Nasa launches $1M competition to turn Mars CO2 into sugar

That reminds me of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Shredder_Challenge_2011

https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-really-happened-a...

which was thought to be almost impossible to solve.

> DARPA, The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created 5 coded-documents of increasing complexity, ran them through an industrial paper-shredder, scanned the pieces, and posted them online for anyone to attempt to solve. Each document had a certain amount of 'intel', every piece of which was given a point value. The competition, which launched October 27 and would expire December 4, was offering a prize of $50,000 to the first individual or team to find all the intel (first to 50 points).

> The competition gained popularity quickly, with over 9000 official entrants and 50,000 folks downloading the first of the five puzzles. But skeptics had already begun to question the contest after only 67 entrants could score any points at all. "Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all, let alone within the short time frame," said Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office. But, with just 2 days remaining before the competition was closed (only 33 days after it began) one of the entrants had solved all 5 levels completely.

I was going to suggest we should hold competitions for turning Earth's CO2 in sugar as well, but then I remembered you can just plant seeds.

Who is the target audience for this? Seems like you should solicit research proposals and provide grant funding to academic or industrial research groups to actually do the work. They can't just work for free in hopes they get 250k or 1M...

If someone can figure out CO2 -> C6H12O6, it's probably worth more than $1mm.

If NASA is really serious about people living on Mars, I would think that they should build a rotating space station with Mars level of pseudo-gravity. Two decent sized chambers connected by a tether might be the easiest to build. If one really wants to see if something complicated will work on Mars, running it in Martian G, is the only way to be sure.

Long term studies in the current space station seem to suggest that humans can't live years at zero G without serious health problems developing. It would useful to try out Mars gravity (38% of Earth's) somewhat closer to Earth than the surface of Mars.

Straight out of Cookie Clicker: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

Everyone seems to misunderstand photosynthesis. It can’t occur without water, and in fact, the oxygen plants release is from the water, not the CO2.

The smart money on useful compounds is CO and O2, made possible with high temperatures, CO2, and not much else.

Seems a somewhat odd project, at least for the stated purpose, given that there's now evidence that there is not even enough CO2 on Mars to easily create a breathable atmosphere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6

A million bucks is a bit steep for a plant, no?

And yes, you do need water for plants, but you're probably going to need hydrogen from somewhere anyway. Mars does have a decent amount of water ice ripe for melting.

Definitely thought this was going to be about the Mars Bar factory CO2 output, which would have been cool if they could reuse that in the product they're making.