How to keep Martians fed and happy

Daniel and Kelly talk about the future of food in space. Do you like lukewarm cricket tacos? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
In nineteen ninety one, eight people entered Biosphere two. You
may have heard of Biosphere two. There was a polychchore
movie sort of based on Biosphere in the nineties, and
as a child of the nineties, I of course watched
it and learned so much about the value of friendship.
But Biosphere two was a three point one four acre
enclosure out in the Arizona Desert that was meant to

(00:30):
replicate Biosphere one, which is the Earth. So they had
a rainforest, a marsh, an ocean with the coral reef,
a desert, a savannah, agricultural fields, and human habitats. And
the people who started this giant experiment had future settlements
in space in mind. If you could figure out how
our Earth works and you can miniaturize that, maybe you

(00:51):
can take that out with you into space and create
sustainable habitats for humans in space. But during this first run,
the men lost eight teen percent of their body weight
and the women lost ten percent. They just were not
able to create enough food to keep themselves going. And
this was despite the fact that they were spending an
average of eight to ten hours a day five and

(01:12):
a half hours a week doing this kind of stuff.
And that doesn't even include the other kinds of things
that you would have to do if you were, you know,
trying to make a living on Mars, like running a
power plant. Biosphere too was running off of the grid,
so on Mars there'd be all this extra stuff like
crewing the solar panels that you'd have to worry about.
But we need more experiments like these. Probably it would

(01:33):
be better to start on a smaller scale and then
sort of scale up so we can understand the systems better.
But we need these kinds of experiments where you're in
a closed environment. The amount of plants that you're growing
determine how much oxygen you get and how much carbon
dioxide is extracted from the atmosphere. We need to prove
to ourselves that we can live in these systems while
growing sustainable amounts of food. These experiments take time because

(01:55):
they happen at the pace of ecology, which is slow.
So today we're going to talk about what we've learned
from these kind of closed loop systems so far and
what other kinds of challenges we might have as we
attempt to grow food to keep ourselves alive on Mars.
So welcome to episode two of our series on food
in space and Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
UC Irvine, and I would never ever ever go into
biosphere too voluntarily.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
I am Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites. I have been
dying to visit biosphere too. Like I'm thinking of going
to a conference in Arizona so that I'll be close
enough to visit biosphere too. Why don't you want to
go in the same reason.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
I get the chills when I visit Alcatraz and they
ask you to step into the cells, and I'm like, oo,
feels like you will asking to get trapped.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Huh. So I am claustrophobic, and I went into a
cave on with family and was like, I have to
get out of here. But I think three point one
four acres is big enough that I don't feel trapped.
But anyway we can differ.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, let me ask you another question about that kind
of scenario. Imagine you're living on the surface of Mars,
struggling to survive. Is there some kind of food that's
so gross you'd rather starve than eat it and survive.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Oh man, Okay, Well, so first, I just finished re
listening to the story of Adolphus Greeley's trip to the Arctic,
and I think that what you learn from a book
like that is that when you're hungry enough, you will
eat anything.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Did he like boil his shoelaces and make tea or something?

Speaker 1 (03:45):
He did? Yeah, they were eating their shoes at the
end there.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Oh no, that was a joke.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, no, it gets bleak. They were also accused of cannibalism,
but there's no solid evidence, but a lot of them
didn't make it. So I'm sure that if I got
to that point, I also be eating my shoes. But
I can say that most of the food that I've
read about as it pertains to life in space are
not things that I think would be delicious. Like I

(04:10):
happen to come from a culture that doesn't eat a
lot of insects, and that seems to be a major
recommended protein source in space. And you can find recipes
for how to like hide insects by like grinding them
and like mixing it up with wheat, so you can
have like cricket bread that doesn't taste so crickety, but
I don't know what about you. Are you more adventurous.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I'm pretty adventurous, and I think it's hard to predict
how you'd react in those situations. But I've thought about
the cannibalism question, like would I rather starve or eat people?
Oh boy, I'm very happy to not be in that
situation because I don't know how I would react. Probably
i'd be eating people.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
I mean, I think if I was gonna die before
the rest of my crew, I would want them to
eat me because I wouldn't want them to die. If
they could like stretch it out and increase the probability
that they.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Live, wouldn't matter who though.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
I mean, I guess if I had a death wish
for someone, I feel differently. But uh, and you probably
reading about how these like closed loop systems work. Often
the crews end up hating each other, like in biospheric,
you know, they were spitting on each other. So maybe
I'd be like, you know, Jane can eat me, but
Brian cannot, and that is my dying wish.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yeah, or especially if you're on a colony you might
be related to some of these people. You're like, all right,
my kids can eat me, but don't share me with
the Millers over there, because you know they've been jerks.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, Oh, let's get space gets weird fast.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
I know exactly. And that's why space is so fascinating,
because we know it's gonna be tough. We know it's
going to be difficult, we know we're gonna have to
push the limits of human ingenuity but also probably the
limits of human experience and culture and what we think
is appropriate.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah. I think that there's some things that you can
learn by looking at like Arctic expeditions, and I think
we should have an episode on that in the future.
But you know, you see that people will do so
I think two lessons there. One, people will do extraordinary
things to survive, but two, they still treat each other
really well at the end in most situations like there,

(06:17):
you know, as the Greeley expedition members were starving to death,
they were like spoon feeding each other and holding each
other and like they were it was very well sweet,
I don't know sweet sweets the right word, but their
humanity was maintained even in the case of this, this
horrible situation. It gives you a bit of hope for humanity.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Well, maybe they were just exceptionally nice people, because I'm
not sure everybody would end up babing so well, yeah, fair.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
And then the question is are humans nutritionally complete? I
don't know if they are, so you also, you know,
there's a lot to think about when you're eating in Mars.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Do you need to add beans to your meal to
get all your proteins? Yes? Great question. Yes, And these
are just a sampling of the questions we're gonna be
talking about today as we explore how humans can feed
themselves in Space episode Part two.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
So, Daniel, I'm wondering if any of the people that
you talked to on the street brought cannibalism up in
the conversation as quickly as we did when you ask
them about food on Mars.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Let's find out. I walked around the campus if you
see Irvine, and I asked people what they thought was
going to be the biggest challenge to feeding people in
a colony on Mars. If you would like to contribute
to these audience participation segments in the future, please don't
be shy. Write to us two questions at danieland Kelly
dot org. We'd love to have your voice on the podcast.

(07:35):
So think about it for a minute. What do you
think is the greatest challenge to feeding astronauts on Mars?
And is it finding the right marinade recipe for human thoughts?

Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (07:45):
No, too much, this whole episode I might dump.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
I'm just slowly trying to change your opinion about cannibalism,
because really it's just a cultural thing.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
You know, there's a culture that was really into it,
and they got this protein disease called kubru, and so
I think there's good disease related reasons to not eat
your family.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
All right, pull your biologists credentials there.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Fine, But I do have an expert on cannibalism that
we could talk to in a future episode because I
know all the best people.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
That sounds great as long as it's not over dinner.
Let's get back to our audience participation segment. Here to
folks around the uc Irvine had to say about challenges
of living on Mars. The astronauts could make sprouts and
stuff like that, so on Mars a few ways to
do that too.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
I mean, we all saw The Martian.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
The Martian was not a documentary, but the process felt feasible,
Like they need water there first, to supply it, and
the climate.

Speaker 4 (08:46):
I guess how cold it is. Nutrients in the soil,
so you have to bring like nitrogen, and I think
we basically have to find ways to make local fertilizer possible.
I mean also, I think at some point, like there's
this the bare minimum to keep people alive. It keeps
you alive, but it's horrific and nobody's gonna want to
come to Mars, so there's kind of a marketing inside

(09:08):
of this.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
Well, so far we have not established an a sort
of colony on Mars there we could even grow any food.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
So it's a bit of a premature question, to be honest.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
I guess he did it in that movie The Martian
and not supposed to be accurate.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Not a documentary.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Not a documentary. No, that's right, But I guess you'd
have to do it someday. And you've got some frozen
water in the ice caps, so people always talk about
terraforming it and getting that liquid water, so maybe it's possible.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Well, no one brought up cannibalism, which is a little disappointing,
but you know, I'm glad they focused on the more
immediate challenges. Yes, water came up a few times. One
of the great things about Mars actually is that there's
kind of a lot of water. So there's water at
the poles and just about anywhere you go. If you
dig down far enough, you're gonna hit frozen water. We're
gonna talk a little later in the show about some

(09:58):
of the problems with that water, and it's going to
be hard to get, but there's water, whereas on the
Moon there's a lot less than it's even harder to get.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
One thing I've found fascinating is how many people refer
to The Martian, and it's very entertaining, but it's also
amazing how much science people seem to have learned from
that movie.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yes, so I like The Martian because it got a
lot of things right. So, like, Mars has one percent
of Earth's atmosphere, so you do get dust storms that
kick up like or that can engulf the entire planet.
But because you only have one percent of the atmosphere,
those winds are not probably strong enough to like knock
over a rocket. And as you correctly noted in these interviews,

(10:41):
it is not a documentary, and so it wasn't one
hundred percent correct, but it was very well researched, and
you know, I think it's fine for fiction to take
some scientific license.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Something I found fascinating is how many people saw the
movie and didn't understand that it was a made up story.
A bunch of people came out of theater and thought, oh,
this is a true story about something that really happened
to somebody on Mars.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
No.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Really, a lot of people googling like is The Martian
a true story after they saw the movie, which is
like maybe a testament to the apparent realism of it.
But yeah, you're right, there's definitely some science issues with
that movie.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
And again, I don't think that's a problem in my mind.
That's the only thing that matters is that you create
a world and then you stay consistent with the rules
you made for that world. And I think The Martian
was incredible, not complaining, but yeah, also not a documentary. Also,
when I was researching a city on Mars, I was
surprised by how many people in the literature on settlements
would be like, well, could such and such happen well

(11:45):
in the expanse, And I'm like, dudes, that's fiction too,
And like, I know the author, he's a great guy,
but He's like, he hasn't been there. None of us
have the author's quarrel, right, because there's two of them.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
The expanse not a textbook, you.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
Say, yes, that's right, very well thought out, great character development.
Not a textbook.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Well, I've written a lot of science papers and have
never cited science fiction in those papers. So maybe that's
something I should try. That sounds like a lot of fun.
But today we're not talking about science fiction. We are
talking about science, and I'm very excited to hear about
the science. I'm growing food on Mars whether we do
need to be pooping in our own gardens. But first, Kelly,
you were going to tell us about experiences here on

(12:28):
Earth that are sort of simulations for what life might
be like on Mars. Where do we start with that.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Well, let's start back in the nineteen sixties in the
Soviet Union, so while the space race was heating up
the Soviets, we're interested in figuring out like, okay, not
just how do you grow food on Mars, but how
do you make that food work for you in a
lot of different ways. So if you are in a
sealed environment, every time you breathe out that carbon dioxide
it just builds up and it could suffocate you. And

(12:56):
you know, people complain about headaches way before the suffocation happens.
So you could have chemicals and devices that remove the
carbon dioxide, but you could also just let the plants
do that work for you. And so they try to
come up with systems where the plants pull out the
carbon dioxide. The plants also produce the oxygen that you breathe,
and then you can like recycle the plant material, maybe

(13:18):
by feeding something else with it. And so just trying
to be as efficient and good at recycling as possible.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
So making a system which is enclosed and self sufficient
and where things support each other so you don't need
to be injecting supplies from the outside. That makes sense.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, it's so expensive to ship stuff from Earth to space,
and the stuff that you have you want to get
the most use out of. So you know, anything that
you can stretch the use of in space like you
want to do. And you know, every once in a
while it feels like this goes in cycles. But people
will get really excited about algae and so, you know,
algae grows fast. It you know, takes up carbon dioxide,

(13:51):
releases oxygen, it like you can grow it in a vat,
so you can get a lot of it in a
small area. And so the first experiment was called bios
that we're focusing on growing algae, an attempt to like
do a bunch of this stuff. And it worked pretty
well actually, but a major complaint was that algae sucks
to eat, and like.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Does it taste as bad as it smells, because it
don't smell great.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
No, it smells awful. I hate that smell actually, And
I actually lived with two roommates who studied algae, and
they smelled great, but like they did not enjoy talking
to me about algae because I would always tell them
how bad it smells.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
But you know, also, like blue cheese doesn't smell great,
and if you smell blue cheese for the first time,
you're like gross. So I wonder if algae is just
like an acquired taste, maybe in a thousand years people
will be like, oh my gosh, have you had this
algae vintage? It's incredibly complex.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Well, I can at least tell you that the Soviets
in this experiment did not come to that conclusion, and
so in the second iteration they added another wing where
they grew plants that were not algae, and then in
the third iteration, they were like, look, it's not worth
having any algae because none of us want to eat
this stuff. And so then they had two wings that
were just growing more traditional plants.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
So do you think if it came down to it,
they'd be like, I'd rather starve than eat more algae, Like, really,
I'm just not going to do it.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
I think the answer to this question is always going
to be when it comes between death and eating something else,
we become way less picky. Do you disagree?

Speaker 2 (15:20):
I don't know. I feel kind of picky, but also
I know the human drive to survive is very, very powerful,
and people do basically anything in that situation. But based
on my knowledge of the documentary The Martian, it makes
me wonder in an enclosed environment like that, what happens
to the people's poop? Like are they pooping in their garden?
Is that for real?

Speaker 1 (15:39):
That is for real in a lot of these systems.
I don't think they were doing that in these bios systems,
But when we move on to some of the other
systems we're going to talk about, yes they are, and
in space I think absolutely you're going to need those microbes,
you're going to need those nutrients, and you're just going

(16:00):
to have to be really careful to make sure that
you're not transmitting any diseases, so you can like screen
for stuff ahead of time. I think using human waste
on fields that's called like night soil or something like that.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
That's a good name for it.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Well, yeah, it sounds way less, way more appealing when
you call it that, but you do get diseases transmitted
that way, so you have to be really careful about
how you do that. And I think that's why we
don't tend to do that in a lot of areas
where we're able to avoid it.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
That reminds me of a dinner I had once in
France at some fancy restaurant where my wife ordered a
particular kind of dish she'd never seen before, and the
waiter warned her that the dish had quote a barnyard aroma.
She ordered it anyway, and yes, when it came it
smell like poop. What was it? It was some kind

(16:50):
of horrible sausage. I tried it also, I was like,
I just cannot eat that. Oh my gosh. You know,
the French they're very creative with their meat dishes, and
they eat a lot of things that a lot of
other people would be like, yeah, that's not food.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
People will sometimes say that goat milk has a barnyard
after taste, and it does, but that's just the taste
of hay, which is way better than the taste of
feces or the smell of feces. So I guess there's
a variety of barnyard tastes out there.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
So but back to BIOS three, they didn't have goats,
they didn't have barnyards. When is this all happening? Is
this like in the middle of the space race?

Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah, so it's before So sixty five was the first one,
so before we landed on the Moon in sixty nine. Oh,
and then they kept it going so like they I
think BIOS three was in nineteen seventy two, and then
the Soviet Union started running out of money and so
they kind of stopped. But like they so for a
while they were spending like twenty percent of their time
just like sort of tinkering with the system. So it
was very time intensive and they never achieved complete closure. Like,

(17:51):
for example, they weren't growing meat, they didn't have cows
in there, but quote Siberians must have their meat was
a quote I found in one of the papers. So
they were like doing meat deliveries regularly. And actually talked
to a guy who was born in Siberia and I
was like, Oh, it's so funny, and he's like, you
don't understand. In Siberia you need meat to stay alive.

(18:12):
And I'm like, I'm not sure that scientifically sound, but
I'm going to stop pushing you on the meat question.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, what's interesting If you're going for a closed loop
system and then you're like importing meat and you're exporting
human poop, it feels like you're not really close to
a closed loop system. Are you still learning something because
you're doing some closed loop stuff people haven't done before.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
I think you're still learning something. So like you're getting
a handle on how long it takes to maintain these systems,
and you know, maybe a little bit about the psychology
of living in these systems, a little bit of information
about food production, but you know, so biosphere too. One
of the exciting things about that was that their goal
was nothing, no food comes in, and there were some

(18:52):
rumors that maybe like liquor snuck in at some point,
but like, I mean they lost the men lost eighteen
percent of their weight, the women lost ten, and so
like they were really they were sticking to it. But
they had the benefit of being on the grid, so
they didn't have to like worry about power or you know,
like cleaning solar panels or anything like that. And they
had these giant lungs that equilibrated the pressure, so like

(19:15):
on warm days, you know, like the air would expand
and so and the lungs would sort of adjust to
make sure that, you know, like the panels didn't burst
and break and fall in on them. So like they
did a good job of closing things, but there were
still things that they were able to, you know, benefit
from because they were on the Earth.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
And so do we have like a linear progression from
the earliest efforts that are less closed loop to the
later efforts that are more closed loop or like making
progress or are we making progress? Or is it sort
of like a random assortment of Hey, let's try this,
let's try that.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
You know, one of the most frustrating things about space
settlement related research is that it does seem to be
a grab bag of someone who's like, oh, I have
the right knowledge that to answer this question. And I've
got the right knowledge that to answer this question, and
there's no like funding for like. This is the like
step wise path we're going to take to get to
the answer. It's a bit more of a hodgepodge. Lunar

(20:09):
palace is one of the more recent ones.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
So what is lunar palace?

Speaker 1 (20:13):
So that is a facility in China. The palace part
is actually an acronym the permanent astro based life support
artificial closed ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, do they have an acronym generating facility within their
experiment in case they need new acronyms so they don't
have to import them from the outside.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
I mean they should, they should. And you know, if
there's a space race heating up between China and the US,
we should at least worry about China's acronym game because
they're rocking it.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Oh really, well, they're winning the acronym racey.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
I mean it's close, it's neck and neck.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
All right, I want to hear about this amazing acronym facility,
but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're

(21:10):
back and we are importing ideas into your mind and
exporting night soil. You know what that means. And we're
hearing about early efforts to try to learn how to
grow food on alien planets by practicing enclosed environments here
on Earth. And you were telling us about the Chinese
Lunar Palace. So this is neither a palace, nor is
it on the Moon.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
I'm guessing that's right, but it is preparing for settlements
on the Moon eventually. And in my mind, this is
the most impressive closed loop system that's been set up
so far. So Biosphere two was like huge, but it's
so complicated that if something goes wrong, it's kind of
hard to tinker with the system to figure out, like

(21:50):
what would you would do differently if you are on Mars.
So Lunar Palace started a little smaller. They had two
wings where they were growing plants, and then they had
an area where like humans could live, and there was
a meeting space, and then they had a bathroom and
a waste treatment area. So they were trying to like
reuse the water from the urine. I think they were

(22:11):
using the feces for fertilizer, but actually I'm forgetting if
they did that for sure, but they did a great
job at capturing the water that they breathed out, that
they used for showers, that they urinated, and I think
eventually they made it to one hundred percent like water recycling.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Kind of like they do in Dune, that other documentary.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
Oh, there's so many space documentaries. Yes, so impressive. I
watched the more recent version of that documentary just the
other day.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
And for anybody out there who's not getting the joke,
obviously Dune, he's not a documentary. Don't write us emails
about how Dune exact right fiction? But you're saying that
they did actually achieve some amount of recycling all of
their water like they do induce.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
Yes, and there is a worm connection. So Dune there
were those giant worms. There are not giant worms in
the Lunar Palace. And I'm going to stretch this to
make the connection. But so they one of the things
that they did that was unique in this facility is
that they took meal worms.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Oh no, are we about to eat worms?

Speaker 1 (23:13):
We're about to eat worms? Yeah, So meal worms they've
got like an exoskeleton, so they're not like the worms
in your garden. They like become beetles eventually, so they
were feeding the meal worms on the wasst the plant waste,
and so any part of the plant that wasn't digestible
by the people was being turned into protein by the worms.

(23:33):
And they created a meal plan, and the meal plan
they were able to grow seventy eight percent of the
food by weight for this meal plan, and they included
the worms for like a protein source. They did bring
in things like different kinds of spices.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
So they're saying they're using the meal worm to turn
the plant waste in the proteins, and then they're just
directly eating the worms.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yes, they would season them to make them more palatable,
and they'd like fry them up and stuff, and so
they had a couple different like recipes for preparing them.
But yes, they were being incredibly efficient. And so while
this makes a lot of Westerners like you and I
not hungry, you know that's not true. And other places
in the world, other places in the world are way
more comfortable with eating insects than we are.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
So you're saying these Chinese lunar palasin knots or whoever
whatever you call these folks living there were totally cool
with this meal worm based diet. They were like yum
yum yum, put some soy sauce on it, and it's good.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
There was a survey and they raided the food favorably,
And I mean it could be because, like if a
lot of the people who do analogs are people who
are hoping that eventually this their nation Space Agency will
send them to space. So maybe they were like, I
am just such a good sport about everything. These meal
worm tacos are just the best thing I've ever eaten.

(24:42):
But they did report that they liked it.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Well, I have a science question for you, which is
I get how turning that plant matter into protein is useful,
but can't we have another layer there, Like, can't you
have something that we'd like to eat, eat the meal worms,
you know, feed the meal worms to talapia or something.
Have a fish farm, then yeah, you get to eat
fish and the fish get to eat mealworms and everybody's happy.

(25:04):
Do you lose a lot of efficiency there because you're
like one step up the pyramid? Or is that pretty efficient?

Speaker 1 (25:10):
So this is a great question. Almost every plan that
I read for settlements on Mars stopped at insects. So
every time an animal eats another animal, you lose a
lot of energy as it like converts what it ate
into its own like muscle mass. A lot of that
gets like lost as heat. So every time you add
a step in the food chain, you're losing some of
the calories that you could have produced.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
So the way, like it takes a huge amount of
corn to support one cow, So you could replace a
burger with like a huge amount of corn, eat a
lot more food if you eat the corn directly exactly.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, So I think there's zero chance of us bringing
cows to space and then your term, because they like
take up a lot of space and they fart a lot.
You're gonna need to like clean the air a lot.
I wasn't even seeing chickens like listed as something that
we could handle bringing with us to space right now.
I mean, they make a huge mess and they're just
not efficient. I feel like eventually we're going to have

(26:01):
to have that kind of stuff. So when I was
talking to people about like what we're going to do
so some you know, one person pointed out that a
lot of people who start as vegetarians are vegans, something
like eighty four percent of them can't stick with it,
at least in Western diets, and I personally was a
vegetarian for two years and then I had a craving
for Arby's beef and cheddar sandwiches that I just could not.
My husband is like that. So my husband's been a

(26:23):
vegetarian for twenty five years and he's like that is
just so depressing that that's what threw you off.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Is it a pregnancy related thing? Was it when you
were pregnant?

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, No, wasn't pregnant. I was an undergrad.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
You can't even blame it on the fetus.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
No, maybe it was a hangover related thing, which anyway, Arby's,
if you want to advertise on our show, where we're
open for that. But so they were trying to figure out, like, well,
what do you do if you know that the people
in your facility are going to be sad on Mars
if they're not eating meat, And so their proposals were

(26:56):
it's called so based meats. But the ideas you like,
take cells from cows, for example, and you feed them
all the nutrients that those cells need to divide, and
you grow them and essentially like a nutrient filled vat
and then all you need is the cells and so
you don't need the whole animal. There's a lot of
waste that way, and you don't have to worry about
like humane treatment of those animals, and so you can

(27:17):
still get the cells. That science is like it's coming
along pretty well. But like you know, when you bite
into a steak or something, there's actually a lot of
different cell types that are in that steak that contribute
to the taste. And so I think trying to create
a taste that is similar to actually eating cow if
you're someone who eats cow, is difficult. But maybe bringing

(27:39):
these cell based solutions with us will be a way
to make it happen.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
So you're saying, we can't bring cows, but we could
grow real meat sort of in the lab without having
the whole animal, just by growing the cells. I think
I've seen people do that here, Like they even just
ban that in Florida because people were worried about the
effect on the industry or something.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Oh that's a bummer. So, like, I'm excited about this
idea because it seems less environmentally damaging and far more humane.
So I'm excited about this technology personally, but I can
see how, yes, lobbyists would not be happy to have
cattle farms replaced by vats, and it does feel kind
of dystopiing it's.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Sort of weird indeed, bad grown meat. But is it
a lot more efficient or does it require as much
or just different resources like energy, etc.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
I am not an expert. My sense is that it
is more efficient, but I don't know that for sure.
It's possible that those factories have some complicated extra stuff
that makes it less efficient.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well. Also, just in terms of satisfying the Siberians, plant
based products that taste like meat have come a long way, right,
A lot of people happily eat impossible burgers or beyond
burgers or whatever.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah. Yeah, So my husband has tried a bunch of
those kinds of like fake meat. I call them feet
and he doesn't appreciate that. But every once in a while,
Who'll be like, oh, man, try this hot dog. It
tastes just like a hot dog. And I was like,
you haven't had I eat in twenty five years. It
does not taste like a hot dog. Actually, I like
eating a lot of those foods, but in my head,

(29:06):
I never think, oh, I'm eating a hot dog. I
think like, oh, I'm eating something different. This is like
protein something different. I don't classify it as meat in
my head.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
I was a vegetarian for a long time, and when
I was I wasn't into the whole like meat replacement things.
I was like, I'm a vegetarian. I'm into vegetables. I
like vegetables. Let's make an eggplant, let's roasta cauliflower, Like,
let's eat the vegetables as vegetables and not force them
to pretend to be meat. But it brings up an
interesting question about these colonies, Like you have to think
not just about the initial colonists who just want to

(29:38):
survive and will be able to choke down meal worms,
but you want to build a self sustaining population that
lives and has quality of life and joy and can
have barbecues and whatever. And so you're right, you need
to build up this technology to have like different kinds
of foods and actually tasty foods, not just Shackleton styles
scraping by.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah, but like even I Shackleton Expedition, they got to
like kill penguins and have fresh meat.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
All right, So we'll talk more about growing food on
Mars and the science of that, But you're telling us
about the lunar Palace is that's sort of the epitome
of examples of growing things in a self sustained colony
on Earth.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, there's some companies who are trying to do stuff
like this on the small scale, but in my mind,
Lunar Palace is the facility that has managed to close
the most things while doing the best recycling. But there's
still a lot to learn. So like, they had a
run where it was three guys in there, and the
carbon dioxide levels were like fluctuating up and down. They
were getting too high and then dropping down again, and
so they took two of the bigger men out and

(30:38):
replace them with two smaller women, and then then the
carbon dioxide levels were okay. And so like if that
happened on Mars, like that's like that could have just
been death for everybody. And so like right now we're
at the stage where like we're swapping out sizes of
humans to try to make things work, and so like
the papers from the Lunar Palace group have like many

(30:59):
pages of storychometric equations where they're trying to like figure
out where all of the different like atoms and molecules went.
There's still a lot we have to figure out it's complicated.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
So are we sending short people to Mars? Is that
what we learned from this experiment?

Speaker 1 (31:12):
So women are slightly more metabolically efficient, and on average
we're smaller. I've heard people argue that we should be
sending just women to space, or and then my exac
likes to joke that we should send just jockeys to space.
But it's worth considering. But at least initially, you know
your cargo will stretch for longer if the people are smaller.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
What about amputees. We could have amputees in space, right,
I mean, do you really need your legs anyway? Right?
Why support all that leg tissue?

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean Mars has partial gravity, and so
there's still some benefit to having having to But maybe
it would be way more comfortable to have a prosthetic
on Mars if there was less gravity pulling you down
and creating like friction and pain at the interface between
the prosthetic and the human body. So I don't really
know the answer to your question.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Somebody's going to type amputees in space into Google and
see some really really weird stuff.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
There's lots of weird space stuff. Yeah, yeah, So Lunar
Palace did well. There's a ESA, the European Space Agency
is working on this system. Their acronym is Melissa, and
I don't remember exactly what it stands for. But they
are doing some experiments with algae. Again, algae's back, and
they don't have humans in this system, but they're they're
trying to figure out these equations for like, you know,

(32:30):
how many for if you have like one hundred cells
of algae, how much carbon dioxide can that extract from
the air, and how much oxygen does it give you back?
And it does it depend on like what you're feeding them.
And I'm just sort of making things up here, but
like the point is they're trying to like start at
the bottom and work out all of these little equations
that you're gonna want to have sort of figured it
out before you go to Mars. And so there's there's

(32:52):
groups sort of tackling this from different angles. But we're
I would say, we're definitely not there yet. All right, Well,
we have been having too much fun. I've lost of time,
and it is time for us to take a little
break and we'll be back to talk more about food
and space in just a second.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
So this is great practice and we're learning a lot,
and we're tweaking our systems, and we're learning to love
algae and meal worms because apparently it's the future of
Michelin starred restaurants on Mars. But what do we know about,
like the long term plan for growing food on Mars,
because as you said, we can't like shift food from
Earth for a long time. And you know, the whole
plan I think is let's make humans multiplanetary. That's only

(33:45):
useful if we're actually independent. Right, if we have colony
on Mars and it's totally dependent on Earth and then
Earth gets hit by an asteroid and it goes capute,
then the colony, if it's dependent on Earth, it's going
to die out anyway. So what do we know about
like making a actually independent so you can survive on
its own.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Well, we know it's going to be even more complicated
than doing it on Earth. So one of the reasons
it's going to be complicated. So in our prior episode
on why it's going to be so hard to work
on the Moon, we talked about how regolith is a
huge pain in the rear end. So like the dust
on the Moon and Mars. It's jagged. You don't want
to breathe it in That jaggedness we think also makes

(34:23):
it hard to grow plants in it. So there were
these samples from the Apollo mission that folks tried to
grow a Rabbitopsis thaliana in and the plants grew, and
it wasn't just lunar regolith. It was like lunar regolith
plus fertilizer and nutrients and water, like there was a
lot of stuff done to like put lipstick on the pig,
that is lunar regolith.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
So, but for people who haven't heard that episode or
don't remember, you're saying, basically, there's no soil on the
Moon and no soil on Mars, and that the dirt
we grow our plants in has a lot of useful
stuff and that stuff is just missing from Mars and
from the Moon. Yeah, And what is a Rabbitopsis thaliana
For the of us who are not biologists.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
A rabbit ops Ofstheliana is a plant. It's also known
as sale criss and it's a workhorse for biologists. So
tons of experiments have been done on this kind of stuff.
We know, like if you grow it under soil with
toxins in it. We know what genes turned on to
tell us that the plant is stressed out, for example.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
So it's like a well understood plant here on Earth.
Is it something that you could eat or is it
just like, hey, let's start with something we know how
to grow.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
I think it's can you just start with something that
we know how to grow. It's edible, edible, by.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
The way, I like to describe my food source. What
are we having for dinner tonight? It's edible. Don't worry,
right right, Yeah, I feel now I'm worried.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
I feel like foragers like to tell you that food
is edible a lot like I feel like what you're
telling me is that artificial selection has made food good,
but nature provides edible anyway. Okay, it is edible.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
So you're saying, they tried growing this thing in lunar regolis, right.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
And they added all of this stuff to make it
more like Earth's soil, and the plants that grew showed
signs of stress based on their coloration and what their
genes were doing. And one of the hypotheses was that
all of those jagged lunar bits were like making it
hard for the plant to put out roots, and maybe
nutrients and water were leaking out because it kept getting poked.
We don't really know. But the point is, even if

(36:15):
you like supplement a lot, it's hard to grow in
this stuff.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
So you're saying they basically grew it in earth soil,
but with lunar regolith mixed in, and that was bad
enough to make the plants stressed out.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, that's right, and Mars is going to be worse.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Now they're really testing the Mark Watney experiments, right. Basically,
human poop plus regolith is not a great place for
plants to grow.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, so they didn't actually use human poop. They used
other fertilizers, but if they had wanted to be more
realistic for Martian settlements, they could have used human poop.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
So what do we need to add to regolith on
Mars to actually make it soily enough that we could
grow plants on it?

Speaker 1 (36:50):
So you might need to supplement with nitrogen and potassium.
So I think those things are both available on Mars,
but maybe not in the form that plants use, So
we might need to bring some of that with us.
We almost certainly need to bring boron and we understand
Martian soil in some areas where it's been studied well,
but I don't think we have a good handle on
variability and what Martian soil is like. But some of

(37:11):
the areas we've sampled have perchlorates, which are endocrine disrupting hormones.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
That sounds bad.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yeah, that's bad right, so for developing fetuses. So like
if a pregnant woman was consuming food that had been
grown in regulus with these perchlorates, the perchlorates get taken
up in the food. We know that plants take it
up and it messes with nervous system development, so bad
for the baby, and it also messes with maternal metabolism,

(37:38):
so bad for the mom.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
So edible but poisonous.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
So when I talk to folks who are pro space settlement,
they always say, ugh, pah, it's water soluble. You just
gotta like rinse it and it's gonna go away. But
then I talked to a friend of mine who's a
geologist and his lab works with perchlorates, and I was like,
is it that easy? Do you just like rinse it
and it goes away? And he's like, we work with
that in fume hoods, only, Like, it's not that easy,

(38:06):
and he's and it's a big deal if you miss it.
And also like if you imagine, you know, so Zach
and I bought some farmland and we wanted we have
like a garden. If someone was to say like, hey,
it's cheap, it's got like these endocrine disrupting hormones in
the soil, but like, just rinse it first before you
grow your plants. It's cool. Like I wouldn't be like,
oh great, I'm fine with that.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
And you have to rinse the plant, so you have
to rinse the soil. Rise every rinse.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
The soil to get the perchlorates out. But then now
you've got the perchlorates in the water. So basically, like
the more you talk about the regolith, like it's jagged,
it's filled with chemicals. I think it also has toxic
amounts of aluminum. Maybe that's on the moon, but like
it's gonna need to get cleaned up so it's not
toxic first. So a lot of folks say like, look,
this is all too much work. Let's just do hydroponics.

(38:54):
And so the idea with hydroponics is you plant the
plants directly into water, like you give them something to
hold on to, but they're just in water, and into
that water you add nutrients and everything else that they need,
and then that way you don't need the soil at all.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Everybody who like carved an apple before listening to this
episode knows what you're talking about when it comes to hydro.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Don't understand I have a I have apple trees growing
in my head.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Was a bong reference.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Oh I thought this was a family friendly show.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
That's why I was making a subtle reference.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Oh well, it goes right over my right over my head.
Can't be too subtle with Killy on the show.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Well, that tells me something about your college experience. First,
I want to go back to something you said about
importing this stuff, Like you said bringing nitrogen and boron.
I've heard of nitrogen as something we need for plants
to grow, but what is boron and why do we
need it for plants?

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Well, I'm not a botanist, so I'm not one hundred
percent sure, but so like just you know, our bodies,
we were mostly made out of what knops I think carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
phosphor a sulfur. Those the main things that are in
our body, but we also need other things and like
trace amounts, and so something that plants need some of
but not loads of, includes boron, and I think that's

(40:05):
something that we just haven't found a lot of on Mars,
so it's something we'd need to bring with us. The
list of things that you need to bring for the
Moon is much longer, and you know, Mars has things
like there's carbon in the atmosphere in the form of
carbon dioxide, and so you can get that carbon, whereas
the Moon has very little carbon and it's hard to acquire. So,
like Mars has a lot of good stuff, but you're

(40:25):
still going to need to bring some and recycle others.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
So we're going to need to pull some of the
things we want out of the Martian environment and bring
a bunch of stuff in order to create an environment
where plants can be healthy and grow in a way
that they produce food we want to like feed our children.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yeah, exactly. And the stuff that you pull out of
the Martian environment, it's probably going to be a pain
in the rear end to pull it out. So, like previously,
we're talking about how regolith is super jagged and how
that makes it hard to run equipment because it's abrasive
and it gets it clogs up the equipment and wears
it down pretty quickly. And so anytime you're like extracting
something from the regolith, for example, you're going to want
to recycle. It is probably easier to recycle it than

(41:01):
it is to extract it additionally, and so so these
recycled systems are going to be super important.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
And all of these things sound like they're going to
be very energy intensive, Like you're extracting things from Mars
and you're separating them and doing all these complicated processes
on them. I guess this is going to all run
on solar power.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, so solar panels on Mars. We use them for
our rovers for example, and so it's like a proven technology.
But that one percent atmosphere that Mars has, as we mentioned,
is enough to support dust storms that can encircle the
whole planet for like weeks at a time sometimes, so
they can last for a long time. They're not super predictable,
and you can have battery packs to help you get

(41:40):
through those periods. But most of the folks that I
talked to say, we're going to need to bring portable
nuclear reactors with us as well and plant them sort
of far away from our habitats, so they're not, you know,
irradiating the crew members. So we're probably going to be
relying on both of those. You might be able to
get a little geo thermal energy from Mars, but that's
like a comple caid engineering project that I don't think

(42:01):
we'll be ready to tackle for a while. And there's
no flowing water, so hydropowers out and unless there's big
surprises on Mars, there's not going to be any fossil fuels,
so probably it's going to be solar and nuclear.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
We've talked before about nuclear power in terms of spaceflight,
and one of the big questions is like, how do
you safely get the nuclear materials up there, because we
mind them here on Earth and then we're going to
send them to Mars or send them to the Moon.
Something we haven't talked about it, and I'm wondering if
you know anything about it, is extracting nuclear materials on Mars.
Like Mars has uranium, right, why not send the technology

(42:35):
to Mars to extract uranium from Marsian soil itself, because
then we don't have to launch uranium in the Earth's atmosphere.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
So I believe that those materials are available on Mars,
but just like on Earth, it's not just a matter
of acquiring those materials. So, for example, if you're using
plutonium to power your power plant, you need to like
centrifuge it to get certain kinds of plutonium and it
requires like massive facilities to do that. And so I think,
you know, eventually, if Mars is going to be self sustaining,

(43:04):
they will need to collect and process their own nuclear
fuel for their power plants. But I think we're not
going to start that way.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
Probably all these conversations have like two modes, like how
do you get there and get started? And then how
do you become self sufficient? And it's incredible, like the
list of things you're going to need to run a society,
you know, to grow all this food and to supply
the power, and then all the people to run these facilities,
and then the schools to teach those people's children, and
then the factory to make the pencils for those children

(43:32):
to do their homework. And it's just like the tensils
of the complexity of the society are incredible.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Our global supply chains are so incredible, Like there's so
much that we benefit from. We tried to find numbers
on how many people you would need to create a
self sustaining society, so like how many people would need
to be there before the Earth could explode and Mars
could survive without us? And I think we don't really
know the answer to that, But like I think Cuba
and North Korea, which are countries that maybe get the

(44:00):
closest to running without interacting with other countries, they've got like,
what is it thirty million, like probably tens of millions,
but neither one of those countries are places where most
of us would be like totally, I want to live there, right,
So they're like and I think a lot of them
would rather not be so closed or you know, maybe
not the leaders in those countries, but the average citizen.

(44:20):
So it's going to take a lot. I've seen a
lot of estimates, but I think if you're going to live, well,
like there's something like one hundred thousand different kinds of
medical specialists, you don't necessarily need all of them, but
I'm glad they all exist and that they're available to
me on this planet. So it's going to take I
think generations before Mars is completely self sustaining.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
And do you think that answer changes if we only
send jockeys to Mars, Like can we get there faster
with just jockeys? Is it like a volume of humanity
question or like a number of heads?

Speaker 1 (44:50):
I think it's numbers of heads and hands. But uh ok,
I haven't done all the equations.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
So you didn't say feet. So then like my amputee
only colony on Mars, you know, maybe that could succeed. Yeah,
but speaking of bringing life to Mars, you were talking
about importing all these materials to grow food on Mars.
I was wondering about the little critters, like our life
here on Earth also relies on micro organisms in the soil.
Are we bringing sterile stuff to Mars to grow or

(45:17):
are we bringing like Earth based microorganisms for our farms
on Mars.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, so this is tough. So for space stuff, you
try to bring as few microbes as possible typically, but
we're going to need to bring those microbes with us
because bacteria and fungi are like very important collaborators with
the plants that we like to eat, so they need
to come. And you probably can speak to this better
because your wife works on questions like this, But yeah,
those are going to have to come. But so then
the hard thing is just bringing the organisms that you

(45:43):
want and keeping out the organisms you don't want. So
at the introduction we talked about how Biosphere two had
problems with plant pests and pathogens that they clearly had
not plans to bring with them, but they got in.
And Biosphere two also had scorpions that got in that
they didn't mean to have in there, and they're the
only lethal scorpions in the United States and they managed

(46:06):
to get in.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Wow. Do they make good tacos? I bet there's a
pretty spicy.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah. They did not try eating them in Biosphere too.
They were not hungry enough. Eighteen percent body mass loss
was not enough to get them to eat the scorpions.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
At some point, you're eating scorpion tacos. But I guess
they weren't there yet.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
No, maybe they'll get there all right.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
It's fascinating though, how we have these competing interests, Like
on one hand, as you said, you don't want to
bring microbes to Mars because you still want to know the
answer to the question like are there already microbes on
Mars that either grew independently or through some sort of
like pan spermian thing got to Mars from Earth or
maybe originally evolved on Mars and then got knocked off

(46:48):
the planet and landed here on Earth and seated life
on Earth? Like are we space cousins with the Martians?
So you're right, we want to answer those questions, which
means we shouldn't be bringing those microbes. On the other hand,
we can't really go to Mars long term without bringing microbes.
And so do we try to like set up some
sterile barrier, I mean, the whole thing seems totally impractical.
Or do we just have to wait until we've answered
the science question before we can begin colonizing.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
Well, I think have to wait is a tough way
to put it, Like you don't have to wait for anything,
should you wait? I would like to see us have
the answer to that question before humans go there, because
even if you're not like you know, so, the first
mission of Mars is probably not going to be trying
to like grow their own food. They're probably going to
pack stuff that's shelf stable. But they're humans, so they're
gonna come with their microbiome and like we're lousy with microbes,

(47:34):
and so I think we'll contaminate the surface, you know,
just by like touching our space suits before we put
them on for EVAs, So I think before humans go
at all, if that's a question that we think is
important to answer, we should probably try to answer it
with the machines we send out there, which probably also
brings some microbes, but hopefully fewer.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Well. People are planning to visit Mars, you know, in
the next decade or so, I can't imagine we're gonna
have an answer, definitive answer to the question about life
on Mars in that deck. So we're most likely we're
going to spoil Mars for this question scientifically.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Musk has just announced that in twenty twenty eight he's
going to send people to Mars. I wouldn't hold my breath.
I don't think that's going to happen that fast unless
some so the United States government, I guess, would probably
have to say no, you can't do that until we
have the answer to this question, because I don't know
who else would have the power to stop him.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Does the US government have the power to stop him?

Speaker 1 (48:24):
So, according to the Outer Space Treaty of nineteen sixty seven,
some country is responsible for what Musk does out there.
So Musk could decide, well, I'm not going to launch
from the US, I'm going to launch from some other country,
and then that country becomes responsible. But given his current infrastructure,
in his current nationality, he would probably be the United
States's responsibility. So they're the ones who would be issuing

(48:45):
the launch license, so they're the ones who would have
to put their stamp on the mission plan. So I mean,
the international community could like make a fuss and the
US could feel pressured, but I'm not seeing that happening.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Another possibility I suppose is that we try to build
colonies on Mars that are more separate from like what's
going on on the surface. And I talked about living
underground on the Moon. What about living underground on Mars
also as a way to protect yourself from all the
cosmic radiation the death from the Martian skies.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
Yeah, so we will probably live underground on Mars as well.
So Mars, like the one percent atmosphere that Mars has
isn't really sufficient to save you from all of this
space radiation. And unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have a planet
wide strong magnetic field, so you're going to get exposed
to space radiation. So most of the proposals I've seen
do involve habitats either in like lava tubes or just

(49:36):
buried underneath regolith. So first I'll say that burying yourself
underground doesn't necessarily mean you're not going to contaminate the
Martian surface, I think, because you're probably still going to
be going on some EVAs.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
And also it could be that there are microbes under
the ground, right.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Yeah, right, and that might be the place we're most
likely to find them because they're not exposed to you know,
the radiation from space. Like maybe the most likely place
we are to find these microbes could be in you know,
lava tubes or caves underground. But this also this opposes
problems related to growing plants because you're not going to
get any sunlight. And already you were getting less sunlight
than you would on Earth because Mars is farther from

(50:10):
the sun, which is also going to be a problem
for your solar panels. But now you're also underground, so
you're going to need to be using a lot of
energy to create artificial lights, or you're gonna have to
pipe the sunlight in somehow. So it's it's going to
be complicated. But yeah, I don't think being underground necessarily
protects the microbes, but it adds some complications when it
comes to growing plants.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Well, what about future technology. All this stuff assumes we're
going to be growing earth like plants and bringing earth
like chickens. What if we genetically engineered, you know, chickens
that were good at growing on Mars, or plants that
were good in nine environment, or like loved Martian regularithic
could like filter out these toxins. Is that just a
pipe dream? Should I expect Andy Weird to write a

(50:50):
novel about that next?

Speaker 1 (50:51):
Well, I'll read anything Andy wear rights. But so, I
hear a lot of folks pushing genetic engineering, and often
they're talking about genetic engineer in humans, which I think
has its whole a whole other range of ethical questions
that maybe we don't want to dive into today. But
you know, genetic engineering can improve crops in some ways,
but I think there are a lot of problems that

(51:11):
are really complicated, and we don't understand which genes you
would need to tinker with in which way to solve
those problems. Yet, So I think that eventually it could
help us with a variety of problems, maybe like genes
for radiation resistance or something like that. I don't know,
although if you're underground that'll be less of a problem.
But I would be surprised if right now we knew

(51:32):
what kind of genes we needed to tinker with in
a way that would actually be effective. And I know
there's people who disagree with me, so I guess we'll
have to see.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Well, I guess we'll just have to see which plants
and which people survive in that Martian colony. And that's
just sort of like a form of genetic engineering, right,
that is.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
A form of natural selection, you know, So everyone should
purchase a city on Mars and hear all about my
opinions on this, But my opinion is that we need
a lot more research ahead of time so that we're
not said people out there and saying, like, all right,
we're going to see what happens. Natural selection is going
to select the best of you, and we'll see what
happens there, like I would rather. I think there's a

(52:08):
lot of engineering solutions to this stuff, you know, like
burying your habitat under regoliths probably helps. There might be
certain like material science problems that could be solved for
like types of habitats that do better at absorbing radiation.
There's a lot of work that can get done ahead
of time to figure out the equations for you know,
how much human poop do you need to fertilize your

(52:29):
plants take up this much carbon dioxide to make this
muss oxygen. Like, there's a lot of work that can
be done ahead of time so that you can reduce
the number of people who need to die. And I
think we need to do that stuff first, so that
we're not relying on natural selection to hone the people
for space.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
So you're saying we shouldn't just send a bunch of
people up there and see who lives and see who dies.
We should prepare for that and try to minimize the
number of deaths, right.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
Or we should send delicious people so that everybody can
at least have some good meals while the end closes in.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
Well, I want all of those jobs to have nice
tasty meals from all their dead co colonists.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
All right, Well, we have come full circle to the
forbidden meal. So I think that's probably good for this week.
And I'm going to probably not eat for a few
hours because I think you've put me off of food.
But I will enjoy the wonderful variety of foods that
are available on Earth when I'm prepared to eat again.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
Well, I hope at least that this episode was food
for thought, even if it didn't inspire an appetite in anybody.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
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