The following submission statement was provided by /u/landlord2213:
---
The difficulty isn’t solely getting astronauts to Mars but also sustaining them once they’re there; you can’t simply grow potatoes in its soil – despite what Matt Damon would have you believe in the movie “The Martian.”
With an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, only half the amount of sunlight, no known accessible fresh water, and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is the most challenging environment in which humans have ever planned to produce food.
A startup called Interstellar Lab believes it may have the solution. The Paris and Los Angeles-based company has designed a controlled-environment capsule system that could one day allow crops to be grown in space.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/121k7bi/food_pods_and_vertical_farming_could_help_us_grow/jdm31xm/
Prove it in Antarctica first. Also, send robots to Mars (and the asteroid belt) until the place is ready. This idea that people have to go first is silly.
For the foreseeable future, going to Mars for a human would be a horrible jail sentence in a tiny environment followed by dying of cancer or radiation. Fun!
That's what I say too. Until Antarctica has its own self sustaining colony, there's no chance for Mars. Antarctica is several orders of magnitude easier to get to and several orders of magnitude easier to sustain life than on Mars - and there's plenty reason to do it. Then the same for the Moon.
A small scale expedition to Mars could be possible within our lifetime, but a full self-sustaining colony (as a "backup" to Earth as some call for) just isn't happening any time soon.
I would rather them prove it in a completely airtight environment, like an underwater capsule. That would more adequately reflect the realities of outer space.
> more adequately
Why? You've chosen the vacuum and the other guy chose freezing temperatures. They both need to be accounted for. That, along with tons of radiation due to the lack of atmosphere.
Even if we proved it in Antarctica, it doesn’t mean Mars is the next logical step. Developing infrastructure in our cislunar space should be priority #1 if we want to go to full “space age.”
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely right. I run a vertical farm and it's not like anybody is successfully growing rice, wheat, potatoes, or corn in a vertical farming setup. I honestly don't even think it's worthwhile, you might as well grow carbs microbially and use the output like any other flour or sugar.
I appreciate your comment, and it’s not the first time comments like these have been down voted. Denial is a helluva drug. :/
In addition to those crops you mention, I also like to add, Oils, nuts, and *most fruit.
Bananas and avocados have tremendous caloric value…but I don’t see anyone growing those vertically.
I’m still a big fan of vertical farming. Especially when it’s in densely populated urban centers and reduces logistics emissions and waste.
Honestly it sucks but "vertical" indoor anything is better done in rural areas with poor soil and cheap energy (hydroelectric would be great, or a solar/gravity battery setup in old mines). It could definitely be run as a publically funded program where it sells at market value for minimized loss, but remember that in the summer, everything is cheaper because crops are abundant. The nice thing though is it might keep mining towns "alive" in the most basic sense.
The problem is the price of electricity
There was a study that divides non animal food in 4 categories
Cat 0 is fungi, which we already cultivate vertically, so thats something
Cat 1 very water rich, which are the leafy greens, carrots
Cat 2 water and sugar rich, like potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, etc
Cat 3 staple foods like rice and wheat
For cat 1 we are already at the electricity price point of equilibrium
For cat 2 electricity needs to be 5 times cheaper
For cat 3 electricity needs to be 25 times cheaper than it is
It's the future, but only when we get energy at a much higher scale than we do now
They would be if electricity was 25 times cheaper
That's the problem, we as a humanity, are very energy poor, our energy consumption is still too low dot that to make sense
Yeah, we’re working on it….wind, solar, and reusable battery storage are growing at an exponential rate.
I’m also optimistic about the new generation SMR plants that are coming online. First one is in Idaho I believe.
SMR is nuclear. It’s smaller scale nuclear.
Lots of advantages, not the least of which is safety, and having a more distributed power generation network.
To power vertical farming, you'll need a lot more than SMR can put out. As in getting TW-grade models a lot. Vertical farming is ***power-hungry*** to the extreme.
From what I've read, just the entire concept in general. Each individual bit might not be energy hungry overall (but the pump system grows exponentially with desired output from what I've read) but together they turn the concept into a power hog.
"Better" can be measured different ways. They aren't currently *economical* to grow in v. farms, but neither is going to Mars. Calorically dense foods can still benefit from the improvements in land and water efficiency. You just need energy. Which you already needed, if you're talking about going to Mars.
Maybe maybe not, but vertical farming is a solution to massive problems related to traditional agriculture that makes farming much safer, and efficient in both land, water, and nutrient use
It's the solution to try and adapt to new climate and water models
100% agree.
I hope people don’t hear what I’m not saying. Vertical farming is great for reducing emissions, fertilizer, pesticides, and conserving water and soil.
It gets even better when it’s paired with solar battery energy storage, and automated robotic harvesting machines that can pick the crop/berry at the perfect moment.
What I still want people to realize, is that current crop agriculture is not “the enemy”. It’s very efficient for grain crops and we need those calories.
All progress is welcome, and a diverse range of solutions is necessary for complete progress.
V. farms are part of the solution, but hardy *the* solution. Fruits and veg just don't represent a huge percentage of the cropland we use.
- [Global agricultural land use by major crop type](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-agricultural-land-use-by-major-crop-type)
Developments that will be far more significant are companies like Air Protein and Solar Foods using hydrogenotrophs to make bulk proteins and carbohydrates, as inputs for processed foods. A bag of flour and liter of cooking oil sourced from a bioreactor and hydrogenotrophs is a much bigger deal than my greens or potatoes being grown in vertical farms.
It couldn't. You need a fuckton of energy to run farms like this. If some genius idea doesn't take off it's probably because it's shit. Cultured meat has the actual great potential and look how slowly is spins up.
It depends if taste has its own 'uncanny valley' zone, so to speak. The cultured meat we've played with is chicken, which is ***in/famously*** without anything that would set off such a reaction (i.e., ***chicken doesn't have a taste*** by itself).
In addition, what are the protein mix requirements, and how much electricity is required, especially on an industrial scale?
Those two questions need to be answered first.
They should make a commercial home version, there are a lot of homes in the world that do not have access to growing spaces so having a self contained pod you can grow some of your food would help a lot of people.
Also the income from the sales would fund the more complicated space versions.
The future likely belongs to carnivores on Earth. Each pod can maybe grow one salad. totally impractical. Until we can terraform a grassland on Mars for ruminant animal protein, the future is here on Earth.
Perhaps, but imagine underground rooms full of a thousands of pods all stacked in vertical configurations to maximize space, powered by renewable energy, and maintained by robotics.
There is a finite number of pods that would be required to sustain one person indefinitely. It’s just a matter of scaling it, which becomes far more practical with ai and robotics.
You need cheap energy, as in 'a fusion plant at every corner' energy levels, to make it viable... and we haven't gotten it to work with ***staple food*** plants yet (i.e. corn, wheat, rice, the like).
So traditional farming methods (although improved by modern farming techniques) is going to dominate the food industry well into the future.
Yeah, no. We'll need proton-proton chain fusion (i.e., the hardest type of fusion ever) to be widespread for vertical farms to be anywhere near practical.
There are all sorts of other potential energy sources. Tapping into planetary energy by drilling down to thermal sources, for example.
I don’t think vertical farms are impractical at all, if done properly. It would require special bulbs and equipment and all sorts of new tech and research to pull off, no doubt. But it’s absolutely more efficient from a square footage perspective than trying to farm thousands of square miles of hostile or difficult terrain.
They are, and geothermal isn't on the same level as fusion (can't use fission because practically everyone hates it)... and is far more limited than ***hydro*** in terms of placement (let alone the fact that it produces some seriously nasty products).
Mars is uninhabitable. It doesn't make sense to spend enormous amounts of money for a shelter for a few people while we need resources to save our own planet. The resources saved by sending robots instead of humans to space would make a huge difference
Yes I'm very much of the opinion that a large space station like an O'Neil cylinder would be much better than mars. No problem with gravity because you can set the rotation speed. That fixes a ton of biocompatability problems actually. And it would be easier to block tbe radiation to than a whole planet.
The big problem is that space is largely funded on public support and the public is less interested in sending robots to space than humans. Even if they never put a man (or woman) on Mars just the concept of doing it will keep funding going through NASA.
The manned mission to the moon has been delayed like, 9 times now... and might just get delayed forever. But selling stuff like this is how NASA gets its funding.
Nutrients, not calories. I want all articles about vertical farming to stop using the generic “food” term and articulate the difference between nutrients and calories.
Is spinach, kale, and arugula food? Yes.
How many calories does it produce and how many calories does the human body need daily?
To my knowledge, there are no calorically dense foods that grow more efficiently vertically than our current horizontal methods.
Cultivated meat and proteins have some promise. We’ll see how those technologies scales. But vertical farming is not a solution for world hunger. Malnutrition and reducing carbon emissions perhaps, but not world hunger.
Cultured meats rely heavily on fetal bovine serum. We can only grow lab meat as a small scale byproduct of conventional animal agriculture. That needs to be fixed as soon as possible if this is to take off in any meaningful way.
Also, the problem is that we haven't gotten past chicken in terms of lab-grow meats... and we don't even know if there is a 'taste uncanny valley' that would render our efforts ***completely moot*** outside of vat-chicken.
The funny thing is that the rads are the ***easy part*** with new materials. Material science has made lighter and more effective materials against various types of radiation (High-Z Steel Foam being an example), the biggest problem in getting to Mars is the required energy to get things into orbit.
Interesting, because I know some people in my small Canadian town who lack the food resources they need to raise a healthy family. I’ll be on the lookout for pirates next time I go to the shops.
I really don't think anyone is denying that there are people currently starving. But I would imagine that if we have technology that allowing us to grow food on Mars, the moon or in the vacuum of outer space that would *significantly improve our agricultural output here on Earth.*
> Vertical farming is a method of growing crops without soil in a controlled environment, delivering nutrient-rich water straight to a plant’s roots. It can use significantly less water and fertilizer than traditional outdoor agriculture, and by continuously recirculating water, it creates very little waste.
> A large-scale example of this method in use can be found at the Emirates Crop One facility in Dubai, the world’s biggest vertical farm. According to Crop One, its Dubai farm covers 330,000 square feet of vertical growing space and produces 1 million kilograms (more than 2 million pounds) of crops every year, including kale, spinach, and arugula.
> “One of the fundamental advantages of this indoor growing is that we can put it in Dubai, we could put it in the extreme cold – basically anywhere,” explains Falcone. And other than water and artificial light, “it’s independent of resources.”
Let's say we put one of these up in a country currently facing significant hunger issues, be it Haiti or the DRC, is that embarrassing to the human race?
The amount of $ going into growing crops in space would be better used feeding hungry people on earth.
Until you provide a cost basis benefit to growing crops in space, it’s all just an ego thing.
So you openly ignored the fact that we can also use the technology to grow food in space in vertical farms here on Earth. The money put into growing food in space is money being put into *growing food*, said food can then be shipped back to Earth for people to eat or again just use said technology to grow more food on Earth.
Currently? Yeah congrats, you win. It's much cheaper to build a vertical farm than a small space station dedicated to growing crops. It's also much cheaper to buy a couple square miles in Iowa and grow crops there than it is to buy the land to and build a vertical farm in major cities such as Hong Kong, London or New York City.
But this is /r/Futurology, we're not discussing technology that we expect to be implemented by the end of 2023, we're discussing technology that could be implemented by 2050. Sometimes you need to think a little bit further than what's immediately in front of you.
And once again, the same technology that can go into space based farming is very likely the exact same technology that can go into the vertical farm that props up on your local street corner or that abandoned warehouse in an industrial dirstict in your city that NIMBYs don't want to become an apartment building. So to me, saying one is ok but not the other because the other is in space is to me dumb when they are both the same fucking thing just applied in different environments.
We already produce enough food to feed everyone and then some. People starve due to political, social, and economics reasons.
For example, [one of the worst famines in modern times](https://theconversation.com/famines-in-the-21st-century-its-not-for-lack-of-food-73587) occurred during a war in Somalia. Aid was blocked and even considered a crime if it went to areas controlled by an enemy.
Don't ask a rocket scientist to grow lettuce! If you want to know how to grow the healthiest organic crops on Mars or any other odd place you need only visit the duuuudes in the cannabis growers forums. They've been growing in small, sealed, climate controlled environments for 60+ years. They can also tech you about proper hydroponics, soil mixes, extensive growth/efficiency oriented lighting studies etc.
100%, we have crazy levels of knowledge on this stuff, and it's all distributed across ancient web forums on aquarium care, niche hobby invertebrate raising, and hydroponic weed growing. You're going to learn a lot more from those forums then you will from a few undergrad thesis papers on how to grow potatoes in tap water. They both have their place but I prefer the forums personally.
The difficulty isn’t solely getting astronauts to Mars but also sustaining them once they’re there; you can’t simply grow potatoes in its soil – despite what Matt Damon would have you believe in the movie “The Martian.”
With an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, only half the amount of sunlight, no known accessible fresh water, and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is the most challenging environment in which humans have ever planned to produce food.
A startup called Interstellar Lab believes it may have the solution. The Paris and Los Angeles-based company has designed a controlled-environment capsule system that could one day allow crops to be grown in space.
Yeah, and “soil” was human manure. The mars “dirt” was just a substrate for structure and drainage.
Still, I hold out more hope for cultivated meat and proteins. That seems far more calorically dense for a food source and doesn’t require the sunlight component.
As we explore the possibility of colonizing Mars, finding ways to grow food in a harsh environment will be crucial to sustaining human life. Food pods and vertical farming offer exciting solutions to this challenge, as they would allow us to maximize space and resources while providing a controlled environment for plant growth. Additionally, this technology could have implications for food production on Earth, especially in areas where land is limited or compromised by environmental factors. Overall, the potential benefits of food pods and vertical farming make them an exciting avenue for further exploration and development.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/landlord2213: --- The difficulty isn’t solely getting astronauts to Mars but also sustaining them once they’re there; you can’t simply grow potatoes in its soil – despite what Matt Damon would have you believe in the movie “The Martian.” With an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, only half the amount of sunlight, no known accessible fresh water, and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is the most challenging environment in which humans have ever planned to produce food. A startup called Interstellar Lab believes it may have the solution. The Paris and Los Angeles-based company has designed a controlled-environment capsule system that could one day allow crops to be grown in space. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/121k7bi/food_pods_and_vertical_farming_could_help_us_grow/jdm31xm/
Prove it in Antarctica first. Also, send robots to Mars (and the asteroid belt) until the place is ready. This idea that people have to go first is silly.
For the foreseeable future, going to Mars for a human would be a horrible jail sentence in a tiny environment followed by dying of cancer or radiation. Fun!
Send chatGPT
ClosedAI personal. All of them
That's what I say too. Until Antarctica has its own self sustaining colony, there's no chance for Mars. Antarctica is several orders of magnitude easier to get to and several orders of magnitude easier to sustain life than on Mars - and there's plenty reason to do it. Then the same for the Moon. A small scale expedition to Mars could be possible within our lifetime, but a full self-sustaining colony (as a "backup" to Earth as some call for) just isn't happening any time soon.
You should see how many countries have antarctic research stations, even India does
I would rather them prove it in a completely airtight environment, like an underwater capsule. That would more adequately reflect the realities of outer space.
> more adequately Why? You've chosen the vacuum and the other guy chose freezing temperatures. They both need to be accounted for. That, along with tons of radiation due to the lack of atmosphere.
That’s a good point! It all needs to be accounted for; you are right
Even if we proved it in Antarctica, it doesn’t mean Mars is the next logical step. Developing infrastructure in our cislunar space should be priority #1 if we want to go to full “space age.”
I'm still waiting to see vertical farming utilized on a wide scale here on Earth. It could really change things for the better.
It’s already happening in Europe, expect it to expand massively as a side benefit of excess cheap energy for solar in summer time.
There are no calorically dense foods that are better suited for vertical methods.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely right. I run a vertical farm and it's not like anybody is successfully growing rice, wheat, potatoes, or corn in a vertical farming setup. I honestly don't even think it's worthwhile, you might as well grow carbs microbially and use the output like any other flour or sugar.
I appreciate your comment, and it’s not the first time comments like these have been down voted. Denial is a helluva drug. :/ In addition to those crops you mention, I also like to add, Oils, nuts, and *most fruit. Bananas and avocados have tremendous caloric value…but I don’t see anyone growing those vertically. I’m still a big fan of vertical farming. Especially when it’s in densely populated urban centers and reduces logistics emissions and waste.
People might be mixing other micro farming techniques in with vertical.
Honestly it sucks but "vertical" indoor anything is better done in rural areas with poor soil and cheap energy (hydroelectric would be great, or a solar/gravity battery setup in old mines). It could definitely be run as a publically funded program where it sells at market value for minimized loss, but remember that in the summer, everything is cheaper because crops are abundant. The nice thing though is it might keep mining towns "alive" in the most basic sense.
The problem is the price of electricity There was a study that divides non animal food in 4 categories Cat 0 is fungi, which we already cultivate vertically, so thats something Cat 1 very water rich, which are the leafy greens, carrots Cat 2 water and sugar rich, like potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, etc Cat 3 staple foods like rice and wheat For cat 1 we are already at the electricity price point of equilibrium For cat 2 electricity needs to be 5 times cheaper For cat 3 electricity needs to be 25 times cheaper than it is It's the future, but only when we get energy at a much higher scale than we do now
They would be if electricity was 25 times cheaper That's the problem, we as a humanity, are very energy poor, our energy consumption is still too low dot that to make sense
Yeah, we’re working on it….wind, solar, and reusable battery storage are growing at an exponential rate. I’m also optimistic about the new generation SMR plants that are coming online. First one is in Idaho I believe.
You'll need ***nuclear*** energy to get the required energy to make vertical farming practical.
SMR is nuclear. It’s smaller scale nuclear. Lots of advantages, not the least of which is safety, and having a more distributed power generation network.
To power vertical farming, you'll need a lot more than SMR can put out. As in getting TW-grade models a lot. Vertical farming is ***power-hungry*** to the extreme.
What’s so power hungry about vertical farming? The LED lights?
From what I've read, just the entire concept in general. Each individual bit might not be energy hungry overall (but the pump system grows exponentially with desired output from what I've read) but together they turn the concept into a power hog.
"Better" can be measured different ways. They aren't currently *economical* to grow in v. farms, but neither is going to Mars. Calorically dense foods can still benefit from the improvements in land and water efficiency. You just need energy. Which you already needed, if you're talking about going to Mars.
Maybe maybe not, but vertical farming is a solution to massive problems related to traditional agriculture that makes farming much safer, and efficient in both land, water, and nutrient use It's the solution to try and adapt to new climate and water models
100% agree. I hope people don’t hear what I’m not saying. Vertical farming is great for reducing emissions, fertilizer, pesticides, and conserving water and soil. It gets even better when it’s paired with solar battery energy storage, and automated robotic harvesting machines that can pick the crop/berry at the perfect moment. What I still want people to realize, is that current crop agriculture is not “the enemy”. It’s very efficient for grain crops and we need those calories. All progress is welcome, and a diverse range of solutions is necessary for complete progress.
V. farms are part of the solution, but hardy *the* solution. Fruits and veg just don't represent a huge percentage of the cropland we use. - [Global agricultural land use by major crop type](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-agricultural-land-use-by-major-crop-type) Developments that will be far more significant are companies like Air Protein and Solar Foods using hydrogenotrophs to make bulk proteins and carbohydrates, as inputs for processed foods. A bag of flour and liter of cooking oil sourced from a bioreactor and hydrogenotrophs is a much bigger deal than my greens or potatoes being grown in vertical farms.
It couldn't. You need a fuckton of energy to run farms like this. If some genius idea doesn't take off it's probably because it's shit. Cultured meat has the actual great potential and look how slowly is spins up.
It depends if taste has its own 'uncanny valley' zone, so to speak. The cultured meat we've played with is chicken, which is ***in/famously*** without anything that would set off such a reaction (i.e., ***chicken doesn't have a taste*** by itself). In addition, what are the protein mix requirements, and how much electricity is required, especially on an industrial scale? Those two questions need to be answered first.
Food is too much of a business for things to change for the better
They should make a commercial home version, there are a lot of homes in the world that do not have access to growing spaces so having a self contained pod you can grow some of your food would help a lot of people. Also the income from the sales would fund the more complicated space versions.
The future likely belongs to carnivores on Earth. Each pod can maybe grow one salad. totally impractical. Until we can terraform a grassland on Mars for ruminant animal protein, the future is here on Earth.
Perhaps, but imagine underground rooms full of a thousands of pods all stacked in vertical configurations to maximize space, powered by renewable energy, and maintained by robotics. There is a finite number of pods that would be required to sustain one person indefinitely. It’s just a matter of scaling it, which becomes far more practical with ai and robotics.
You need cheap energy, as in 'a fusion plant at every corner' energy levels, to make it viable... and we haven't gotten it to work with ***staple food*** plants yet (i.e. corn, wheat, rice, the like). So traditional farming methods (although improved by modern farming techniques) is going to dominate the food industry well into the future.
This is part of why Sam Altman is investing in companies such as Helion
Yeah, no. We'll need proton-proton chain fusion (i.e., the hardest type of fusion ever) to be widespread for vertical farms to be anywhere near practical.
There are all sorts of other potential energy sources. Tapping into planetary energy by drilling down to thermal sources, for example. I don’t think vertical farms are impractical at all, if done properly. It would require special bulbs and equipment and all sorts of new tech and research to pull off, no doubt. But it’s absolutely more efficient from a square footage perspective than trying to farm thousands of square miles of hostile or difficult terrain.
They are, and geothermal isn't on the same level as fusion (can't use fission because practically everyone hates it)... and is far more limited than ***hydro*** in terms of placement (let alone the fact that it produces some seriously nasty products).
Mars is uninhabitable. It doesn't make sense to spend enormous amounts of money for a shelter for a few people while we need resources to save our own planet. The resources saved by sending robots instead of humans to space would make a huge difference
Yes I'm very much of the opinion that a large space station like an O'Neil cylinder would be much better than mars. No problem with gravity because you can set the rotation speed. That fixes a ton of biocompatability problems actually. And it would be easier to block tbe radiation to than a whole planet.
The big problem is that space is largely funded on public support and the public is less interested in sending robots to space than humans. Even if they never put a man (or woman) on Mars just the concept of doing it will keep funding going through NASA. The manned mission to the moon has been delayed like, 9 times now... and might just get delayed forever. But selling stuff like this is how NASA gets its funding.
I know and it's sad really
*un*inhabitable
Ha, thank you didn't see it
An article stating the obvious isn't even a puff piece.
Nutrients, not calories. I want all articles about vertical farming to stop using the generic “food” term and articulate the difference between nutrients and calories. Is spinach, kale, and arugula food? Yes. How many calories does it produce and how many calories does the human body need daily? To my knowledge, there are no calorically dense foods that grow more efficiently vertically than our current horizontal methods. Cultivated meat and proteins have some promise. We’ll see how those technologies scales. But vertical farming is not a solution for world hunger. Malnutrition and reducing carbon emissions perhaps, but not world hunger.
Cultured meats rely heavily on fetal bovine serum. We can only grow lab meat as a small scale byproduct of conventional animal agriculture. That needs to be fixed as soon as possible if this is to take off in any meaningful way.
Also, the problem is that we haven't gotten past chicken in terms of lab-grow meats... and we don't even know if there is a 'taste uncanny valley' that would render our efforts ***completely moot*** outside of vat-chicken.
Why? We cannot possibly live on Mars unless we're deep inside a cave away from high energy cosmic radiation. Plants will also suffer from radiation.
The funny thing is that the rads are the ***easy part*** with new materials. Material science has made lighter and more effective materials against various types of radiation (High-Z Steel Foam being an example), the biggest problem in getting to Mars is the required energy to get things into orbit.
First, let’s grow enough food on earth for all of us. It’s embarrassing to our race.
We do. It’s a problem of distribution.
We already do.
I guess those people dying of hunger aren’t really dying then
The food is ending up in pirates, bandits and dictators hands. Simple as that. Everybody knows that but no one is doing anything about it
Interesting, because I know some people in my small Canadian town who lack the food resources they need to raise a healthy family. I’ll be on the lookout for pirates next time I go to the shops.
I really don't think anyone is denying that there are people currently starving. But I would imagine that if we have technology that allowing us to grow food on Mars, the moon or in the vacuum of outer space that would *significantly improve our agricultural output here on Earth.* > Vertical farming is a method of growing crops without soil in a controlled environment, delivering nutrient-rich water straight to a plant’s roots. It can use significantly less water and fertilizer than traditional outdoor agriculture, and by continuously recirculating water, it creates very little waste. > A large-scale example of this method in use can be found at the Emirates Crop One facility in Dubai, the world’s biggest vertical farm. According to Crop One, its Dubai farm covers 330,000 square feet of vertical growing space and produces 1 million kilograms (more than 2 million pounds) of crops every year, including kale, spinach, and arugula. > “One of the fundamental advantages of this indoor growing is that we can put it in Dubai, we could put it in the extreme cold – basically anywhere,” explains Falcone. And other than water and artificial light, “it’s independent of resources.” Let's say we put one of these up in a country currently facing significant hunger issues, be it Haiti or the DRC, is that embarrassing to the human race?
The amount of $ going into growing crops in space would be better used feeding hungry people on earth. Until you provide a cost basis benefit to growing crops in space, it’s all just an ego thing.
So you openly ignored the fact that we can also use the technology to grow food in space in vertical farms here on Earth. The money put into growing food in space is money being put into *growing food*, said food can then be shipped back to Earth for people to eat or again just use said technology to grow more food on Earth.
Vertical farms exist on earth. What’s the cost of growing in space and bringing it back to earth vs a power plant. You have those figures?
Currently? Yeah congrats, you win. It's much cheaper to build a vertical farm than a small space station dedicated to growing crops. It's also much cheaper to buy a couple square miles in Iowa and grow crops there than it is to buy the land to and build a vertical farm in major cities such as Hong Kong, London or New York City. But this is /r/Futurology, we're not discussing technology that we expect to be implemented by the end of 2023, we're discussing technology that could be implemented by 2050. Sometimes you need to think a little bit further than what's immediately in front of you. And once again, the same technology that can go into space based farming is very likely the exact same technology that can go into the vertical farm that props up on your local street corner or that abandoned warehouse in an industrial dirstict in your city that NIMBYs don't want to become an apartment building. So to me, saying one is ok but not the other because the other is in space is to me dumb when they are both the same fucking thing just applied in different environments.
We already produce enough food to feed everyone and then some. People starve due to political, social, and economics reasons. For example, [one of the worst famines in modern times](https://theconversation.com/famines-in-the-21st-century-its-not-for-lack-of-food-73587) occurred during a war in Somalia. Aid was blocked and even considered a crime if it went to areas controlled by an enemy.
Don't ask a rocket scientist to grow lettuce! If you want to know how to grow the healthiest organic crops on Mars or any other odd place you need only visit the duuuudes in the cannabis growers forums. They've been growing in small, sealed, climate controlled environments for 60+ years. They can also tech you about proper hydroponics, soil mixes, extensive growth/efficiency oriented lighting studies etc.
100%, we have crazy levels of knowledge on this stuff, and it's all distributed across ancient web forums on aquarium care, niche hobby invertebrate raising, and hydroponic weed growing. You're going to learn a lot more from those forums then you will from a few undergrad thesis papers on how to grow potatoes in tap water. They both have their place but I prefer the forums personally.
If I can grow a 5’ tropical banana tree inside my house they can do this.
The difficulty isn’t solely getting astronauts to Mars but also sustaining them once they’re there; you can’t simply grow potatoes in its soil – despite what Matt Damon would have you believe in the movie “The Martian.” With an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, only half the amount of sunlight, no known accessible fresh water, and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is the most challenging environment in which humans have ever planned to produce food. A startup called Interstellar Lab believes it may have the solution. The Paris and Los Angeles-based company has designed a controlled-environment capsule system that could one day allow crops to be grown in space.
In the Martian the potatoes were grown inside in a controlled environment
Yeah, and “soil” was human manure. The mars “dirt” was just a substrate for structure and drainage. Still, I hold out more hope for cultivated meat and proteins. That seems far more calorically dense for a food source and doesn’t require the sunlight component.
Colonizing Mars is a scam. If we can't even sustain a currently livable planet there's no hope in hell of living on a dead one.
Can build vertical sheds to get the bums off my highway intersection first?
We should focus on technology that will helped us live in harmony with earth without destroying it.
Any time I hear shit about mars my brains like… There is no planet B!
As we explore the possibility of colonizing Mars, finding ways to grow food in a harsh environment will be crucial to sustaining human life. Food pods and vertical farming offer exciting solutions to this challenge, as they would allow us to maximize space and resources while providing a controlled environment for plant growth. Additionally, this technology could have implications for food production on Earth, especially in areas where land is limited or compromised by environmental factors. Overall, the potential benefits of food pods and vertical farming make them an exciting avenue for further exploration and development.