We can mine asteroids for space food

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/how-we-can-mine-asteroids-for-space-food/9EF3C4FA6F32368D09994EB7910C7035

by reinaldnaufal • 2 years ago

168 202 2 years ago

cambridge.org

api2• 2 years ago

This 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• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

To 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.

stoneman242• 2 years ago

Isn’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.

vegetablepotpie• 2 years ago

I’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/S02638...

gibspaulding• 2 years ago

Apparently producing margarine from coal was actually done during WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine?wprov=sfti1#Coal_but...

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• 2 years ago

I was never a fan of margarine, but the more I learn tidbits like this the more I think it strange.

dialup_sounds• 2 years ago

I can't decide if this sounds more like a startup idea or a proposal from the coal lobby.

miffy900• 2 years ago

No 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• 2 years ago

The 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• 2 years ago

ALLFED[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/

pavel_lishin4• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the CHON factories from the Heechee Saga, by Frederik Pohl.

yborg• 2 years ago

My brother in _Gateway_ (1977).

m4632• 2 years ago

Still can't get this series on kindle

doctorwho42• 2 years ago

Don't leave us!!!

twodave2• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

Starmite!

pengaru2• 2 years ago

Minemite

jareklupinski• 2 years 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-ye...

lupire2• 2 years ago

Problem 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?

busssard• 2 years ago

that depends so much on the kind of asteroid i thought.

gus_massa2• 2 years ago

That's the actual plan. It's not explsined in the introduction, but in the middle of the article they explain that they will food bacterias with the proceced material, and later people will eat the bacteria.

speerer• 2 years ago

This is very close to the subject of the article. In the following quotation, "consortia" means (I think) globs of algae:

After comparing the experimental pyrolysis breakdown products, which were able to be converted to biomass using a consortia, it was hypothesized that equivalent chemicals found on asteroids could also be converted to biomass with the same nutritional content as the pyrolyzed products. This study is a mathematical exercise that explores the potential food yield that could be produced from these methodologies.

twodave2• 2 years ago

Ah, thanks. Exposing my non-academic reading comprehension ;)

mkl• 2 years ago

Yes: "A group of symbiotic microbes" - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consortium#English

HenryBemis• 2 years ago

I wanted to paste the very same paragraph and bring up my own dream (for which I hope someone is working hard).

I am a Trekkie. I dream of the day that (in the future, unfortunately far beyond my lifespan) someone will create a Replicator[0] and people will be able to order a burger with a side of fries, a large soda drink to wash it down, and it will be full of vitamins and useful nutrients (minus the garbage/sugar) (or any food from any culture on the planet what will give them the flavor but not the diarrhea)("I wonder how a cockroach tastes").

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Replicator

perihelions• 2 years ago

We're the scary aliens other ETI's make sci-fi horror movies about.

"...and they wield GREY GOO that turns *everything* it touches into nutrients they lap up in their flappy appendages..."

benpacker• 2 years ago

We always have been

josefresco• 2 years ago

I could have done just fine without learning about "grey goo" today thank you very much.

roughly3• 2 years ago

“They’re Made out of Meat” https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

lupire2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Well, 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• 2 years ago

Asteroids which enter a planet's atmosphere will probably yield even better food, because they will be a little meteor.

tessierashpool• 2 years ago

underrated comet

nonethewiser• 2 years ago

stellar even

bpodgursky• 2 years ago

My 3 year old used to think the dinosaurs are gone because a meat eater killed them all.

pengaru2• 2 years ago

The Dodo bird could probably be considered a dinosaur, not entirely wrong...

whycome3• 2 years ago

because 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• 2 years ago

Title should really be "How we might be able to ..."

criddell• 2 years ago

We're just lucky the HN title ruiner bot didn't change it to "We can food"

zelias• 2 years ago

For my Factorio friends out there, this sounds like grounds for a mod that let's you "mine" nutrients in space

Wingy• 2 years ago

This is roughly a thing in Space Age!

Filligree2• 2 years ago

Really? Can you make spoilage somehow?

goda90• 2 years ago

The space version of this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock

ivanjermakov2• 2 years ago

There is one already: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/spaceblock

And a playthrough I enjoyed watching: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqiMv9sOILsrYve0aG200HTQV...

butlike• 2 years ago

Lisa Simpson: "Look (the boar) is licking the slime off that rock! That's what he's been eating: slime!"

coding123• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

I 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_lishin4• 2 years ago

I 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.

Teever3• 2 years ago

But could you use the hydrocarbons on the comet as fuel to change the orbit to a desirable one?

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

Voyager, with with deflection nukes.

tlb• 2 years ago

The 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• 2 years ago

As 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.

jamieplex2• 2 years ago

I 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...

ttyprintk3• 2 years ago

If 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• 2 years ago

Gold 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.

MetallicDragon• 2 years ago

In space, assuming you're not too far out, heat is abundant. Literally just put the ice in an insulated room with a window facing the sun. If you want to get fancy, use mirrors to focus the sunlight.

jamieplex2• 2 years ago

This sounds wrong. Firstly, it is generally around -450 degrees F in space (not toward the sun obviously), and to get that asteroid to continuously point toward the sun on one side is probably not gonna happen, and then that "insulated room" built on the asteroid is exorbitantly expensive by itself if it is of any consequential size, and finally, it is impossibly expensive (from energy cost to time cost to equipment cost) to 'mine' that ice from the asteroid. It ain't just sitting out there in cubes... (not to mention there aren't any asteroids hanging out around the Earth anywhere close, so you WILL be far away)

Terr_6• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

I’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.

throwawaycities2• 2 years ago

Obviously 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.

mmooss2• 2 years ago

There's a distinction - between obvious BS that is a philosophical puzzle to rebut on one hand, and genuine issues on the other. You don't really have to play the game of the former, unless you don't like philosophical puzzles of course.

FrustratedMonky• 2 years ago

What about the atoms?

pests2• 2 years ago

Some people do care about the plants though, such as Jainism. If you draw the line at plants - that's fine, but some others do not and are wondering why you arbitrarily drew that line where you did. Sure some may be joking around but its still a legit concern for some.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

"but what about plants"

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals -- I'm one because I hate plants.

Teever3• 2 years ago

I've wondered about this too and if in our quest to colonize the solar system and mine asteroids we will inadvertently destroy remnants of dead extraterrestrial life or artifacts of alien species such as defunct sentinel probes that were hidden in an asteroid.

It would be tragic if the only proof of alien life in the solar system was gobbled up by some automated asteroid miner that turns asteroids into shitty consumer goods.

m4632• 2 years ago

Is mined food processed food?

jaydeegee• 2 years ago

Every* food is processed food the amount of processing varies.

Terr_6• 2 years ago

Or cooking it, for that matter.

Plus there's the "processing" of an enormous mobile smelter-factory of nanomachines we call the human body. Chop and grind, add peptides, acid-bath, add neutralizing agent, churn with fermentation bacteria...

Yeah, I know, people usually implicitly mean "artificial" processing, but that's often more about who is doing the processing, rather than what kind of process is going on.

InDubioProRubio• 2 years ago

Its definitely natural

jorgesborges2• 2 years ago

This actually makes sense to me in terms of logical coherence. I understand and support people who follow ethically-motivated diets but the fact is a line is always drawn somewhere. Plants are alive. Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s?

I don’t think we’re good at making claims about where particular organisms sit along a gradient of consciousness we can’t even properly define.

I like to imagine other civilizations in the universe might use this basic distinction to evaluate how sophisticated a culture is — do they still needlessly eradicate life for more convenient consumption? Akin to asking, are they still a pre-warp civilization?

PartiallyTyped• 2 years ago

I draw my line based on units of consciousness that I half-arbitrarily assign to different animals. I think most people do so, the assignment seems to be a sort of emergent property of the local society within which any individual is brought up.

wruza• 2 years ago

In my book about distant civilizations they eradicate all life except the forms that are able to function as you described. Because it’s pointless to just avoid participating in a meat grinder that life itself is naturally. The point is to stop anything that suffers from suffering. They dream about visiting every world and eradicating unascended lifes there for that same reason.

jraph2• 2 years ago

Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s?

A rabbit probably ate a lot of carrots, you are better off eating just the carrot directly if you want to reduce the killing :-)

tialaramex2• 2 years ago

Many years ago my lecturer, Professor Stevan Harnad drew the line at backbones, if you have a spine or similar arrangement it's not OK to eat you. These days Harnad is a Vegan, which entails prohibition against a much larger array of animals being eaten or indeed taken advantage of in any way for your benefit.

There is no reason to imagine that if there was alien life it would be able to comprehend us at all, for fictional convenience it has been usual to depict aliens as basically just humans in Halloween costume and there is every reason to assume they would be entirely incomprehensible instead. Even in soft SF, try say Iain M Banks' repeated reference to other forms of life which show essentially no interest in the scale of events that our human-like characters are engaged with. The Stellar Field Liner, a vast entity living in the magnetosphere of a star, the Excession, seemingly a living portal to other universes, or even just the Dirigible Behemothaurs which are island sized creatures that think a Galactic Cycle (225 million Earth years) is not very long.

lkbm• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure you draw the same line:

* Pealing a carrot: not cruel

* Skinning a rabbit alive: unnecessarily cruel

For all the nonsense about plants experiencing "pain", they, uh, don't. Animals do. Outside of bad philosophical arguments, everyone behaves broadly in accordance with that belief.

aylmao• 2 years ago

I know a lot of people choose to draw lines, but I personally don't think it's necessarily a "line" one has to draw. I think this is best thought of as a gradient. A rabbit is more like us, than a carrot. It has eyes, a backbone, moms take care of their babies, etc. We look at a dogs and can clearly see loyalty, happiness, longing, etc— emotions we associate a lot with humanity.

Where these animals fall in the "they're similar to a human" gradient is highly subjective, especially since it may have an emotional component to it. But we don't have to all agree on the definition of this gradient when the consequences (what to eat) are very personal.

I will say though I admire this in humans. We have achieved plentifulness to the point we can attach moral and emotional meaning to our diet if we wish to. It's a pretty unique expression of our empathy.

otikik• 2 years ago

I think the distinction has always been between "alive" and "conscious", not between "alive" and "dead". A rabbit is more self-aware than a carrot, we think (because it has a central nervous system).

If you dig deep enough, the frontier between alive and death is actually blurry. Things like viruses challenge the intuitive understanding of what alive means.

The water cycle makes it so that any water that you consume today will probably have been part of some other alive being at some point in the past.

tayo42• 2 years ago

Some creatures are really weird too. Cutting up urchins for uni made me think what is really alive or what animals really are

tzs• 2 years ago

Plants are alive. Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s?

Some have indeed wondered about plant rights. There is even a vegetable rights protest song, "Carrot Juice is Murder" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

Well said a carrot and a rabbit are equal you can eat both.

Terr_6• 2 years ago

You can also take it in the opposite direction: Primitives don't have control over their own integrated ecological web.

jajko• 2 years ago

But there will never ever be such guarantee that could be taken seriously. How do you know that 2 star generations ago (so say roughly 10 billion years ago), in our previous neighborhood, a massive hypernova wiped out advanced civilization and you are now just consuming molecules that were once part of sentient living being, even with IQ much higher than yours?

Nah, you can never be 100% sure, its one of those situations reachable only on paper.

Terr_6• 2 years ago

The phrasing "any known living organism" already excludes that.

Even if it didn't, a guarantee in product marketing is a promise and quasi-legal committment, not a certification of objective universal cosmic truth.

In some cases, everybody knows that statistically there will be at least one case where the guarantee is broken, but that doesn't void anything.

polynomial• 2 years ago

Almost certainly Food of the Gods by Arthur C. Clarke.

ElevenLathe• 2 years ago

Bruce Sterling's /Islands in the Net/ has a character that is this kind of vegan (forget what they call it). He finds the idea of agricultural food disgusting and only eats sterile synthetic food.

Edit: had the wrong Sterling book.

zoklet-enjoyer• 2 years ago

I've been vegan since 2002 and would be down to go on a fully synthetic vegan diet. I used to be a heavy consumer of Soylent

luqtas3• 2 years ago

veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend. no vegan is ditching transportation or plastic because it may contain by-products of the animal industry... thus if one day we can make food out of minerals, for sure that would be vegan; although i can't see ANY harm done to a fruit tree or a soybean/corn that dries out because of its short life cycle being a 'bad thing' but maybe minerals based food will avoid taking land of native species

dgfitz• 2 years ago

veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend

I don’t think there are enough current or future vegans in the world to negate anything at all.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

veganism is about reducing suffering to a practical extend

There is genuine debate around whether plants suffer. The answer seems to be “no,” at least not in a way we’d recognise as suffering. But that ambiguity is more than enough to spawn a movement. Ethically-harvested honey doesn’t harm bees, for instance, and family dairies can blur the line between animal husbandry and petkeeping.

mr_toad• 2 years ago

Food using molecules certified never to have been part of any known living organism.

Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature. There’s only a finite supply. And humans have come to monopolise it. We should worry less about killing individual creatures and worry a lot more about wiping out entire species.

Terr_6• 2 years ago

Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature.

That contains a very-unproven assumption that other biological life was present prior to the ignition of our Sun and formation of the solar system... Or that there are "living creatures" in solar plasma.

coldtea2• 2 years ago

Over the aeons they have almost certainly been part of some living creature.

There are neither enough aeons (10-20 billion years of universe), nor enough living creatures for that.

There’s only a finite supply*

Finite supply doesn't mean all possible permutations have happenned. It's also not like an infinitely old universe (and even one like that wouldn't necessarily have permutations of molecule arrangements where thats statement is true).

wrp• 2 years ago

fictional advertisement for such a product in a sci-fi story

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl

The artificial food was called CHON.

ashoeafoot2• 2 years ago

Part of the gateway trilogy

pugworthy• 2 years ago

This 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) and consider the arguments made against there and whether they would apply here.

adastra222• 2 years ago

You 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.

roughly3• 2 years ago

The 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.

anon84873628• 2 years ago

That article states that we don't conclusively know how much the "processing" itself leads to bad health outcomes, versus the nutrient content / hyper-palatability / etc.

But in any case, the situation in space is going to be very different. You'll be eating a highly tuned macro & micro nutrient profile down to the individual calorie. There is no room for junk food or mindless eating. So most of today's problems with processed food will be irrelevant.

Whatever contribution the "processing" plays will eventually be isolated and mitigated with yet further inventions. Yes it's the pinnacle of the scientific reductionism hubris that many people find objectionable.

4b11b4• 2 years ago

still need fiber though

pyrolistical• 2 years ago

Wouldn’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_lishin4• 2 years ago

Where 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• 2 years ago

Turns out you can grow plants in lunar regolith: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

From 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• 2 years ago

I 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.

lm284692• 2 years ago

That'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• 2 years ago

Yes, but without a proper replicator, how does it taste? Burnt toast? Three week old socks? Munster cheese?

amanaplanacanal• 2 years ago

Velikovsky 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Eating like an elephant, I see

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Reading 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• 2 years 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/S09242...

[2] https://www.darpa.mil/program/cornucopia

gus_massa2• 2 years ago

Their 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• 2 years ago

Variations of that idea definitely work. Light is optional for plants with adequate nutrient uptake from mediums like agar.

Simon_ORourke• 2 years ago

Hydroponics already works.

I read something on wired last year on why urban vertical farming never really took off, and one of the reasons was, if I remember, that these kind of environments increase the likelihood of plant disease and the density makes it difficult to arrest any spread.

So, I'm not too sure that hydroponics at scale is completely solved.

Iulioh3• 2 years ago

It's a price problem, not a technical one

lupusreal• 2 years ago

The big reason is growing food in wide open fields is almost always more economical. Urban farming is mostly advocated for by people who spend too much time in urban areas and don't have a solid grasp on the scale of the rest of the world.

adrian_b2• 2 years ago

Plants feed on oxidized compounds, i.e. water, carbon dioxide and dinitrogen, plus solar energy. Because carbon dioxide and dinitrogen are very volatile they must be taken from atmosphere.

Reduced organic compounds, like hydrocarbons, are not food for plants, but for fungi or similar organisms, which, like humans, need only dioxygen from the atmosphere.

There already are genetically-modified fungi that can produce the complete proteins required by humans (i.e. whey proteins or egg-white proteins) when fed with cheap carbohydrates and ammonia or a simple amino-acid. There are also fungi that can feed on hydrocarbons.

Creating genetically-modified fungi able to feed on hydrocarbons and produce glucose and proteins for human consumption is not far from the already existing technology. With a serious effort in this direction, this could be solved in a decade or so. The glucose and proteins produced by fungi would be used not only for direct consumption, but also for feeding other microbial cultures that are needed for producing vitamins and essential fatty acids, using the techniques that are already in use today for this purpose.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

Do plants take nitrogen from the atmosphere? There's plenty of it available, but my understanding was that molecular nitrogen likes being molecular nitrogen and is difficult to react into a useful form.

If plants took nitrogen from the atmosphere, there would be no issue of fixing nitrogen in the ground. But instead, that's a huge issue. We also provide nitrogen fertilizer, which is another way of getting it into the ground. Why would we do that?

And similarly, I was pretty sure that most plants got their hydrogen and oxygen from water, which they draw out of the ground with special, purpose-dedicated organs called "roots". Their stylized interaction with the air is carbon dioxide in, molecular oxygen out. That's a source of carbon and maybe a little oxygen. The atmosphere doesn't even contain any significant amount of hydrogen.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

Because carbon dioxide and dinitrogen are very volatile they must be taken from atmosphere.

I don't follow the logic. These two ideas are definitely compatible - oxygen is very volatile, and it's present in significant quantities in the atmosphere, and therefore can be (and is) taken from the atmosphere.

But they seem to me to be in tension rather than supporting each other. Oxygen is present in the atmosphere, but _because_ it is very volatile, it's constantly reacting with stuff on the ground, which is a process that tends to eliminate it from the atmosphere. What's the reasoning that suggests that the volatility of carbon dioxide means it has to be taken from the atmosphere?

evoke4908• 2 years ago

I'm extremely amused (and totally unsurprised) that the military has palatability requirements for soldier chow

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Well soldiers tend to be armed and trained. Unlike say inmates or school children or hospital patients....

jojobas• 2 years ago

Your tax dollars at work. By the time we're ready to fly to deep space we'll no longer be a protein life form.

coldtea2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I bet we mine asteroids for minerals-to-sell before we do for minerals-to-eat.

rajamaka• 2 years ago

why not minerals-to-sell-to-eat?

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

The 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• 2 years ago

That'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".

ashoeafoot2• 2 years ago

And 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• 2 years ago

I 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.

JoeAltmaier2• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

Perhaps 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.

JoeAltmaier2• 2 years 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.

lm284692• 2 years ago

Looks like we'll be sucking rocks before solving climate change, the future is bright!

foundry27• 2 years ago

This 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• 2 years ago

Also, Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky

johnea• 2 years ago

Buck 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!

We can mine asteroids for space food

Related Stories