Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We can mine asteroids for space food

cambridge.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 216 posts

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#131

Post by dgfitz »

luqtas wrote: post #123
Terr_ wrote: post #56

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.

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 a…

> 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.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#132

Post by actionfromafar »

mmooss wrote: post #110
wruza wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it’s pointless to just avoid participating in a meat grinder that life itself is naturally. We've revolutionized human life over a few generations, and even more over a few hundred years. One outcome is that you can communicate freely - politically and technologically - with people all over the world. And you use that to say how pointless it is to try to improve. Think bigger and better. People did all that work to…

You haven't even read the book, yet it enticed such commentary. Not bad. :)

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#133

Post by jamieplex »

MetallicDragon wrote: post #62
jamieplex wrote: post #50

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 y…

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.

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)

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#134

Post by shepherdjerred »

dgfitz wrote: post #131
luqtas wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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.

Practical for the individual

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#135

Post by mr_toad »

Terr_ wrote: post #56

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.

> 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.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#136

Post by gus_massa »

Animats wrote: post #121

"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 nev…

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.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#137

Post by [deleted] »

mr_toad wrote: post #135
Terr_ wrote: post #56

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.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#138

Post by Mistletoe »

christophilus wrote: post #58
bee_rider wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If we were suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the price would go down. Yes, and this has happened at least twice in history: when Europeans discovered the Americas and moved a bunch of gold into Europe, and when Europeans discovered World Wars and moved a bunch of gold back to the Americas.

https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2008/1/7/cngold106bi...

This is a neat chart.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#139

Post by Terr_ »

mr_toad wrote: post #135
Terr_ wrote: post #56

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#140

Post by Terr_ »

jorgesborges wrote: post #82
Terr_ wrote: post #56

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.

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 oth…

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