough oxygen,food, water and energy for itself that is the important first step. Next step would probably be producing the heavy parts they need for expansions like metal or similar solid materials for walls and machinery, the lighter parts could be sent from Earth.

worldsayshi3• 8 years ago

Sure, becoming 100% self sufficient wouldn't be a reasonable short term goal but I can't imagine there being any product worth trading in the long term over such distance and given such cost for logistics?

richmarr• 8 years ago

One of the reasons to establish off-world colonies is to allow persistence of the species in the event of a catastrophy making the Earth unlivable. Given the history of extinction events found in archaeology this isn't an entirely unreasonable thing to plan for.

In that frame, a colony that can't survive (or has a reduced chance of survival) is of lower utility than one that can be effectively independent.

bayesian_horse8• 8 years ago

As far as I know, Humans need lots of gravity to develop, so any settlement could not reproduce, at least until means to counteract the effects of microgravity are discovered.

onetimemanytime• 8 years ago

>But why should you have a 100% complete industry, a colony can trade with Earth like countries trade with each other, a colony could trade some rare resources and buy high tech stuff.

Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith &c. To ALL to whom these Presents shall come, greeting:.....The Moon Trading Company : )

They need a way to get pure vitamins, fat etc and then mix them on the Moon. Live on shakes or something at least until all is solved.

cpeterso• 8 years ago

Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has a lot to say about a space colony (in this case, on the moon) depending on resources from Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

zokier• 8 years ago

You can ship a 40ft container with about 25t capacity for about $2000-$5000 between any major ports on Earth, and probably for even less for bigger volumes.

SpaceX BFR has about 100t capacity to Mars. While the total cost of a Mars mission has not been publicized, I suspect it would be fair bit more than $20k.

Biggest container ships these days carry about 20k TEU, or about 500000 tons of cargo. You can try putting that number to the rocket equation just for fun.

zaroth• 8 years ago

Does Mars make a particularly good outpost for asteroid mining with its much lower gravity well, and the fact that if you fuck up and de-orbit an asteroid you’re not potentially destroying a large swath of populated land below?

There may be refining steps which you would want to do on the surface vs in orbit, and getting the raw ore down and refined product back up would be substantially cheaper on Mars.

Probably it wouldn’t be worth building a colony in the first place for just this economic benefit, but once you have the colony, you can exploit this advantage?

cafebabbe• 8 years ago

We're not even self-sustaining on Earth.

worldsayshi3• 8 years ago

Fair point. Perhaps forcing us to be on Mars can teach us something about sustainability here on earth. Here's hoping.

Aardwolf• 8 years ago

We also have significantly more people on Earth though. If anything, more planets makes us more self sustainable in the future.

alex_duf• 8 years ago

That's one of my arguments for space colonisation.

In the process of colonising other bodies and planets we'll learn how to be more sustainable here. In other words we would use the promise of new resources and exciting new worlds to learn how to avoid destructing our own.

wklauss• 8 years ago

You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization.

It's not as much as you'd think, specially if you can survive on the first couple of decades with regular shipments from earth, mostly for very advanced materials and electronics.

A lot of manufacturing capacity in our society is redundant and focused on non-essential items. In addition, some manufacturing processes are complex because of the scale of our society but could be made simpler for a small colony, especially if you are not worried about details or finishing quality and approach it from a more utilitarian perspective.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

I think you underestimate how complicated even simple machines are. Making lubricated ball bearings for example requires high quality steel, precision manufacturing and chemistry that is not trivial if you don't have access to oil.

k9s92• 8 years ago

Replicators. Feels like no one watches Star Trek anymore. Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho.

krapp• 8 years ago

Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho.

No, they didn't. They came up with transporters to save money not having effects shots of ships taking off and landing, and replicators are basically the same, a prop meant to save a bit of money while looking "futuristic". Replicators and transporters violate physics (thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle, E=MC^2) and cannot exist as depicted in Star Trek. They spent zero time working out the science because they're television writers, not scientists.

The best you could do in the real world is 3D printers and fabbers. But directly converting energy into complex physical structures in a way that isn't insanely less efficient than physical manufacturing or agriculture? No.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

Replicators are fictional technology that is either straight impossible to build or requires ludicrous amounts of energy.

908087• 8 years ago

I had to double check to make sure I wasn't on reddit after reading this. Good work.

pjc503• 8 years ago

NASA have been looking at this almost since the Kennedy speech. e.g. (1989) https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/198900... "Lunar production of solar cells"

(Contains some handy tables of relative abundance of substances at the end. Oxygen is really plentiful, it's just attached to all that silicon and iron.)

setquk• 8 years ago

And that pesky radiation slowly killing you.

yholio• 8 years ago

The unshielded radiation dose for a round trip Mars expedition with 18 months spent on the surface is roughly equivalent to the life time dose allowed for a worker in the nuclear industry. The risks are completely negligible compared to the 50% or so chances of not making it back to Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays...

One of the first mass products of a colony is likely to be Methane and simple hydrocarbons like ethylene which can be further used to produce polyethylene, an excelent shielding material that can reduce the radiation to earth levels if applied in thick blankets.

bayesian_horse8• 8 years ago

Many concepts for permanent settlements on Mars or the moon envision tunneling under the surface to achieve radiation shielding.

Of course it would help to develop better treatments for radiation exposure.

HeadsUpHigh• 8 years ago

I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be. Would guess that electronics would be one of the last things you'd learn to make yourself.

If I recall correctly the number quoted from E. Musk on an early Mars colonization presentation was 2 cargo ships per full colonist ship. But that's only for being water/air/food/energy self-sustained. The assumption is that large shipments of high-tech products will continue for a while. Maybe something like solar panels/basic air turbines can be produced on the spot provided with either the raw material or mining equipment. The same probably goes at least for simple electronics( like e.g. various sensors for monitoring the colony), lots of appliances can be made in a crude way( think stoves, furnaces, maybe fridges?).

charlesju• 8 years ago

I think the tech that I'm most interested in for the purpose of colonizing other worlds will be 3D printing. In its current form it's no where close to good enough, but if we stretch our time horizon to hundred plus years I do think we can build 3D printers powerful enough to make everything we need to mine and sustain life on other worlds.

phkahler• 8 years ago

Let me know when your 3D printer can make it's own electronics. Also, mining equipment... I mean, wow. I suppose sintered metals might be possible but there's still the refining of raw materials. I guess my point is that the supply chain needed to build a 3D printer is probably enough to sustain things without the 3D printer.

That's not to say they wouldn't be useful. I really like being able to sketch out whatever bracket, holder, candy dish, etc that I want and print it. That would be very useful on a world without a huge economy providing every little thing you might want or need.

MichaelMoser123• 8 years ago

Shielding off radiation is hard too, on Earth you gave an atmosphere and a magnetosphere. On the Moon or Mars its much harder to do the shield effectively

rbanffy2• 8 years ago

There are some caves on the moon that provide shielding and, probably, water since they have perpetual shadow inside them. They can be very attractive places to build future colonies.

drstins_n• 8 years ago

Mars is a better space body for a colony. I suggest reading "A case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin.

Novashi• 8 years ago

I think we’ll see robust shipping routes before completely self-sustaining colonies. To the point where missing 2-3 shipments isn’t a huge deal.

stcredzero3• 8 years ago

To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony.

Zubrin's estimate of this in The Case For Mars is a half million people. That's an estimate for the minimum size of the population which can support the knowledge base required to make everything to sustain a modern industrialized civilization.

You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization.

It's been demonstrated that a single person can build up the infrastructure of an 1800's colonial village all by himself, up to and including a blacksmith's shop. That guy from Turtle Island Preserve could do it, dropped into a forest with a single knife. There's a YouTuber who does all that sort of stuff without the knife to begin with.

It will be harder to do such bootstrapping on Mars, of course. I'm not sure that the half million estimate above included chip fabs. I somehow doubt it.

nyc1113• 8 years ago

The plants are in a sealed container on board the lander.

For a moment I thought they were in the open... Since they are enclosed is there a reason why they should not sprout? The gravity is less but that should not make a difference.

Cthulhu_3• 8 years ago

The gravity is less but that should not make a difference.

That's the theory, indeed, and this experiment proves it - science!

_rpd• 8 years ago

Interestingly, low gravity changes the way plants express their genes ...

Organ-specific remodeling of the Arabidopsis transcriptome in response to spaceflight

https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471...

duchenne• 8 years ago

The temperature might be an issue. The moon surface 106°C during the day, -183°C during the night.

Also, the sun is brighter in space than an Earth under the atmosphere.

The long days and nights lasting 12 Earth days each might also be problematic.

nyc1113• 8 years ago

Still, it would have been interesting to see what happens to the seed on the surface of the moon. Maybe a cactus used to desert sun could adapt to the harsh conditions on the moon.

andygates4• 8 years ago

They're in a controlled environment, not being baked and frozen. This is a test of the gravity only.

Test one thing at a time.

nyc1113• 8 years ago

Answers all my questions about the experiment https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-grows-first-plants-on-...

Gustomaximus• 8 years ago

Hasn't plant growth been happening for a few years in space? Like the salad they grew and ate in ISS.

Is this such big news because it's an ongoing step in living in space or am I missing something.

Not trying to take away from the achievement but just curious why this is such a big story. I'd thought there would be more news focus on the dark side of the moon updates or astronomy potential of being there type thing.

SuperGent• 8 years ago

I assume it's because its the first plant grown 'on' the moon.

growlist• 8 years ago

I suspect if the US had done it, it would be plastered everywhere.

Ivoirians• 8 years ago

What I heard is that we have data on plant growth on Earth (1G) and on the ISS (0G), but not at reduced gravity like on the Moon (.17G).

bayesian_horse8• 8 years ago

It would be easier to produce the .17G on the ISS (with a centrifuge) than putting these seeds on the moon.

richardknop4• 8 years ago

But that was done on ISS, in Earth's orbit. This is on the Moon which seems like a bit more of a breakthrough. It probably means we can grow plants on every planetary body in the Solar system. So Moon, Mars. Very promising.

arcticfox• 8 years ago

What is the breakthrough part here? If we can grow in 1g and 0g, is 0.2g surprising at all?

kevmo• 8 years ago

It is incredibly disappointing to me that the USA didn't do this decades ago. The USA basically won the space race... then decided to chill out for 50 years. I understand that perhaps we did not want to continue to fund NASA at such a high rate, but NASA budgets still could have focused on this.

Space is the next frontier of humanity's existence. A moon base is a logical, achievable next step in man's space exploration. The technology developed and lessons learned would have broad implications far beyond simply "We have a base on the moon."

Newt Gingrich talked about this idea in his 2012 campaign for president. Despite being a fountain of bad ideas in general, the press seized upon this particular issue as a primary source for mockery of Newt.

This is not to belittle any of the other work NASA has done, much of which is also extremely important. Space research is not a zero-sum game. But a moon base is a concrete, achievable (and still awe-inspiring!) goal that both the scientific and political classes could coalesce around. I hope to see it during my lifetime.

MichaelApproved• 8 years ago

The USA basically won the space race... then decided to chill out for 50 years.

The USA military got what it needed under the cover of a civilian space race.

The US didn't chill after that. It put even more money into rockets but those were funded through the military for ICBMs.

pluma4• 8 years ago

Sending things to (actual) space is expensive. Drones are a lot cheaper than orbital weapons and easier to justify than WMDs.

There's not much profit in sending things beyond Earth orbit as Earth is where all the strategic targets are. So other than satellites there's not much to do in space from a military-industrial point of view.

darkpuma• 8 years ago

"The USA military got what it needed under the cover of a civilian space race."

This sort of cynicism is very popular but largely unfounded. In terms of rocket technology, the moon missions were following in the wake of ICBM tech, not the other way around. The Mercury/Redstone, Mercury/Atlas and Gemini programs were all using rockets that were designed initially as ICBMs (well, the Redstone was an SRBM.) Those rockets were already developed and paid for by the time a civilian applications were found for them.

Consider this timeline of launches: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/USAF_ICB...

'Atlas D' and 'GLV' are the Mercury and Gemini programs, respectively. They both came after the majority of ICBM tests for their military siblings. The military wasn't using rockets built for NASA; NASA was using rockets built for the military.

Then there is the Saturn V itself. A massive purpose built cryogenic liquid propellant rocket first flying in the late 60s. ICBM technology had moved on, cryogenic liquid propellant ICBMs were already discontinued by that time. In 1962 you had the introduction of solid fuel Minutemen and in 1963 the storable fuel Titan II's were brought into service. Both of these rendered cryogenic propellant ICBMs like the Atlas family and the Titan I obsolete, and both were finally fully retired in 1965 (and subsequently recycled as satellite launchers, roles that they served for many years following. The last Titan II launched a weather satellite in 2003.) This is years before the Saturn V ever flew. The Saturn V simply was not an ICBM program.

Now, the Space Shuttle is another matter entirely...

pluma4• 8 years ago

The USA basically won the space race

The USA lost the original space race, then redefined it as "race to the moon", eventually accomplished that and then dropped the ball.

I don't want to denounce the amazing accomplishment of the Apollo programme, but Americans have a tendency to undersell the groundwork laid by the Soviet Union by focusing just on the moon landing.

samblr• 8 years ago

> The organisms inside have a supply of air, water and nutrients to help them grow.

Challenge is with respect to maintaining temperature which swing wildly between -173C and 100C or more.

auiya2• 8 years ago

And, you know, cosmic radiation.

vectorEQ• 8 years ago

all i read was: And it's worth reiterating that there are already nearly 100 bags of human waste on the Moon left behind by the Apollo astronauts

and thought.... what a won-der-ful world :D

dear• 8 years ago

That can be used to fertilize the sprout!

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

Does anyone know where I can find a full write-up of this experiment? I want to replicate it here on Earth but I've been having a hard time finding the info. Documents in Chinese are fine, if you have them.

echevil• 8 years ago

http://news.cqu.edu.cn/newsv2/show-14-16860-1.html

This is from the university that lead the experiment. A control experiment was done as well

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

Thank you!

bayesian_horse8• 8 years ago

It doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. If you can grow plants in pressurized compartments in micro-gravity it should work on the moon, also.

It would have been another thing if they used parts of moon soil and the like.

And this wasn't the first time biological material has grown on the moon. The American astronauts brought plenty of growing biological material with them, too.

Symmetry4• 8 years ago

The issue is that we have an incredible dearth of knowledge about the effects of low gravity compared to either normal gravity or microgravity. If the ISS centrifuge had actually flow the situation might be different but when considering settlement of either the Moon or Mars we desperately need more information about how low gravity affects biological systems.

From the Apollo missions we do know that humans can survive for three days on the Moon, but given that humans can survive for months in orbit this isn't a surprise. But what are the effects on animal gestation? On plant growth? As far as I'm aware there weren't any plants on any of the Apollo missions, though I believe they did experiments with lunar regolith on Earth.

modzu• 8 years ago

wait its not growing in a sample of regolith? i thought that was the point of the experiment (gravity experiments with plants have been done on ISS, no?)

andygates4• 8 years ago

No, the point is growing in lunar gravity. Things get confused and need training by light in microgravity. We really don't know what they do in lunar g; "it just works" is a great result. Boring but useful.

jloughry• 8 years ago

From The Martian by Andy Weir:

"They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially 'colonized' it. So technically, I colonized Mars."

CodeSheikh• 8 years ago

Is it a misleading article since every thing happened in a contained simulated environment and NOT on the Moon? "The plants are in a sealed container on board the lander. The crops will try to form a mini biosphere - an artificial, self-sustaining environment." Only takeaway I can think of is the growth possible in a low-gravity environment

piercebot• 8 years ago

Why cotton?

China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

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