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We can mine asteroids for space food

cambridge.org

71–80 of 216 posts

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#71
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

That's just the mass you need to extract the resources that make up the food that one person consumes in a year. Assuming you don't just space the human waste and instead reuse it you'll be accumulating material that can make up the biomass that will comprise a large and intricate food web that will eventually make up the biomes of large O'Neill cylinder stations.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#73
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... "

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#74
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.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#76
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Carbonaceous Chondrite asteroids have carbon in the form of coal but also carbonate rocks as well as moderate amounts of water as well as stony minerals (silicon, aluminum) as well as iron.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#77

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.

Europeans stole so much gold from S America it messed up the economy in China.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#78
post #65
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.

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.

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.

Re: We can mine asteroids for space food

#79
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.

Is mined food processed food?
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