Establishment of a closed artificial ecosystem to ensure human survival on moon | Hacker News Reader

Establishment of a closed artificial ecosystem to ensure human survival on moon

biorxiv.org

123 pointsphreeza74 comments

I wonder how this compared to the Biosphere 2 experiments conducted in the 90s. It seems this is a much more artificial environment, and thus probably closer to an actual moon mission.

iirc, biosphere failed because the concrete absorbed carbon dioxide and caused crop failure. interestingly, this allowed Dr Roy Walford et al to study calorie restricted optimal nutrition (CRON) diets and discover their effects, slowing the aging process.

Edit: sorry, rereading this it sounds a bit abrasive. That wasn't my intent. I'd never actually read up on it till I read your comment and wondered how concrete absorbed CO2. It was a fun 30min of Wikipedia! I thank you for the distraction!

The concrete absorbed oxygen not CO2. I don't think there was a crop failure so much as too many people, not enough plants? Apparently they also miscalculated the amount of sunlight coming through the windows and so the amount of photosynthesis occurring, so maybe that is form of crop failure: does X grams of crop have fewer calories in of its been light deprived?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

Interesting read. I was surprised to find Steve Bannon's name in there.

They ended up growing and eating so much sweet potatoes that they turned orange after a while. They had to pump oxygen into the biosphere 2

This is a fantastic read https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/biosphere-2-wha...

[..] Microbes in our organically enriched soils had produced carbon dioxide at a greater rate than our young plants could produce oxygen via photosynthesis. We discovered that most of the missing oxygen was converted to CO2 and had been absorbed by the unsealed concrete in our habitat.[..]

We don't really know whether the aging process has slowed. Some biomarkers changed but that doesn't necessarily indicate a longer life.

On the BBC there was an episode where CRON was discussed. It showed a man who peeled an apple threw away the apple and ate the peelings. It seems bizarre but I think this will be a trend in a few years. It ticks boxes of less food waste, less bulk, high nutrition, ultra low calories. Whether it works or not who knows since many diets tend to be for status not health; veganism with its absence of B12, Atkins with its high fat, Paleo based on inaccurate pre-history.

A lot of people use diets for health, not for status. E.g. vegans often supplement B12 externally.

But that's the issue vegans can't live without artificially supplementing with B12. To me that shows the vegan diet is not valid or survivable. If you were on a desert island or stuck in a remote location and were vegan you'd be dead after a few years from B12 deficiency.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01lxyzc/horizon-20122...

How do you reconcile “He threw the apple away” and “Less food waste”?

Not just that apple but overall the fewer calories of CRON means less food consumed.

For a billion people, calories is the most important nutrition

I think that's the point of the "ON" part in CRON, optimal nutrition. Eat enough calories to survive but be healthy by getting optimal nutrition.

Concrete absorbs carbon dioxide even after it's set? Shouldn't it like... grow, then? From accumulated carbon?

Don't mean to waive you off or anything, just never heard this before and it doesn't seem to make sense at first listen.

I don't much about biosphere 2 specifically, but I have read that concrete absorbs CO2 over long timescales. Hundred-year-old concrete is chemically different than it was when it was a month old. I don't know if it gets denser, or if the CO2 replaces something else.

Concrete samples from inside and outside the structure showed strikingly different levels of calcium carbonate, which was rapidly being formed inside the domes as huge amounts of carbon dioxide reacted with calcium hydroxide in the concrete. ... Severinghaus said of the calcium carbonate. "It's 10 times more than outside."

From https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/05/science/too-rich-a-soil-s...

But how much was it relative to the total volume of concrete?

“ Concrete continues to set and cure for months and years, increasing its strength over time. It's a long-lived giant chemical reaction that continues on long after it has set.”

Source: https://interestingengineering.com/why-concrete-doesnt-actua...

But it continues to take up the same volume of space, so isn't there a limit to how much carbon dioxide it can remove from the atmosphere and store?

Yes of course it has a limit. Nobody said that it is an infinite sink.

If you are interested in the details I can recommend J.P. Severinghaus et al., “Oxygen loss in Biosphere 2“.

I'm just surprised because somebody said that the concrete soaked up so much carbon that the trees alongside it in the biosphere were unable to grow.

That sounds like a lot of carbon. Like, a lot. I'd expect that it would have to absorb enough carbon that it could displace some amount of the volume that it would have appeared as in tree form.

Can you fit a third of a small forest into the concrete around that small forest? It seems unlikely.

Am I the only one thinking that Elon should already be testing some beta Mars habitats on Earth by now? Why aren't we seeing more Biosphere-style experiments?

My understanding was that Elon was interested in providing the bus service (so to speak) of getting people and cargo there. Less interested in the colony building aspect? But, I believe The Boring Company tunneling machine will fit inside a launch vehicle and the Tesla truck will function on extraterrestrial world's with a pressurized cabin so I could be completely mistaken.

> the Tesla truck will function on extraterrestrial world's with a pressurized cabin so I could be completely mistaken

I suppose that's true, in the same way it's true of all electric cars. But a pressurized cabin and an airlock is a pretty massive change.

The cooling system would need to work in a very minimal atmosphere.

He's focused on the critical path to colonizing mars. If an sustainable ecosystem becomes the critical path, he'll focus on it. There's so much else that is more important now though, and funding is limited.

Is funding limited? While Robinhood is around?

Maybe it's his attention that is limited.

On the scale needed for Mars, even at $200,000/colonist? Yes, funding is still limited.

A sustainable ecosystem has been the critical path to Mars colonization since Apollo wrapped up.

There is a mountain of unknown unknowns in this problem - that it would expect would take at least decades to solve.

And unlike launching commercial satellites, nobody is going to be interested in dropping a few billion dollars on a biosphere R&D startup.

Which is why IMHO the next logical step is to establish orbital autonomous manufacturing. There’s no way an experimental artificial habitats can be built on Earth by manual labor let alone launched by chemical rockets.

Note that manufacturing anything useful to our technological society currently requires a supply chain of tens of thousands of factories, worked by millions of people, requiring mountains of input ingredients, and producing mountains of waste.

Doing that in orbit would be quite a trick, even if you didn't restrict yourself to only being able to use found-in-orbit resources.

> And unlike launching commercial satellites, nobody is going to be interested in dropping a few billion dollars on a biosphere R&D startup.

Yes, no one is going to fund this until it looks like sustainable transport to Mars is feasible, which makes transport the priority at the moment.

Nobody is going to fund it after sustainable transport to Mars is feasible, either. Because there is no path from 'spend billions of dollars on this' to 'make your investment back'.

Aren't Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both interested in this and their combined wealth around $200Billion? Seems like they have plenty of money to throw at this company even without outside investors/governments.

But will the rescue sub work in Martian caves?

There are many problems that will have to be solved to have viable Martian habitats, and a lot of those can just as well be solved by someone else. It could be that maintaining a self-sufficient and productive ecosystem outside of Earth's atmosphere is a harder problem than building a reusable rocket, but it's also research that has fewer obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to contribute.

I do think that after many decades of Mars being sort of within reach but just impractically expensive to go there, now that it's almost time to start packing our bags we're not really prepared. Maybe SpaceX (or Tesla with their solar panels and batteries and EVs) will fill some of that gap, but it makes sense for them to put most of their focus on what they're best at.

Not sure why we don't have more non-Elon-associated organizations doing closed ecosystem testing, but I don't follow space-related news that closely and maybe it's already happening in ways that aren't highly visible like Biosphere-2 was.

> There are many problems that will have to be solved to have viable Martian habitats, and a lot of those can just as well be solved by someone else.

Someone else? Who? Governments aren't seriously working on this problem, and there's no money in it for the private sector.

Vertical farms growing organic lettuce and arugula in warehouses are not solving this problem, by the way. They are solving a much simpler, much less interesting problem.

I once created a system of vertical and hydroponics build for underground ‘farms’ to grow food on Mars for a ‘Crops on Mars’ hackathon.

The key feature would be an inflatable ‘mattress’ on the surface above that will freeze and thaw.

I still think that it will be useful for underground farms on earth. I was really thinking of ‘hostile environments’ rather than growing on Mars.

Powering my underground Mars farm was a challenge but I sorted that out with a nuclear battery. Whatever. Shouldn’t be a problem for earth tunnel farms.

HST: I think if we are to colonize space and start living out there, we could convert earth into a ‘garden of Eden’ ..a work in progress, as it were..with a skeleton farming team tending and supplying food to the space earthlings.

Or if we are to colonies a planet, it would be in the form of a cluster of sealed habitats or environments. And each habitat will be vacated as it regenerates ...in a way, a kind of progression of seasonal changes. Only..on earth, the seasons change. Up there, we will simply move to a seasonal module. This way, we can regenerate and deal with waste/recyclables etc.

> I once created a system of vertical and hydroponics build for underground ‘farms’ to grow food on Mars for a ‘Crops on Mars’ hackathon.

Is there any more info on your submission?

This was almost three years ago. I only went to see what’s new out there..was curious about vertical and hydronics tech.. and also there were people from nasa and ibm..so it was interesting to check out the available tools.

There is definitely more scope for automation and robotics and AI with indoor Ag and can be implemented easily compared to traditional Ag. I think I have some PowerPoint version of it somewhere. I will have to look for it. Soil Ag and robotics is my area..not indoor Ag.

> Soil Ag and robotics is my area..not indoor Ag.

Same. Former Biodynamic farmer (horticulture) and did a stint at the MDRS, I was asked by the director to come back as an Executive Officer under her for another mission with more focus on the Green Hab.

If you can find that PP and repost I'd definitely check it out.

Are you working on anything right now in robotics with automating Ag? One of the things that I think we've seen during COVID is the mass acceleration of automated processes in many fields, but I haven't seen as many in Ag then prior to this--mainly in harvesting, weeding but as you know maintenance, pest control and irrigation play a much bigger part in day to day operations and was wondering what has been done in that regard.

I wonder if there is anything for those of us with backgrounds in Ag and tech to do something at places like Biosphere 2 or at the Eden Project.

I've had to go back to Supply Chain since COVID derailed my plans to go to SpaceX and then hopefully come back and work at a more mature Squared Roots if it had a focus on Mars food production, but I definitely like to see something like that happen and maybe even get involved if I'm still useful.

I am working on small acreage automation and robotics with the stated goal of swarming cobots and pairing them with farmers who work no more than 20 hours/week. Small acreage = 100 acre hubs with 20-25 swarming cobots.

I am skeptical about growing Terra produce in space and even about us consuming them out in space. How do we even digest food in space? I want to know more about that. I want to know what happens to our internal organs. How we age and how we process calories etc.

We are likely better off 3D printing our food and nutrients and calories in space. And some significant space ready body modifications would be required.

Having said that..keeping it technical..I am more interested in growing food in hostile environments here on earth. Or Mars like environments here on earth for wool gathering purposes.

Eventually some produce like lettuce and strawberries will be exclusively grown indoors. But forests and orchards and creating eco systems ..and soil food web is more important. And we need tech to assist us with that to regenerate our earth systems. As we automate them for earth, many of them can be tweaked or exported for space environments. Maybe.

Growing for Mars or space pushes my imagination and many good things have come from that. My email is my hn handle at gmail. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat further.

> Why aren't we seeing more Biosphere-style experiments?

There's plenty of fundamental research going on. There are BIOS-3 and Yuegong-1 based on it (AFAIK probably the most successful ones in terms of closing the loop), also MELiSSA, CESRF, and many other labs.

I often think about the Biosphere 2 experiment. The question of how to create a materialy closed but energetically open system where humans can thrive is such an interesting one. And it is already a really hard problem. But the biospherians went one further. They didnt just wanted to build a working biosphere, they also wanted to make it mimic the earth. Like I understand if for some chemical or even psychological reason you need a giant pool to make your humans comfortable, but why spend resources and attention to create a salt mars of varying salt gradient? It just adds more moving parts to an already complicated puzzle. It is as if you don’t only want to build the worlds first aeroplane but you want it shaped like a jellyfish with tinny bells. They had a hard problem and made it even harder for themselves.

despite extraodinary good data regarding human experience of living in isolated/enclosed conolies, we persist on believing the fundmantal obstacle to livign on the moon is technological.

Neuralink will make sure we don’t feel lonely on the colony.

Neuralink (or, at least, the designs I've seen) would be worse than VR, and it's a little amusing to consider the idea that it might somehow directly prevent lonelinesss.

You just load up the map for the kind of lobotomy you want to simulate and say good bye to loneliness.

Turning humans into emotionless robot workers via brain implants.

If it is always-on, it’s like slavery.

If you can turn it on/off, it’s like schizophrenia.

This whole thing brings up so many practical phylosophical and ethical questions.

• Neuralink – or, at least, the prototypes I've seen – can't do that.

• I wouldn't let anything that could anywhere near my brain, and I doubt I'm the only one.

IMO it won’t count as a proper colony until it is big enough to not feel isolated.

Assuming we establish communication relays between the Earth and Moon, Moon dwellers would probably be able to use the internet (albeit probably with a laggy connection by Earth standards). While remote socialization during the pandemic has been far from ideal, I think our last year's experience collectively has proven that socializing digitally is somewhat possible and might prevent (or at least mitigate) the worst effects of isolation.

If there are any physicists/engineers reading this that have the appropriate expertise to potentially work on something like it, I'd be super curious to hear your thoughts about how it could work.

Assuming we're supporting a Moon colony of nontrivial scale (~100 people maybe?), what would the experience of connecting to Earth's internet be like for the colonists? What infrastructure would we need to create to make it possible and/or improve it?

I guess moon dwellers would be careful not to overload the space around them with radio waves, so the bulk of communications with Earth will be in focused optical beams. NASA had good results testing that with small optical trancivers.

Major cloud providers would perhaps have some presence on the Moon, so anybody could watch videos available over the Internet from local access points, no delays. Most communications at some point would also be local; talking with Earth will incur that unavoidable delay.

Moon-Earth ping time would something like 2580ms [0]. If anyone remembers the days when phone calls to Australia were via geosynchronous satellite (vs undersea cables), there was maybe ~500ms delay and that was annoying enough, although you got used to it. TBH 2580ms for many applications would be fine (e.g. youtube, netflix, social media, github, chat/slack/teams etc).

If you take sci-fi as inspiration (e.g. The Expanse!), we might see less "realtime/two-way" voice/video chat and more one way "vmail" type messaging when RTT is too great for realtime.

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ping-between-earth-and-the...

But we've addressed this repeatedly, with submarine crews, Antarctic populations, iceberg outposts. It's manageable.

Personally I believe the fundamental obstacle is gravitational.

It seems as if low gravity on Mars would make it a one-way trip.

Same, all other obstacles are within the range of current tech. Long-term (decades & human development) habitation under reduced gravity is not understood. Hopefully it’s not a problem.

Gravity can be relatively easily improved with large rotating modules on the surface of the Moon or under the surface. Not for the very first colonists though, but if we're serious about colonizing, we'll get to solve this soon.

I'd guess the barrier is personal wealth for most people. That's certainly what I blame my lack of landing on the moon thus far on.

As for being excited about paying for someone else living on the moon rather than more immediate social concerns—fat chance of that.

To me it seems like the Moon has a pretty unhelpful elemental composition. Especially, a distinct lack of carbon and nitrogen.

Venus atmosphere is (roughly) habitable in terms of temperature and pressure at 55km up; seems like the elemental shortage there would be hydrogen and phosphorous; but that might be a better trade off than trying to farm the moon...

The case for Venus colonization:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0az7DEwG68A

Venus space stations gaining traction as a "second front" in exploration and colonization is something I am really pleased to see. It opens the door of planetary formation research. Long term lower atmospheric and surface habitation is the ultimate prize and perhaps the toughest engineering challenge at this moment ;)

Experimental Study of Structural Materials for Prolonged Venus Surface Exploration Missions

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.A34617

Imagining a venus cloud city, Lando calrisian style

Moon's biggest problem is the abrasiveness of moon dust. Without oxygen and water, the dust is very spiky.

It sticks to everything, instantly matting spacesuits masks, wears our door hinges.

On Earth the sand can be a nasty element, but the moon's dust is really an aggressive beast.

I imagine using some sort of electrostatic cleaning would probably be a first stab at solving this problem.

Wouldn't it be much easier to just drop nukes and glass a wide area? It'd probably also provide pretty decent platform to build on.

Nukes in space don’t act the same as nukes in air. The total energy is the same, but the fireball needs an atmosphere, and you need the fireball to shift the energy from a point-like source of hard X-rays to a big ball of IR.

This is also why Project Orion isn’t quite as self-destructive as it seems at first glance.

I guess you could pave the Moon with a rover and some Fresnel lenses though?

The number of crew (8) raises my eyebrow a bit, since it seems to replicate what biosphere 2 did. I remember reading - or watching - some source that stated an even number of people is suboptimal for group dynamics, since it allows for a split into equal-numbered factions.

There were 4 people in the experiment at any given time, but the point about even numbers holds.

Hopefully the US moon base plan is maintained by the new administration and projects like these can find real applications in the next 10 years.

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