Upward Bound: Space Farming
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ส.ค. 2018
- Could we grow our foods in the heavens rather than on the earth?
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In order to do serious exploration and colonization of space, we will need a source of food beyond Earth. But can we go beyond simply small hydroponic gardens to entire vast space farms in orbit of our planet, and could those farming on satellites and space stations eventually replace earth-based agriculture as our main food source at home?
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Upward Bound: Space Farming
Episode 148, Season 4 E34
Writers
Isaac Arthur
Editors
A.T. Long
Darius Said
Keith Blockus
Mark Warburton
Matthew Acker
Sigmund Kopperud
Producer
Isaac Arthur
Cover Artist
Jakub Grygier www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier
Graphics Team
Ariesticnig
Bryan Versteeg spacehabs.com
Jarred Eagley
Jeremy Jozwik www.artstation.com/zeuxis_of_...
Katie Byrne
Ken York / ydvisual
Kris Holland (Mafic Studios) www.maficstudios.com
Kristijan Tavcar
LegionTech Studios
Mihail Yordanov
Sam McNamara
Sergio Botero www.artstation.com/sboterod?f...
Narrator
Isaac Arthur
Music Manager:
Luca DeRosa - lucaderosa2@live.com
Music:
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Sirius" www.s-cheremisinov.com
Miguel Johnson, "So Many Stars" / migueljohnsonmjmusic
Aerium, "Fifth Star of Aldebaran" / @officialaerium
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Labyrinth" www.s-cheremisinov.com
A.J. Prasad, "Cold Shadow" • Dark Future - Staring ...
Markus Junnikkala, "A Memory of Earth" www.markusjunnikkala.com/ - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
"Just a little food for thought" Ugh!That pun was rather hard to swallow
applause for this man.
Left a bad taste in your mouth eh?
Kind of hard to digest
As someone who is writing a sci-fi story and who places an obsessive value on world building, I do love these videos. The ability to talk for thirty minutes [ish] about something so easily escaped from the mind is downright impressive.
You don't say.
Same! A lot of his videos are on subjects I get stumped on, so they really help.
Lets take Star Wars for example. Luke grew up on his Uncle's farm. R2D2 is purchased to do farm work. C3P0 is purchased to communicate with farm equipment. There was no time spent in the movie explaining how people farm on Tatooine. I do not recall seeing any plants in the movie.
moisture farm.
Same, these are helpful for my sci fi story in the 36th century.
Space farming huh? Better get some Tractor Beams. You know what I'm saying?
heh heh well done👏
"Space Farming?" *Fires up Elite Dangerous & Eve Online, then holds up a grinder* "Let's get grinding, then"
Nice!!😂😂😂
LOL
In elite in "Agricultural" type of economy systems there are transporters with "low pressure diamonds" in hold concentrated the most.I guess they need them for all that light focusing, well their loss my gain. Pirating in farming systems is the best... so i whoole-heartedly support space farming :)
Topic suggestion: The future of Futurism.
Yes, I know it is very meta and, yes, I'm serious. If you watch some futurism videos from the 50s and 60s (yes, they did exist), there were some wild predictions, some came true, some didn't and some fell far short of what we have achieved. Regardless, here we are in the future and yet we act as if it is now and the future is yet to come (which it is). What will the kid living on the O'Neil cylinder dream of, what will the equivalent of sci-fi movies be like and what will scientist be researching? And how likely are we to get our guesses right, in light of how our ancestor's predictions were?
I don't expect this to be an easy topic, but I would be fascinated to hear Isaac's thoughts on the subject.
I think that he would want to tackle the future of history and paleontology before getting into that area.
@Lon Johnson
Thats a fascinating topic for sure!
Great idea! I'm looking forward to watching the Future of Futurism episodes!
how about "The future of Futurists on the future of Futurism " where future Futurists dream of what their future holds for the Futurisms dreaming of the future of Futurism
We can go deeper
We have the technology
That music gets me pumped every time!
Me too. Actually, the quality of everything is amazing. These videos are much more like mainstream documentaries than the average TH-cam content. I love it that everyday people can get together and produce videos of this quality and share them with others on sites like TH-cam.
Yup. I liked those kinds of mainstream documentaries but i am finding that this is actually better content-wise than any mainstream documentaries discussing simmilar topics available now or in recent times. I mean, you can have nice cgi video and morgan freeman narrating the content or something, and that content can sometimes be good but not this level of good. Imho only thing that issac arthur needs in his videos are more cgi artists and creators ( and that is the most expensice part of making the video i suppose )...everything else is top notch :)
agreed, I'm actually afraid to ask if there is a buy-now button for the title song. I would love to have a full length, or even remixes of the track. B) (I'll ask in a more private place away from evil eyes)
As for other documentaries, yeah, they have stepped away from showing real data in favor of drama, to the point that many documentaries forget to even show the technical what and how, it's kind of sad really. That's part of why I like SFIA so much, More substance than fluff, B).
Zarcondeegrissom it makes my car stereo go thud-thud and gets me pumped too!
Do any of you guys know what soundtrack the intro has? Its been in my head all day!
Man... Isaac makes some awesome introductions for episodes, they sound really epic
I just wish he would mention Mass Effect 3 at some point.
They really do!
@@EverlastingSky he did
Why Thanos' Arguments Are Wrong: Part 14/1836
What number is "energy conservation doesnt exist in the x-men/thor/spiderman universe"
Thanos was not "wrong" per se, his "solution" might have worked. Reducing overblown civilizations back to a manageable number without obliterating their tech base might, and I stress MIGHT lead to civilizations that experiences little population growth, as is evident in modern western society.
Thanos being wrong about THIS was never the issue - he is a villain, so of course he is wrong. He was wrong about this being the ONLY working solution, for example.
The main argument AGAINST the implementation was how monstrous it was, correct or wrong had nothing to do with it.
@@Alexander_Kale the main argument isn't "how montrous it was." there is the whole destruction of biodiversity, and entire specialized industries, which are going to happen given the huge sample size... Not to mention the fact that it really wasn't a problem, or the fact that with the Infinity guantlet, he has a method of beating entropy.
@@ryanmaxwell2174 In universe, the reason everyone objected to him killing a lot of people is because generally speaking, killing a lot of people is seen as monstrous. "Biodiversity" had nothing to do with the motivation of the Avengers, nor is it a valid point, as the human race has survived way worse genetic bottlenecks.
And yes, of course he had other options. That is not the point. He is a villain and possibly an unreliable narrator. Just because he claimed that "this is the only way", does not necessarily make it true. He is allowed to have a flawed view of the universe - with disastrous consequences of course....
Why didn't Thanos just snap his fingers and create more resources? Because he's an asshole.ja!
8:00 "Your taste buds get all messed up by changes in pressure and humidity" Funny thing, as a Colorado native, I never noticed the "airplane food is terrible" phenomenon, because the plane is pressurized to the same altitude I live at.
I feel like this episode was made just for me as I love this topic. I build and experiment with hydroponics and solar aquaponics. Thank you so much Isaac! Thanks for sharing and as always Keep Building👍
Pleasure to meet you Praxidike Meng
I would love to learn and invest
I luv the history of hydroponixs
Thanks. Hydroponics are critical to farming on Mars. It blows my mind that most people have no idea what hydroponics is.
God, I love Arthursday. It’s so optimistic about the potential of man. We probably all know someone who is going on about how horrible everything is. It’s tiring and you recharge me once a week.
I'm glad to hear that, it's weird that I never really think of myself as an optimist, I do point out challenges and difficulties, but I think a lot of folks like to wallow in doom and gloom, even to the point of inventing or exaggerating it. I've never seen the attraction of that, but it seems a very popular hobby for many in recent years.
Re: _"We probably all know someone who is going on about how horrible everything is."_ -- It's a good time to remind people that there's never been a more globally altruistic time in recorded history. There are more hospitals, more charities, more educational institutes, more access to free information, more social programs for the poor/elderly/disabled than ever before. People forget that in all of human history, there's only been about 250 years of peace, and those _aren't_ consecutive years. It's untrue that there was ever some "better time" to be alive.
How up your own ass do you have to be, to think things are going badly? We live in the best time to be alive in human history. No one starves (at least in the civilized world), average lifespan is 77, all the information in the world is at our finger tips, we have access to more entertainment than ever in history. Right now is literally the most prosperous era in human history, and people still complain.
Great video. But for the errata Charles Stross taught me that indeed you can make an omlet without breaking an egg but you will need to break or dissolve the egg shell once you want to eat it.
Some regions of India colud feed India and export food if they could get past medieval land management patterns
p o o i n l o o
Same goes for Africa, it has enough territory to feed it's future population x 3, with current techniques.
To be fair, India's agricultural output has leaped hugely the last half-century. They, and a lot of places, are not managing their crop land as well as they could be, though there are other issues in play too, to do giant farms with low manpower means annexing and replacing lots of small farms whose occupants aren't always offered good alternatives even if they're willing to abandon their previous life and livelihood.
Good thing Ghandi never lived to see his "spinning wheel" program implemented.
You're right, and the problem is the wheat growers want to sell their wheat to the highest bidder, who is usually foreign, so they export wheat and ignore their own starving countrymen who can't pay as much (and this goes for many 'starving' countries and for many types of crops grown in them)...
I was always hoping you'd revisit food productuon! there is no end in sight for the content on this channel!
I agree. Food production seems like one of the hardest parts of escaping Earth. That, and what do do with all that methane if you keep livestock in space? This is why I image either lab-grown "protein" or more plant-based nutrition. Unless there's some exciting reason all the methane might be an advantage...? I can think of several reasons oxygen-producing plants would benefit the crew and their families on a space vessel, but not livestock or even pets.
I've been wondering how long it'll be before we start "farming up" with either farms in space or (more likely) farming in multi-story buildings. Think giant skyscrapers in big cities all full of indoor farms.
@@maxcovfefe methane can be used to generate fuel for the engines, if they are still using chemical engines and not fusión or plasma
Also why even grow livestock if we have the technology to grow meat RIGHT NOW, i'm pretty sure a future civilization would find a way to probably grow meat that looks and tastes exactly the same as "real" meat
Also livestock uses a lot of space while lab grow meat would probably only require some tubes stacked on top of each other
@@carso1500 I like your point about meat. You got me there! I keep forgetting that a post-scarcity will likely mean less meat consumption all around.
A few days a go I was calculating (first-order approximation) how much agricultural area a nuclear reactor could heat. Around 250W of heat per sqm should be ample to keep a greenhouse warm on Mars - it could probably even be less between sunshine and insulation. A nuclear reactor generating 1MWe (a suitable amount for refueling a BFR on Mars) would need to get rid of around 3MW of waste heat, that works out to 12000sqm or 1.2 hectares, that much area should be able to grow enough food for 50-200 people with agricultural crops such as rice, potatos, green vegetables etc. Overall this would be a pretty good way of getting rid of waste heat and for enabling bottoming cycles in powerplants for higher effeciency. Though it would also be a lot of work to build and man such a large greenhouse area.
If you grow plants with florescent bulbs you have to actively remove heat. LEDs have the advantage that they do not require as much cooling.
The heat "loss" depends on the glazing (glass panes). If you are trying to conserve warmth you can coat glass with IR reflective layers. Visible light passes in and then gets trapped. On Earth a lot of heat escapes into the atmosphere. A Mars (or space) greenhouse would have to be very air tight.
just grow genetially optimized algea or cyanobacteria. they run on solar, produce biomass for eating with all nutrients you need (thanks to gentic engineering) and O2 for breathing, are vastly more easy to grow, need a vastly smaller space to grow, and you could burn excess biomass for heat and energy. the produced CO2 gets fed back to the algea. there is no need for inefficient plant colonies. also the algea produce heat as well because of their metabolism so you could even use the heat they give off for energy. during very long night times (several weeks) you could just freeze them and unfreeze them when the sun is shining again ;D
We also need to work on our biosystem - we (as earth animals) are designed to go though life consuming everything in front of us and expelling most of it unused (inefficiency) as waste behind us - which is the worst possible system for your consciousness to be based on in space...
You forgot to account for the energy required for supplemental lighting. Earth plants on Mars would absolutely require extra light.
Oooo, I completely forgot it's Arthursday.
Yay!
Who needs a popcorn machine when you can just send kernels back to the surface without a heatshield?
Who needs ablative shielding when you can use popcorn kernels?
You claim to have a speech impediment, but you are perfectly understandable to me. Honestly, I thought you just had an unusual accent such as a dialect of Afrikaner/Netherlander until you called attention to it in the past. I've been watching your back-catalog and noticed that the narration sounds much different back then...(almost like it was someone else narrating) - but I have to say, any handicap you claim to have in no way detracts from your videos! They are concise, intelligent, insightful, and easily understandable(both in the audio and how the concepts are presented). I find them immensely entertaining, and like I said, I have been spending quite a bit of time of late catching up on your whole series. Good work!!! I love it!
He’s had speech therapy on his impediment
I would love to hear these constructs compared to the size of private craft considering the largest cruise ships are equal to aircraft carriers and built literally just for fun. Also I wanted to recommend the book Old Man's War. I think an argument could be made that the first Mars colonist should be 50+ year olds. Low gravity would make a trademan's joints feel 30 year younger and would be able to build the first wave of colony without worries for reproduction. I'd love to leave that kind of inheritance for my kids and I'm turning 40 from a farming and carpentry family.
That's an interesting idea re: Mars colonists!
The largest cruise ships in the world are over 200,000 tonnes. That’s more then twice as big as the largest aircraft carrier.
And the largest ship is about 600,000 tonnes. I think it’s some sort of gas or oil tanker.
You are absolutely right in ship mass, I was comparing displacement. Your measurement may be better for comparison since we're mostly concerned with building effort and living space naturally increases if we reduce gravity we're building in. Good catch.
Jay, I know right! 1/3 earth gravity would be the best independent living retirement community ever! Send me to Mars with some equipment and the balance of my Social Security earnings to NASA! Easy way for everyone to be able to pay to colonize. What I build i can leave in deed to my descendants. They could just sell the land if they wanted. Either way your kids make bank! I grew up on a farm and have managed farming and construction projects while my husband is an engineer. When the last of our kids go off to college we would happily set off for Mars. We'll build a freaking city there if we ca keep a private deed for 2/3 of what we make habitable.
Building for the future.... We're not too good at thinking that far ahead. Especially in a land that thinks Jesus is coming back any day now, so we can rape the planet as if there were no tomorrow. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy if we DO end up destroying the planet's ecology.
Man I don't know how you can make a 30 minute episode every week but I'm loving it. Thanks
Every episode I have hope humanity will make to the stars.
If you do it on Ganymede, watch out for space mirrors crashing down.
Love the Expanse!
Another wonderful video and nice music. I do love the opening score - knowing that that fanfare heralds another SFIA treat. At around 14.50 the music became so haunting and lovely I just focused on that - nice job.
Greetings,
An excellent introduction to a fairly complex subject, your work on this is very good, congratulations.
This subject is my
Passion. I manage a hydroponic and aquaponic greenhouse on Martha’s vineyard. The statement that hydroponics requires more manpower is silly. Its the exact opposite. It only requires an increased initial startup. We are outproducing most local farms who staff 10-20 and with a staff of only 3 for a two acre greenhouse assembly. The economical argument doesnt even hold water either as we use only 20% of the daily water resources of an equivalent farm and less than 1/10 thw fertilizer. On top of that i can control the environment to keep disease and pests under control coupled with an entirely biological control system that eliminates the need for any pesticides, fungicides or herbicides the future is already here my man. Either way. Love you isaac!
How does maintenance cost compare?
Yep, hydroponics is advancing quickly too, lots of improvements from the last few years Isaac is likely not aware of. It's still crop dependent though, I'm curious what you grow?
Since you are on Martha's Vineyard there are some economic oddities as well, including the enormous value of land which makes hydroponics favorable there, not to mention the higher labor and housing, and general living costs for employee's. Even here on the mainland in MA everything is way cheaper ...despite still being a pricey place to live.
I need no channel youtube! Maintenance cost would be about equal in the long run. No tractors or heavy equipment to keep running (we have one on the farm but not necessary for greenhouse activity.) just a lot of electricals and a bit system cleaning/prep. Easily done with a good sprayer and bleach and a quick wipe with a rag. Certainly
Obstacles to overcome, but small indeed.
p51mustang24 we grow all sorts. Using various hydroponic methods. Most is done via NFT systems which we tend to grow greens in (lettuce, kale, barise, chard, mustard, mizuna, komatsuna, pac choi, tat soi, strawberries as well as basil and other herbs. We also have bato buckets with soilless media for peppers, cukes, squash, carrots and various other little test crops. We also have hydroponic soil crops such as ginger, tumeric, date palms (still too small to yield) as well as hardy figs. Though we could also grow the non hardy variety too! We have raft culture for some basil and salad greens as well. Next we will add in some aeroponics. As for our aquaculture stock we raise rainbow trout to subsidize our nutrient needs.
Happy Arthursday!
SQUEE!!! My favorite day of the week!!!!
I took a vacation day Wednesday and today completely felt like the start of the work week for me. was thrilled to see the upload.
Thanks again to Isaac and the rest of the S.F.I.A. Crew for another great episode!
I forgot its Thursday, so this video was a delightful surprise. This will brighten what's left of a miserable day!
Uplifting as ever.
Once we get that orbital ring sorted out, perhaps we can mass transport CO2 to Mars to overcome that particular barrier to terraforming Mars.
I suspect CO2, todays irritating waste, will be a valuable commodity on and near Earth in the future, but there's plenty of carbon to be had in the solar system, and of course oxygen.
@@isaacarthurSFIA Venus has a surplus of atmospheric CO2, and I can easily imagine that Venusian colonists would love to sell it to the Martians.
Jeff Fecke, Mercurians will have a stronger need for carbon. Mercury will have much greater capability paying for delivery.
Mars has lots of CO2. They need Nitrogen and Oxygen to thicken up the atmosphere.
The most novel method of terraforming mars Ive seen comes from a novella series titled "Life on Mars.
The idea is to dig a massive hole on Mars to trap gasses. Eventually the atmospheric pressure in said hole would be high enough to sustain itself, creating a "bubble" of atmosphere. Then oxygen can be generated without it flying off into space.
11:07, normally chickens can fly, however it is common practice to remove the wing tip, to make flight based escapes impossible.
It's quite humorous to see videos of this.
But that’s doesn’t mean that chickens can be flying more because they are adapting to Mars weaker gravity
A nice bit about this episode was going into more detail about various light-redirection techniques and the like.
Well, I was gonna go grab a nap after work, but as it turns out, it's arthursday!!! Coffee and some little sandwiches are now in order : )
There is another method to grow food that will produce as much food as soil or hydroponics and it is called aeroponics. Aeroponics is the process of growing plants in an air or mist environment without the use of soil or an aggregate medium (known as geoponics).
I see this as the best way to make food grow on space ship when we first leave earth and go to Mars, (or vertical farms on earth), but once we have built proper space colonies we will use the traditional soil
The issue with hydroponics etc. is that the actual equiptment purchase and maintenance is not cost effective. It works great for value dense crops though. Assuming you have near free fusion energy and manufacturing, it would start to become more practical as you can build thousands of square miles of such systems.
Advanced organic soil growing practices are also highly effective, usually with higher output than traditional chemical fert / soil, falling not far behind hydroponics. Converting soil to an organic system can be challenging though.
@Isaac_Arthur 1. approx 5:21 I've read books about growing food for a family of 4 on 1/4 of an acre. "The Backyard Homestead." It assumes moderate meat consumption (a pig a year, the occasional dwarf goat for milk)
2. approx 7:00 those better be peppers and not nasturiums in that hydroponics bay. If they are nasturtiums lambaste the graphics designer doing that animation. Sure the flowers and leaves are edible but those plants are vining. Same with the squash I see in the image. That had better be a compact bush type. Not only are nasturtiums spicy, and thus not a good idea for a hydroponics bay on a ship where hydroponics area is currently limited but the squash would likely take over the entire floor of the ship. If they're tomatoes then they'd still need to be compact plants (Red Robin is a good cultivar for size concerns) no indeterminite (vining) varieties indoors as I've seen ones that grew in compost I gave my houseplants grow to cover half the window. And squash vines that ended up in my houseplants the same way covered an entire window. Some of these plants grow enormous, if this image is far enough in the future that genetically engineered plants are commonly accepted then so be it. But if this is near future you'd need to make sure that every variety was an open pollinated dwarf or you'd have a jungle that you couldn't walk through without damaging at least one of your big vining plants.
3. light requirements - no growing malabar spinach in the astroid belt, got it. Kale maybe? many leafy green crops grow fast, have easy to collect seeds, and collect decent variety of vitamins and minerals from their environment. Daylength would have to be slowly adjusted to be shorter with each generation. Some selective breeding still would have to be done to try and identify required genes for engineering.
4. stem structure could be improved in low gravity by exposing the plants to a gentle breeze. I've had more tomato plants that grew inside killed due to weak stems snapping when I carry them out. conditioning plants to harsher conditions is called "hardening off". If you don't add this to your climate control systems you'd lose more crop plants to physical trauma than you do to lack of lighting.
5. If you're raising animals for food in space you need to make sure your "Imported" food is biologically appropriate. Feed changes the flavor of meat. You feed a pig acorns instead of corn and its meat will have a different flavor. But also a contrived diet that isn't biologically appropriate can have an effect on the quality of the meat you're eating. Farmed salmon fed on corn and soy actually loses omega 3 content and contains arachidonic (sp?) acid levels high enough to completely negate the health benefits seen from eating wild salmon. (see book "Inflammation Nation") You don't want food thats cheap and poor quality you want food thats cheap and high quality or people aren't going to want to buy it. Not in a post scarcity Kardeshev 1 civilization working on its Kardeshev 2 status.
Yes you can get very high yields out of small areas, generally this does require a lot more effort per calorie though, but is one of the reasons I shrug off overpopulation concerns in regard to food. I can't speak to what leaf Jeremy used in that hydroponic animation, the animators are volunteers and usually have to grab free assets so it limits things a bit, same as you'll sometimes here my reference a specific type of crane for instance while showing footage of a different type of crane, just limitaitons on time and budget for production. Agreed on wind and feed, but again, time constraints, we always have to skip or skim material.
as stelalris taught me. hydroponics on every starbases is an effective way to keep your galactic empire running.
That redhead 6:06
Wow! Such interesting, intriguing & fantastic content, as always! Thanks Isaac!
Noticeable improvement on the Rhotacism. Nice work.
Dumping seeds out of the ISS can cause-
Attacks from killer space tomatoes!!
Attack of the Killer Tomato - One of the greatest movies ever!
This is the sort of video that sets my brain afire in terms of wanting to see a game that follows the general progression as a Stardew valley, subnautica or surviving Mars type of experience, hell maybe even use it as the progression path to support RTS space games in a setting like the expanse with lots of traffic but remarkably few larger population centres.
meat could be produced artificially : you can dump some muscle cells on mass produced collagen fiber that you stretch regulary and you gets nuggets meat. That means no animal harm, no problem with low gravity, and while todays it is an insanely expensive process because there is literally not precedent for it so we have no way to mass-produce it, once mass production is available, it will probably be cheaper that raising cattle. Did you hear about it ? What do you think of it ?
It's probably the most ethical method, and likely to be the most efficient once the tech is mature. But I suspect it will never be the first choice for your average person, I can already hear the cries of "FAKE Lab grown vatmeat made my child autistic!"
People already regard GMOs as inferior and less "real" than natural, and I have to admit some modern foods like tomatoes make it hard to argue in favor such methods.
It'll take the industry deciding that VAT grown meat is more profitable, and subsequently flooding the market with it, before the average family will eat it. And only then because it'll just be harder to find "heirloom" meat.
people always end up adopting technology that they wewed as unnatural before when said technology had overwhelming advantage. Not so far ago people who wanted to drive a car were forced to have a man going on the road beforehand with a red flag to signal the passage of the car. They will end up adopting GMO and vat-grown meat as well. It is more probable that when we will mass produce this meat in orbital farms, people will trow red paint at "ogres" that eat "cattle meat" like they do to those who buy fur nowadays. Note that i don't think GMO are ready : it is a fairly new technology, it lacks good legislation, good state-run and international health surveillance, and we lack some experience with it.
Why even bother with the agriculture? Couldn't we just create fats, sugars and proteins in some kind of bioreaktor? After all, food is mostly carbon and hydrogen, plus some nitrogen,oxygen, sulphur, phosphorus... and I dont mean some bacterias or tissue cultures. Im talking about similar procesis that occur in the cell itself.
+Trixas While it is at least theoretically possible to do such things in a lab I'm not entirely sure that the tech is there to do everything necessary completely from scratch yet and certainly not without spending an order of magnitude more energy than would be needed to use plants or better yet genetically modified algae grown under photosynthesis optimised artificial light. (Algae would be better for this purpose as far less of the energy input goes into creating structures that consist mostly of low nutritional value biomass).
(Algae would be better for this purpose as far less of the energy input goes into creating structures that consist mostly of low nutritional value biomass). you mean producing vegetal foodstuff ? Only if it is pluricellular as monocellular needs filtration that is more complex that it sounds and as such is cause of additionnal costs. Plus the thing must be comestible by humains, who can only handle few specific plantstuffs (something like a leaf is generally not comestible, i don't know exactly why we can digest salad and cabbages, who are the exception ). But indeed genmodding can also bring solution to thoose problem too
Love the videos Isaac! I read all the short stories for Hades 9 and I felt like I could feel your influence on how the Universe was built seeping through in the writing. Keep it up!
I'd like to see how to start up space infrastructure.
I imagine android mining, Space manufacturing, autonomous robotics and telerobotics are super nessasary.
Think about most space laborers could potentially be working and living on earth. They just have to hop into a virtual reality pod for work.
Lightspeed delay though
To teleoperate asteroid mining you'll have to either bring the asteroid to you (not really efficient but we could use rock too) or go th the asteroid (cool one)
Should be good for operations in Earth orbit though
@@bottlekruiser
Earth orbit yes. Most workers could actually be living on earth and teleworking.
Where asteroid miners would still go to the asteroid. They just won't go outside the ship. Depending on how difficult it is to automate mining.
My new bed time story. Helps me relax and drift off to sleep. Thanks Arthur.
Live North of Tampa, I got my hole back yard in Garden now working on my front yard, neighbors are mad because I put raised garden beds in... One complained to the code enforcement. They came out and look at my yard, Told me and the neighbor in the county it is legal. She came back and asked me to make her some raise garden beds
Any thoughts on the recent confirmation on solid water ice at the lunar poles? Thanks for the episode Issac!
I sometimes forget how awesome your voice sounds!
Also, I gotta say the visuals have come an insanely long way since I started watching.
Hydroponics is just cybernetics for plants.
Also: Chickens are not flightless birds, even under earth gravity. They fly very short distances, and don't sustain flight for very long, but they acutally engage in true flight for very short distances... People say this is just a technicality, and that despite their ability to hop like grasshopper, they are in effect still flightless... That's someone who's never had to climb on a roof to catch a hen. Now it does vary greatly by breed, and some breeds are more adept fliers than others. One of my favorite breeds, the Ayam Cemani, are adept enough to fly as much as they want, and if you flock them with tree birds, will take to flying into trees and perching there. For breeds in this category, their "flightlessness" is merely a behavioral feature, albeit they still lack the feature of long-distance flight. I would definitely introduce that breed to Mars...
Your programs never cease to amaze me. Thanks!
Space Farming : *the ultimate salvation of world hunger*
Literally limitless product if that time's company/government's able to afford it
You know we have thounds of km^2 of unused farmland here on earth, right? We can also always build higher or deepe. And then there are the oceans. Space is not the problem when it comes to world hunger. Its all about money destribution
@@herscher1297 On point. There're important forested space however; if you want to cut down all amazon rainforest; be my guest. I agree on oceans but space structure is relatively easier compared to deep underwater/pressure construction.
@@thedoruk6324 i mean free land, without forest. Some places are just unused, some need more water, some need more heat, some are used for things like strawbarrys, which arent good food providers. Also i meant on the oceans
We already have more than enough food to feed the world, thanks to capitalism. Unfortunately, we end up throwing vast amounts of it away rather than getting it to those who need it, also thanks to capitalism. Right now, the solution to world hunger is not making more food, but getting the food to people effectively.
@@FirstRisingSouI Accurate
Image space cattle rustling.
Wow this one slipped through the cracks eh?
Space ranchers will use rail guns to deal with rustlers.
A very large hole would have to be cut into the space habitat to get the cattle out. That's something you can't cover up because of the pressure drop.
this is probably the largest barrier to large-scale and long-term viability of colonization, so this video was very welcome. as always, thanks for the amazing work you do.
I love listening to your voice and that you are sharing with many your knowledge! ♥️
Farming those subscribers, let's hit 300K
Mission Accomplished. Standby For Further Orders.
snacks and drinks Thursday!!
I simply love this series! Thank you!
This episode was so relaxing and perfect. What an excellent way to end my day. As always, solid work.
Grow Meat (laboratory)
Muscle cells (and even fat cells) of cattle, sheep, goat, whale (choice cuts of meat)
Without the bone and gristle.
Saves pastureland, farming and processing.
Instead of eating tofu, meal worms or protein gruel (whey)
Manufacturered meat?
No whey!
As long it TASTES like the real thing and PLZ DON'T call it "synthetic" otherwise it'll sound disgusting
I come in time to the class
This is a subject that I'm really interested in. Thanks for discussinf it, Isaac!
Growing up in a small town in Hungary i can tell you chickens can fly lol, we just trimmed their wing feathers.
The more I watch these videos, the more I believe we will not colonize other planets. I think a different paradigm will prevail:
1. O'Neil Cylinders - Where we will live. They can spin for 1.0 gravity and the climate can be controlled. They can be built anywhere and moved to anywhere if needed. An outer surface compartment at 1.1 - 1.2 gravities can house the farming. This would also provide protection from meteor strikes. This section can have a zillion compartments to enhance structure strength and micro manage any strikes to a little compartment. Zillions of such habitats will insulate the destruction of mankind from war, terrorism, or government totalitarianism.
2. Moons and asteroids - Where we will mine. With low gravity, exporting minerals will be cheap and easy.
3. Planets - Planets with < 0.8 gravity or > 1.2 gravity will be limited to tourist and exploratory installations. Planets within that narrow range may see long term terra forming projects.
agreed. it's what i've always thought, myself. the amount of the work to terraform an entire planet is just.... uh... astronomical?
Another thing that moons or at least the icy moons like Titan might be used for is computing, in theory Titan is a brilliant place to put a massive ultra efficient supercomputer, effectively using Titan itself as a giant heat sink+radiator to keep the machine ultra cool and take advantage of Landauer's principle. After all even if the extra heat dissipation needed requires a 20K or so rise in Titan's surface temperature it would still be really freaking cold which makes computing massively more power efficient. Issac did discuss this in one of his previous videos and it seems like a good idea to me. Sure eventually we might want to move on to something even more powerful like a full on matrioska brain or similar but in the intermediate term a planetary scale supercomputer like that would certainly have a lot of applications and you can never have too many supercomputers anyway.
For me, the major obstacle is gravity. That is why I think humanity will settle in O'Neil cylinders. I think gravity will also play a huge role in interstellar travel. We will either have to:
1. Travel in modified O'Neil cylinder generation ships.
Or,
2. Use acceleration/deceleration as gravity, as shown in Niven's The Mote in God's Eye. We would travel by first accelerating at 1G. Halfway, the ship would turn 180 degrees and decelerate at 1G. It takes about 354 days accelerating at 1G to reach the speed of light.
+Michael Sanches The latter one can however only really work with something like laser propulsion the problem is that even with anti-matter you can't get anything like that close to c with the fuel mass being on board the ship certainly not if you intend to slow down after. Of course if you have laser propulsion capable of providing constant 1g acceleration to an object of the ships mass then it is possible to accelerate at 1g (from the perspective of the crew) for an unlimited period of time assuming enough energy to keep powering the lasers that is. This might sound counterintuitive but it's a consequence of the time dilation see while from a stationary observers perspective the ships acceleration would gradually tend towards zero it does so at the same rate that time on board the ship slows down thus the acceleration and gravity from the perspective of the crew would be constant when a constant propulsive force is applied.
The reason you can't do it with fuel on board however is due to the fact that the energy required to accelerate and decelerate totals more than the mass energy of the ship at much lower velocities than that so even if half the ship was matter fuel and half anti-matter fuel and the payload plus propulsion system was somehow massless you would still run out of fuel.
I like how on the Isaac Arthur channel someone watches a video and then that person is an expert at the topic. Not an attempt to be rude, but it bothers me when someone repeats information or uses information someone else said and acts as if that person came up with it or has knowledge of that topic. (Please don't hate)
....just a little food for thought
I've been really waiting for this one.
in rotating habitats glass fibers could direct light from all sides to the farms. in today's video projectors piezo-moving mirrors are common to influence the amount of light per pixel. this could be interesting if you want to give certain plants a specific profile of illumination.
I think getting meat from bugs is going to be a big part of the future... it just makes sense from a energy input -> calorie output equation.
@@mal2ksc Fresh shrimps, a credit a bag! Fresh pulled this mornin'! Get 'em while 'ere fresh! Just a quarter more and I get ya a fresh lobster, straight outta the tank!
It'll be a cold day in hell that I eat a fuckin' insect. :p
@@ondrej_hrdina Fresh soybeans, fresh picked this morning! Get 'em while 'ere fresh! Just a quarter mor and I get ya a fresh mushroom, straight outta the ground!
SCOP is more likely if you set aside social/taste bias. If you only consider production then single cell organism protein tanks are more efficient...
@@Hengebobs Fresh tank beef, fresh grown this morning! Get 'em while 'ere fresh! Just a quarter more and I'll get ya a poop potato, straight outta the ground!(?)
What is your opinion on the feasibility of something like food 'stynthesis' vs farming, in the classical sense?
Consider a more mature version of the meat cloning industry that is starting to pop up today - even if it isn't financially viable yet - where instead of raising a chicken (likely GM for resource efficiency or yield) to eat its wings, you just 'grow' the wings directly, either starting with a synthetic animal cell implanted with the correct chicken DNA and pumping it full of all the nutrients it needs to develop into a nice tasty wing. In this instance you don't need bright light or a hot, and a warm atmosphere 24/7, you would instead probably use a facility {with a smaller physical footprint} that can turn electricity and raw materials (Carbon, water, calcium etc) into 'nutrient pastes' to grow synth-food. This would likely work just fine with plant cells too - even if synth-vegetables are lower on the priority list today due to higher potential profits from cheaper/more efficient meat.
I could see a world where both have their uses, classical farming for less hassle in the light-rich inner system, and synthesis of food in places that are far from the sun (Space stations or Saturn's moons maybe) that have access to the materials to produce the 'nutrient paste' to synthesise food and other energy sources to run the whole operation.
It's got possibilities but synthetic foods still strike me as a ways down the road, for varying degrees of synthetic, I suspect we'll see a lot of vat-grown nutrient ideal printed food this century though.
Isaac Arthur
That seems really soon to me, my "futurism" friend!!
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK! the first 38 seconds brought tears to my eyes (I know crazy hu?) it sounds like (fill in the blank with familiar and missed). your voice and opening music simply should not be messed with (they are how we know we are in the right place).
The closing music is icing on the cake!
Like always Isaac awesome video ! Thumbs up !
Luke Skywalker was a farmer
Yeah, a "moisture farmer" on a bone-dry desert planet. I guess the Empire didn't let people move water from planet to planet, or there wouldn't be such a job.
"Incidentally, since we mostly stick to metric here, there are about 2.5 acres in a hectare."
That would be more useful information if my Midwestern but only-near-farmland upbringing gave me _any_ idea how big an acre is. (The Imperial system is terrible, you have no idea how big any unit you don't regularly work with is.) I've got a better idea of what 1% of a square kilometer is like.
10m^2?
*thinks*
A football field (not including the end zones) is about 1 acre. I'm rounding there, its a bit bigger than that. but it's close.
If you include the endzones, it's *very* close to 1 and 1/3 acres. But again I'm rounding.
EDIT: which means if you set two football fields (plus end zones) next to each other, they'd make a box that is *approximately* one hectare.
A square acre is 208' x 208'.
erm... What do you mean by "football field"? :D
Generally speaking people suck at picturing areas anyway, units don't matter. Your typical Walmart is about 2 acres of internal space, the most common land parcel for a US house is a quarter acre, a football field is a bit over an acre. A Hectare would be about a football field long and just as wide.
Here we go again, love this time of the week!
We can also skip the entire orbital lighting satellite thingamajig by using purely artificial lighting like LEDs in a totally enclosed solid dome or building, which:
- Saves a lot of energy by only using specific wavelengths of light needed to grow plants
- Much easier to maintain
- You can exert complete control of seasonal lighting, daily light cycles and even radiation levels
- Doesn't interfere with astronomy in the targeted locality (just in case people like to look at stars there)
- Most importantly, we do it a lot already on Earth to grow crop indoors so it's extremely well-tested
156th!
Yay! It's Arthursday!
Oh! Parasite aliens?!?!
Can you please touch on the Yeerks from the Animorphs series? Probably horribly, horribly nonsensical, but it might at least make a good starting point for how bad fiction gets these?
Or better yet do a video thats talks about parasitic aliens in general and serrating the one’s sci-fi and real-life.
Honestly I'd settle for a passing mention of the greatest evil my 2nd grade self was out to find and thwart
It’s Nice to have a video from you!
It helps cheer up my day :)
This is so interesting! I remember a few months back, I saw a post on Isaac's sub reddit, asking why he doesn't cover biology related topics like farming on this channel. And here he is, exploring just that.
*_g e t a s n a c k & a d r i n k I n t e n s i f i e s ! ! !_*
🍺🌭
Why do people believe that chickens can't fly? Yes it is harder for modern chickens to fly as we have them have more meat but they can still fly short amounts and are known to roost in trees if they can't find space closer to the ground.
I think most get that they can fly a little, but there's a bit of difference between limited flight and actually flapping around the sky like a pigeon, which in low grav they could probably do
I need to write a scene with a flock of high-flying chickens in Lunar lava tubes. I've considered genegineered or evolved creatures flying in the low gravity (four-winged penguins, draco lizards the size of pumas, hump-back whales with flaps of skin for gliding, etc.), but not really much in the way of right-now creatures which can barely or almost fly here on Earth. Well, humans with strap-on wings of course, but that's been done since Heinlein or earlier.
Aquatic animals jumping out of water and opening flaps of skin to glide a distance before diving back in?
Yep, that exactly. On Earth, humpbacks can throw about two-thirds of their body out of the water. So in Lunar gravity is should be able to throw twelve thirds of their bodies out of the water. That is to say, four times the body length above the sea. High enough for gliding, if the gravity is light enough for that. Humpbacks already have long flippers, so with a few million years to evolve...
I figure not actually flying, but "flying" squirrel styled gliding should work. I see these gliding whales managing a hundred metres or nearly that, which would be something to see.
Isaac Arthur unfortunately the chickens would mostly be hopping around on mars with the thin atmosphere.
Isaac Arthur is such a good narrator ... I could listen to him all day
Yey I forgot it was Arthursday, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this in the news feed. Since I am an aspiring Sci Fi writer who enjoys worldbuilding your videos inspire me
I've been wondering something about terraforming. Say we have the travel infrastructure to transport billion ton cargos of random gas between planets. Would it be a positive to say, collect a few billion tons of venusian atmosphere, and simply release it on mars, repeatedly? Seems like that would be killing two birds with one stone. Then use gengineered bacteria to process the atmosphere further. It seems at first glance to be a fairly nondestructive method, as well as doubling the productivity of the process.
He talks about this in his Terraforming series. The gist I got was that it would a take a fleet of aircraft carrier sized ships operating 24/7/1000 yrs to supply each planet with the correct ratios, interesting concept tho
For venus I think it is more practical to use GE microbes floating in the dense atmosphere to break down venus' atmosphere, eventually converting the gases to liquids or solids that will fall to the surface. Once that's done and the atmosphere is at least somewhat closer to earths pressure you can begin to operate on the surface with big plants further processing the chemicals, still supplemented by various microbes. There's enough gas containing H and O to make the H2O needed for water oceans, and plenty of oxygen.
That's why I think venus is a great candidate for terraforming, while Mars may be more suited for underground structures. With advanced enough genetic engineering you could make super fast reproducing microbes that process the atmosphere incredibly fast, and that arent prone to mutating (this is important to prevent the zombie virus, naturally).
Transporting the gas doesnt seem so practical with most of the propulsion methods we discuss.
Instead of space farms, why not air drop water to drought ridden areas?
By combining the Apis concept and precise air drops we should be able to create artificial fresh water lakes in isolated locations.
There are a ton of variables involved that I'm not too familiar with; chemistry of space water™, environmental impact of dumping trillions of cubic meters of water through our atmosphere in dry climate regions, precision required to have it land within 50km by 50km drop zone and more that I can't think of.
Other than that, I think it's a better alternative to mass desalination that isn't optimal for agriculture (lack of minerals and costs).
A 1,000 km^3 lake could irrigate tens of millions of hectares.
Desalinated water at that scale will cost trillions with today's tech.
Long distance canal projects; tens of billions dollars, given there's fresh water available.
Also would this make the greenhouse effect worsen?
Would assume that quite a large share of the water will end up in our atmosphere.
Best channel on TH-cam by far, this content should be more publicized and recognized.
I have a concern about the hydroponics vs soil farming in space question. If you're in a space habitat that's meant to feed itself with local production, you have to decide between soil and hydroponics, and the question of what makes too much mass is in what you actually have to bring from earth. With hydroponics, you have to bring all the equipment to grow the plants, plus all the equipment to recycle various waste into nutrient solution for the hydroponic systems. For soil growing, assuming you will crush local silicate rocks into dust and make your soil out of that, you'll have to bring crushing and filtering equipment (to get the right particle size), vats to grow the soil in (your sterilized waste goes here), water, seed microbes, and breeding stock for worms and insects you need. You also have to bring a bunch of carbon dioxide for both options, unless you're burning local carbon and oxygen on-site. The soil-making equipment certainly sounds heavy, but it's a lot simpler and easier to maintain than complex chemical manufacturing equipment. Even if it breaks down entirely, "crush rocks" and "pour muddy water into strainer" are instructions so simple, we stereotype them as how a caveman speaks. From a settlement-building standpoint, isn't simpler, easier to build, more reliable technology better, at least when we're talking about what our settlers will depend on for their very lives?
I always listen to your channel before getting high 😂😂
I always get high by listening to his chanel
We need a space force
Change my mind
you don't trust russia? how could you we all need more gulags in our lives!
Why bother making the distinction at all? Army/navy/air force/space force, why bother? Just have "the military" and leave it at that.
No we don't
Change my mind
Isn't trump already making a space force?
Fun... the warmongers want to weaponize space too. If anything we need an agreement prohibiting ordinance in space. Need to leave this chimpish warfare behind. Nuclear deterrent is enough, if a space weapons launch is detected you have more than enough time to respond with nukes... taking weapons to space is just retarded.
the sea level is rising isaac what should we do?
25:10 isaac: we should take the water, and push it somewhere else!
i fucking love this channel.
Nice to see a lot more subscribers as I sip my "SFIA" mug ;)
Im just waiting for the Reapers to come harvest us. I will gladly side with the reapers. Just for the memes.
Reapers are *weak*
Breathern moons shall arise and *make us whole again*
Noted and thus recorded
I think I would be a good Reaper. Just saying.
I would probably go with the original, the Inhibitors. They'll take some time to notice though.
firstish (better known as second)
Alternative counting?
I like to think of it as "more modern terminology" :)
The old USSR would have said they were first but 1.
Great video. The bit about day lengths reminded me of being on a submarine, where the days are "18 hours long." That is, 6 hour shifts, 3 shifts per watchstation.
There were some folks on a 24-hour schedule, but most of us rotated through it as our schedule shifted forward 6 hours each 'day'. I.e. drills were always in the actual afternoon, so one day someone might be 'offgoing' for them, the next they'd be on watch for them, and the 'day' after that they'd be 'oncoming' for them, with different assignments for each.
Thanks for uploading, and you have a great week too
That took quite a bit of watching, but this is the first time I've actually watched a current SFIA video (with a couple of exceptions where the video was clearly time relivant, like subscription videos or the Stephen Hawking tribute): I've finally caught up after watching every SFIA video in chronological order!
I've learned so much, and enjoyed every moment of it. Thanks so much for making these excellent videos, Isaac!
From now on I'll look forward to Thursdays giving me regular doses of optimism for the future.
Excellent delivery as usual.
Im glad i subscribed to this channel.
Isaac's voice makes this strangely addictive.
Thank you for rocking me again IA.
up bound series still is my all time fav!
i love your show Isaac! thank you so much. it's really hard to find people that think this way. thank you so much :)
For this episode I've got my cup of Royal English Breakfast tea, not space tea... but it will do.
Excellent! As always