Solving the million tonne space puzzle
Futureworld
January 13 2033
As basic as it might sound, until we solve cryogenic sleep, the key to space travel and colonising asteroids and far-off planets involves food … tonnes and tonnes of food! An average human needs 2,500 calories per day, or roughly 4.5kg. So, for a round trip to Mars, estimated to take 14 months, there needs to be about 1,860kg of food per person on the ship. If we round the total up to 2 tonnes (per person), we can also spend one month on (or around) Mars for work or research.
While trying to minimise the weight of food required for long space trips, initial experiments in the mid-20s ruled out the freeze-dried, the tubed and the nutritional pills, as it was found that the process of eating not only provides us with energy, our mental health is vastly improved by the variety of food we eat and the social aspects of sharing a meal with other people. Casually squeezing a tube of nutritional paste into your mouth while hanging upside down just doesn’t cut it!
Luckily for our taste buds, how to grow food in zero gravity was solved in 2020, and gravoponics (zero-gravity hydroponics) and lab-grown meat came to the space travellers’ rescue. Food is now grown as and when needed using a circular food ecosystem where everything (yes, everything!) is recycled and reused, thus limiting nutritional additives and drastically reducing the food ratio of the spacecraft’s payload.
Gravoponics has become one of the ship’s critical systems, where potatoes, veggies, and fruits rooted in hydrogel are immersed in nutrition-rich mist, robotically pollinated to produce seeds for the future. The crops are carefully harvested to ensure maximum yield, while tasty steaks and chicken nuggets grow in the lab next door.
While the world marvelled at huge, reusable rockets from SpaceX, the agri-tech wizards, who quietly plodded on out of the limelight, took a hipster fad from the early ’20s and delivered one of the keys to unlocking interstellar space travel and colonisation.
Now we just need to solve two remaining obstacles and we are ready for lift-off. Can we find a solution to the years-long boredom problem, and can we develop simple and reliable technology that can be used and maintained generation after generation on interstellar spaceships and habitats? /First published on Mindbullets 11 January 2024
THE FOOD IS ALL FAKE
February 5 2026
Alot of strange things have happened in the food business in the last seven years. First, we saw the improbable runaway success of Impossible Foods — burgers and chicken made from plants, that taste just like the real thing. And their stock price soared!
Then came a big global health scare, the novel coronavirus of 2019, and never-confirmed rumours that it made the leap from wildlife food markets in China, quickly mutating to human contagion. Everyone knows bird flu and swine flu infected humans in a similar way, through the animal food chain. Which made everyone more suspicious of “fresh” meat, rather than processed and plantbased meals. To say nothing of the benefits of balanced, nutritionally complete, healthy, manufactured alternatives. There’ sa risk to going organic; you never know just which organisms are included in your crop!
Now engineered food is all the rage. They don’t call it artificial anymore, rather “scientifically formulated” and “clinically complete”; and of course, “better for you”. But at its heart all this new cuisine is lab-developed and designed on computer, rather than grown in earthy, composted soil.
Not that there isn’t room in the market for old-school produce, still picked by hand, with grains of real soil clinging to the roots and stems. That’s very much a niche these days, and scarcity does command a premium.
But as my Uncle Jake likes to say at mealtimes: “It may be fake food and all, but it sure tastes real good!” And he’s 96, so he should know. /First published on Mindbullets on February 6 2020