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'Haute Cuisine' on Mars
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions, you will have the choice between eleven new delicious recipes, such as 'martian bread and green tomato jam' or 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles' when it's time for dinner. In 'Ready for dinner on Mars?,' ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets. The future astronauts -- should I write 'farmonauts'? -- will grow potatoes, onions, rice, soya or lettuce. And it's interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef who has almost as many stars in the 'Guide Michelin' as there are planets in our Solar system. This overview contains more details and references about eating in space."
I used to want to go into space...but if I have to eat that damned Frenchy food while I'm up there, forget it.
(Note: This post may seem like flamebait, but I really do hate the French, so I feel I'm justified.)
^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Unfortunetly, all plants grown on Mars will still be freeze-dried before eaten.
Get Paid to search
"I HATE midichlorian stew!"
"Shut up and eat, kid. You want to grow up to be big and strong like your father, don't you?"
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
What? No avacados? What's the point of good to space if you can't have an avacado while you're there.
would be the oxygen created from the plant's metabolic process. Maybe on a larger scale it could be used as a renewable supply of oxygen for settlements or return travel to earth.
omg... they mentioned spirulina ! smart astronauts !!
my girlfriend takes a heaping spoonful of it and mixes it with warm rice milk. she loooves it, and i think it smells like raw chicken.
i'm sure Monsanto will find a way to get in on this, to ensure the first seeds planted on Mars are genetically modified and prevent strange new martian diseases that only Monsanto knows about.
how are those chefs going to keep their hats from floating away in space?
Luckily in space, no one can hear Gaston say "Sacre blu!".
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Once you pick the antennas off, and drain all the green ichor, the stuff's pretty good! Looking forward to the first Martian fast food restaurant to open "Barsoom King", with its slogan "Take me to your eater!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions..." Next ? ESA hasn't even had a first manned mission as far as I know...
Count me out. I'll wait for McDonald to open first
-- should I write 'farmonauts'? -- No... you should not. Some things can not be un-read.
Don't read the overview. Just more ad revenues for him. (Info on Roland Piquepaille)
In Soviet Russia, crops farm you!
the future is but past forgotten
Chlorella!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Didn't you hear? "Mars is the new France".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Er, what other planets? Other than Earth I'm not aware of any other planet which has the potential for allowing greenhouses to be built. At least none that are close enough to allow resupply of food without a multi-year trip.
Was this a slipup or are the folks at the ESA not telling us something (tinfoil hat goes on).
P.S. To see some of the stories you've been missing, check out my journal.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Cut to a scene of a bunch of green aliens running around, making strange sounds.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions
ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets. So one of their next missions will feature food grown on Mars? Talk about jumping the gun! Oh wait, this is Roland. Dang it, I took the bait.
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
Let's just hope that nothing goes, "BAM!"
I have not noticed any posts from Roland in a long while. It was nice while it lasted.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
And it's interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef
No specific offense to the French intended, but as a vegetarian, I can think of much better choices to have designed the menu (not to mention, not everyone likes real French-style food).
Indian food, for example, has a truly huge variation of veggie-only dishes, as does Spanish (though on that, I'll admit, my experience with it involves mostly South-American-Spanish, not Southern-Europe-Spanish food). Greek has a decent selection as well, and you replace the lamb with falafel for most of the rest.
But French? The French have a reputation for taking perfectly good, otherwise healthy and veggie safe foods, and drenching them in lard. Wrapping them in thinly sliced meat. Stuffing them with unnameable mollusks and cephalopods.
Not the best choice, IMO.
I hope that these fancy new meals do not end up displacing "comfort foods" such as may have previously been on the menu.
As Martha would say, "It's a good thing."
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
I for one welcome our new ant overlords, who now happily carry martian food crumbs to their space nests.
'martian bread and green tomato jam'
But the book isn't named How to Cook For Humans on Mars, it's named How to Cook Humans on Mars!!
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
The same minds that destroyed a spacecraft because they forgot the Metric system existed will likely be involved. On the first mission, the astronauts will be told that there is no food on the spaceship. However, they have 1.25 years to fill out order forms for Martian delicacies which will be served to them by Martian robot chefs once they land. Future film adaptations of the shocking results bear such titles as "Donner Party... in SPACE!" and "Houston, could you send up some burgers?"
(Cue scene of emaciated John Malkovich being pulled from the lander saying. "The kzinti boarding party did this!")
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What about plumbing and the rest of the infrastructure needed for maintaining this 'farm'?
"The Helium Special". Four-armed green martian basted in its own ichor. Favorite of John Carter.
"The War of the Worlds". This blobby Martian is served to you live, at which point you sneeze on it, and your Earth germs instantly render it dead...and tasty.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I once ran down a cephalapoid on foot. But then he blinked the wrong eyelids and jumped off the Guggenheim Museum.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm interested in seeing how veggies grow in lower gravity.
Pretty Pictures!
should I write 'farmonauts'?
Maybe try "agronauts"?
How much do we really know about Martian soil at this point? All things considered, for a greenhouse to be a serious plan, we'd have to know we wouldn't need to ship fertilizer, nutrients, and minerals to support them. All of those things add a lot of weight, so if we can't use the soil on Mars as it is, the idea of thriving communities based around greenhouses is a work of science fiction.
Amazing, a story people hate more than Frenchman Roland Pickmyscabs: a story about French food!
Not another Piquepaille "story"...
We will soon have the Crushinator 3000 and Lulabell working the martian farm or is it the moon :)
May I have some of them Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Beans?
Fermented Tang?
That's haute.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
I was in fifth grade. I then used the "Tang" as wine in a school play, getting the kids pretty well buzzed. It was incredibly funny at the time. The nuns did appreciate that I was able to change "Tang" to Wine.
Thalasar
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He may pay for additional services related to his online journal, but I was unable to find any evidence of this.
All of the
ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets.
On other planets... like Earth?
No farmonauts would be a voyager into a farm.
:-)
I think you mean astrofarmers or cosmofarmers.
Still, I just ate a pizza hut pizza, so stick that in your shuttle and eat it!
I wish dominos/hut would do mars delivery one day, but I think subaqueous hotels will exists first, and the first subaqua society. That'd be cool.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
This is either silly or a P.R. stunt. (Actually, it's both.)
The early missions to Mars will be supplied w/ food shipped from Earth. We may use crates of MREs, or even more every-day food, but the food won't be grown on Mars.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
First, MREs and other prepackaged foods can be prepositioned one launch-window ahead of time, and will survive with long shelf lives as stockpiles. Sufficient food for mission success (and even comfort) will be delivered prior to humans leaving Earth, and the crew will bring another complete set of rations, in case something goes wrong.
Second (and the reason the first is feasible) is that the necessary mass of food per person per year is not a huge fraction of the mass that needs to be sent. It is a lot of mass, and eventually you will want to begin production on the other side. But, there are other things that need to be transported fron Earth which account for a much larger fraction of the cargo shipments from Earth. Propellant will probably be made automatically on Mars even before humans arrive, and major concern of the early crews will be to ensure that the propellant production pipeline is prepared for the demand of later missions. Water supply is also a much, much higher priority than food production, since the hydrogen is so useful for propellant, since humans need it directly, since it is of intense scientific interest, and since many of our manufacturing processes rely on water. Greenhouses and cooking will start up along the way, experimentally and then eventually for a significant fraction of nutrition. However, there will be higher priorities to in the early stages than producing food on Mars.
Marvin fillets with Tabasco may be tasty, though.
Ok, even if they are VERY good I would be board stiff in like, a month and a half. Not to mention with a hand full of ingredients and some creativity you can think of 11 different meals very quickly. I think instead of hiring a world renowned French chef they should hire a mom who has 3+ kids and normally has a very limited budget to feed them with. That way you can get several million recipes in a month.
Potatoes: baked, fried, mashed, soup
Tomatoes: Salad, soup, baked dishes
Wow, we are up to eight, and I haven't even spent a minute on this!
We are the Borg...
1)Take a lot of soil/hydroponic nutrients with us, or
2)Use martian "ingredients" to grow food in.
#1 would seem counterproductive as the mass of soil would be greater than the amount of food you could grow on it. That said, how do you grow anything in soil with no organic material as viking and spirit/opportunity have shown us?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
While it sounds cool, and I'm sure they are good, any group of 11 meals that you eat day after day, is going to become tiresome after an extended period. One would hope they will be able to have variations and other new meals beyond those.
RTFA? I barely RTFS.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I know they take up space, oxygen, food... but can't those be overcome by just building a place with more space, oxygen, and whatever the animal eats?
Would it hurt that much to bring a few frozen chicken eggs on the voyage and then raise some chickens on Mars?
Avocados on toast with a bit of salt is quite good.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Its PEOPLE!!! SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!
Hell, send them with some women and children and they would have a completely replenishable food supply... mmmm Veal...
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
You know, that was a great idea. But no one would have thought that Dr. Smith would decide that a "nice omelette would hit the spot!" halfway through the voyage.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
agronauts
:-)
I was just going to suggest that. It's also a nice play on argonaut, which is appropriate for anyone who'd go on such a dangerous, far off, long term expedition.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
..."2001, A Space Odyssey" parody [1]:
"What's for dinner?"
"A glass of steak, a glass of potatoes, and a glass of carrots."
"What? Nothing to drink?"
"Oh, and a piece of coffee."
[1] undoubtedly some play on Odyssey -> Idoicy....
Ads are broken.
FAMINE STRIKES ON MARS "It's like a fuc*ing desert!" says one astronaut.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
The future astronauts -- should I write 'farmonauts'? -- will grow potatoes, onions, rice, soya or lettuce.
I hope that's an and list, not an or list. I don't know that I could survive on just onions.
Jet: The house specialty is sea rat. Used to be a staple food harvested in the Ganymede sea. After the gates stabilized food wasn't scarce anymore and people stopped eating it. So they ran some fancy ad campaigns and claimed it was a delicacy.
Spike: And...? Is it tasty?
Jet: It's totally discusting. But people eat it anyway for status - it's in.
Spike: Well in that case I'm out. Lobster Miso Stew please.
----------
Good old Cowboy Bebop. Probably off-topic, but it was the first thing I thought of after seeing this.
Happy people make bad consumers.
While the aliens weigh Bart and Homer, Lisa explores. She discovers the cook reaching for a spice rack. ``This will give the humans the perfect flavor...'' He licks his lips and carries off the pot. Lisa looks at the cookbook: ``How to Cook Humans.'' She rushes back to the dining room and shows the family her discovery. Nobody, but NOBODY eats the Simpsons! -- Homer, ``Hungry Are the Damned'' in ``Treehouse of Horror'' (Homer's face is smeared with barbecue sauce.) Kodos takes the book and blows off the dust. The real title is ``How to Cook Humans.'' Lisa blows off more dust: ``How to Cook Humans.'' Kodos blows off yet more dust. The full title reads ``How to Cook Forty Humans.'' The aliens are shocked and hurt that the Simpsons thought they were going to eat them. (``Frankly, you people made pigs of yourselves.'') Serak the Preparer cries.
"Freedom of speech won't feed my children" - Manic Street Preachers
Then would candy made on Mars be from the Earth Candy Company? How would the trademark infringment laws work in this case study?
I haven't heard (or seen) any screen door jokes, let alone Polish screen door jokes!- tell us some. Unfortunately I have heard white supremecist tell jokes.. and they're not funny. Its true, diehard racists don't have any sense of humor.
Roland has an article about a supposed "Z Machine" which shows a really neat picture that is supposedly the "arcs and sparks produced by the gun"
(http://www.primidi.com/images/z_machine_2.
I have to call BS on this. This picture is of the NOVA lasers target chamber at Livermore Labs, California, not Sandia, and not this Z machine.
This is at least my impression. Am I mistaken?
Why not grow mushrooms on Mars? They're a great meat substitute. And they'd make great stools for the giant hookah-smoking caterpillars that live there!
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Biosphere 2 demonstrated convincingly that even with a massive infrastructure, hundreds of millions of dollars, and access to convenient and widespread inputs and manicured, primed soil, that creating and maintaining an artificial, productive, self-sustaining biosphere is a herculean task with no easy solution. And they propose to erect something similar on Mars, a terrifically hostile environment with no escape route? Good luck! NASA's Biomass Production Chamber has not fared especially well, and the USSR's BIOS experimental results are acceptable only as long as you are willing to eat algal slime.
Da Blog
All the aforementioned scenarios are about as likely. The ESA needs NASA's help merely to keep the white elephant known as the "International Space Station" alive; given the cracks in both the EU and the Eurozone, not to mention the creeping Euroscoliosis, the idea of ESA funding a Mars mission in our lifetimes is laughable on its face.
Crow T. Trollbot
In a recent episode of Barsoom Barbecue on the Mars Food Channel John Carter of Mars made an excellent rub for Thoat. Tars Tarkas said when John barbecues Thoat ribs the meat just falls right off the bone. And that his Thoat brisket was to die for. You can really sink your teeth into it. Later Dejah Thoris made some tasty Calot dumplings. John said they tasted a bit like dog. And at the end Tars Tarkas showed how he could make a mean White Ape Stew.
John wrapped up the show my mentioning that Zitidars make a good roast, but you'll be eating leftovers for a Barsoomian year. Tars piped in that even for Green Martians Banth meat was just too tough and stringy. Next week on Barsoom Barbecue John will bring in some special guests, Plant Men. They prefer to eat their Red Martians raw and will show the best way to prepare them. Usually jumping over them and clubbing them with their powerful tails.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The ESA has never actually completed a human-rated space craft, let alone sent someone into space...but when they do, they'll eat like kings!
(ok, ok, just kidding, don't mean to belittle the ESA astronauts who routinely contribute to Russian and American space missions, in addition to the ISS)
I will not eat green eggs in jam
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's agrinauts.
Is that anything like Saltpeter as a food additive? Those Sith sure are dedicated to their cause!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
"One of the next"?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only Europeans to *ever* go into space did so by hitchiking on an American or Soviet vehicle.
The correct phrase is not "one of the next", but "one of the first...assuming it happens at all".
You were so close to the answer. Even used the correct word: hydroponic. Yet you still missed it.
Plants just need water and nutrients to grow. They do not care much about the soil, so long as the roots get enough (but not too much) water and nutrients. Tomatoes have been grown in just water and fertilizer for years! No soil needed at all. Most plants are more picky than tomatoes, but many grow in gravel sprayed with water and fertilizer.
This is old by now. Tomatoes were first grown in the lab this way in the 1930s. (There are claims to have done it before then, but they are hard to pin down) Though tomatoes are particularly easy to grow with hydrophonics.
I'm not sure what nutrients potatoes need, but they prefer sandy soils, which generally doesn't have much in the way of nutrients. Most of the other plants in the article seem to have been selected in part because they don't need much in the way of nutrients.
In short, we know we can find CO2. We can crack that to get a little O2 to start things out. We are pretty sure we can find water. The amount of fertilizer needed is small for many plants, and thus trivial to bring. (Not to mention it is a by-product of digestion once humans are nearby) The only worry is nitrogen doesn't seem to be plentiful. It could easily end up that getting the nitrogen is the hardest part. Depending on how the greenhouse needs to be designed of course.
Will they also grow cows up there? I mean, seriously, what fool would submit to years-on-end leaf-eating? If I have to live on another planet, I'm going to be compensated with prime rib every now and then.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
- where they sell 2 KG bags of yellow curry powder mix. Either very large families, or very large spice loadings. Even I, white-bread all-American dude that I am, use a quarter-kilo of the stuff a year.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions
When is the next log-term European space mission, or rather, when is the next European space mission of any kind? Hitchhiking to ISS on Soyuz or Space Shuttle does not count. I would be very interested to see Europe use the Ariane V for manned missions.
an ill wind that blows no good
How typical of the Europeans. They are talking about a mission that doesn't exist that may or may not include farming, yet they are choosing to waste time on telling people what they should be doing with that food. I'm sure an EU office in Brussels will soon issue a standard or directive with a list of approved recipes for Martian cooking. I say let the astronauts decide! Free the Martian chefs from regulation!
In theory, theory is better than practice, but in practice, it isn't.
Are there only 3 planets in our solar system ?
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
For those long missions, they should investigate how well pot grows in space. (Mind you, I'm sure there's plenty of data on how to grow it hydroponically already.)
Suggestion: Make darned sure that the indulging crew are secure in the Party Module until it wears off.No surprise that there's talk of "gourmet" food for astronauts. The Navy has long had a tradition of assigning the best chefs to submarines, with the thought that if you're trapped in a tin can for several months, at least if the food is good it will help morale a little.
Now make that tin can even smaller and send it out into space, I can see where astronauts would be craving some fine food after a few months.
Seriously, if you can muster a greenhouse that simple and effective, it could also be used to grow chickens, which would travel very, very well in embryonic form. Once that greenhouse has been in business for a few months, start hatching chickens and watch the perpetual protein (and fertilizer) machine rev up.
Humans setting foot on mars for the short term is pretty pointless. Our technology is not sufficiently mature to be able to do anything other than plant a flag and come home.
Economically getting enough payload to mars to even begin to start farming, this is several hundred or thousand tonnes of material! This borderlines on the nigh impossible with our current chemical rocket boosters and lack of on-orbit assembly facilities. Why send flesh humans when our machine-surrogates go on less and last longer, and every decade their abilities double.
What would be more acheiveable in the short term would be a manned lunar base on the moon. A heck of a lot closer, and more of a challenge environmentally to live on, than Mars. The moon could be our space cradle. Develop and debug our technologies there. Learn to construct and fabricate dwellings there.
While you're fussing with baby steps on the moon, build an orbital elevator or two. Get this technology perfected, and it all but opens up the heavens. Use it to start sending heavy payloads to the moon. Large excavation an boring machines. Aluminum smelters, dig cities down into the lunar regolith 5 kilometers deep. A permanent outpost of humanity, self-suficient from earth.
By this time it is 2100 and Medical and computer technology have matured to the point where we can replace the human body with a machine similacrum, perhaps even replace the human brain with one that is emulated in a computer. This is the most ideal.
With their brain clock-speed turned low so that months pass like seconds (for the long journey), and cocooned up in ships that are little more than little more than giant balls of primitive von-neuman machines, these will be the ideal colonists to Mars. Their wholly machine bodies require no powersource other than taking a charge off the solar panels or ships reactors. No taking along biomass like stupid algae for breathable air or any of that rot. Able to withstand dozens of Gs for sustained periods.
These people land on mars, and start boring into the planet, setting up small smart assembly lines capable of making a variety of equipment from iron in the soil, small dumb robotic/teleoperated scouts. Find and secure water, build vast underground arcologies for flesh-bodied people to inhabit if so wanted.
From there on, our ability can J curve. Fleets of cheap explorers, little more than mini millionaires fed up with earth and housed in splended new-metal bodies leave the giant spaceport that is now the moon. They head for Mercury, Venus, the various Lagrange points, the Asteroid belt and Jupiter. Setting up techno-fifdoms. It is 2200 and human intellect can be housed in something little larger than a juice box and run on a few dozen watts. There are new governments and cultures that have no flesh at all now, existing only with prosthetic bodies and simulated e-space. There are techno-luddites, flesh bodied people still inhabiting earth. The bounty of the solar-system is great.
At the other end of the machine spectrum giant organic vessles resembling 2 kilometer long silicon borite skinned sea-cucumbers grow in low earth orbit, space elevator like tendrils rooting them to earth. Inside their thick skin is a warm salty mini-sea swimming with blind whale like floating wombs, capable of spawning/manufacturing lifeforms adaptable to a immense range of environmental conditions, variations of all the extant species on our earth now. including humans, but no humans immediately crew these seed pods which when mature sprout solar-sails and set course for another solar system, with the mindless patience of a simple plant. Capable of spending centuries poking along at a small fraction of the speed of light, until hospitable planets can be seeded.
Oh it will be grand. Humanity will spread and transcend. We can acheive these Western Lands in but 300 years. Will it be our path?
Anyone hear of scrapple? It's an eastern Pennsylvania thing. It's a breakfast food, like sausage, but comes in a brick. I like it sliced thin, and fried all crunchylike.
I wonder if the same thing can be done with chlorella, or other small life forms. We could grow these in outer space, right? I'm getting hungry...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I just threw up a little in my mouth.
Seriously, if you can muster a greenhouse that simple and effective, it could also be used to grow chickens
;-)
Again the pressure could be a problem. If you can help it, you don't want to be placing 10 times the inner pressure on the wall as is received by the outer wall. That also places extra stresses on the buried ring stiffener. But if necessary, it is doable.
Once that greenhouse has been in business for a few months, start hatching chickens and watch the perpetual protein (and fertilizer) machine rev up.
Not a bad idea, actually. It may make more sense to have a fully pressurized coop, then move the materials back and forth (as it were). Especially since loose chickens could potentially damage the tarp.
BTW, sorry dude, but you're going to have a hard time getting your C10H14N2 fix on Mars. The potatos might have a little, but the prime crops are unlikely to grow.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Would be the first astro/cosmo naut with a blog would be called a ... can you guess... ok aready....
A Blogonaut!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You grow SOYBEANS.
Goofy-ass vegetarians.
-JT
Before planning meals, why don't they start planning on their first try at getting a man up off the rock we live on.
'Haute Cuisine' on Mars?
If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions, you will have the choice between eleven new delicious recipes, such as 'martian bread and green tomato jam' or 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles' when it's time for dinner. In 'Ready for dinner on Mars?,' ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets. The future astronauts -- should I write 'farmonauts'? -- will grow potatoes, onions, rice, soya or lettuce. And it's interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef who has almost as many stars in the 'Guide Michelin' as there are planets in our Solar system. Read more...
Below is a picture showing a 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles,' a recipe prepared for ESA (Credit: ADF - Alain Ducasse Formation -- site in French). Here is a link to a larger version (283 KB).
A 'Potato and tomato mille-feuilles' for Mars astronauts
The thin slices of potato, tomatoes and onion are cooked one by one, for a homogeneous colour and a melting and crispy sensation in the mouth. The basic ingredients are potatoes and tomatoes, both thought to be easy to to grow in space, on Mars or other planets.
So, what kind of vegetables will the 'farmonauts' be able to grow?
The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. These nine ingredients must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to) 60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and other seasoning brought from Earth.
The nine basic ingredients that Christophe Lasseur, [ESA's biological life-support coordinator,] plans to grow on other planets are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and spirulina -- all common ingredients except the last. Spirulina is a blue-green algae, a very rich source of nutrition with lots of protein (65% by weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins that cover essential nutritional needs for energy in extreme environments.
Besides the fact that astronauts will have better food than today, this will have additional benefits.
Today all the food for astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will not be possible for longer missions. Although still on the drawing board, ESA has already started research to see what could be grown on other planets -- and what a self-supporting eco-system might look like on Mars.
"In addition to being healthy and sufficiently nutritious for survival, good food could potentially provide psychological support for the crew, away from Earth for years," emphasises Lasseur.
It is extremely difficult today to be selected as an astronaut. But tomorrow, when a candidate needs to show additional qualifications in farming and in cooking, it will become almost impossible...
Anyway, for other stories about space food, you also can read two previous posts, "Eating in Space" or "Astronauts To Eat Italian-Style."
Sources: ESA, June 13, 2005; and various sites
Funny, its going to cost millions of dollars to put plants up there, millions of dollars to put water up there (unless there really _is_ water on Mars and they aren't just lying to us), and millions of dollars to put the astronauts up there. All just to do some long distance vegetable growing. Whats wrong with our earth grown vegetables? People make a living off that. But its going to take 300 people's yearly sallary in taxes to do this. If they would put this much money towards getting pestecides removed from our own vegetables...now that would be something. How are these plants going to survive the radiation on the way?
Why bother with green plants. They take up alot of space.
All you need is a water tank. Add normal bodily waste + GM algea + light + CO2. wait a few days then open. Miss The taste of meat, simply GM the algea to express the flavouroids.
Ok so you might like the occasional bit of salad but have a few pot plants in the habitat module, duh.
Simply do not waste space on a greenhouse when you could use the water tank as part of your recycling system.
yes! It's a much better choice for vegetarians. It's not like ordinary meat; it's force fed!!
As this comment pointed out he's not even using the right word. The name for people who grow food in space would be "astrofarmers or cosmofarmers," though i suppose you might want to use some fancy name for mars rather than for space. (Aresfarmers?)
But beyond that, they're now "space farmers" because they happen to be growing food so they can eat it? Using the stupidly wrong terminology he uses does that also mean they're aquanauts because they drink water? If they didn't grow the food would they just be phageonauts? Are they shiponauts because they're flying in a ship? Are they excrenauts because they, well, you know?
No, their primary purpose would be to explore, so they would be astronauts, or aresnauts, or whichever. Someone who traveled to mars after it had already been settled and ran a farm there would be a astrofarmer, though we'd probably just call them a colonist rather than coming up with specific terms for each kind of settler.
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You do realise that's because seeds are like eggs, right? They contain enough energy (and nutrients) to grow the organism to the point where it can gather its own resources (leaves in the case of plants, teat-sucking in the case of mammals). That energy was put there by the parent plant when it grew the seed. So a potato is just a carrying case for the genetic material + energy you need to start a potato plant on Mars. It'll need plenty of sunlight to get to the next generation.
Nobody want's to eat your French boulliabaise a la creme du tarmac. Now if he were an Italian chef, then we might have something to talk about.
First he's trying to promote his blog, now his cuisine... when will it end?
"Ah weel suejest to you zat zee assturownauwts will reequieur zee amazine talons ouef ze Ferench lewver for ze long treep tu Mars, no?"
No, Roland, no! OMG stop licking us.. what are you doing!?!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Yes the beloved French. The only country in the world where every bar of soap of sold has instructions printed o nthe box. Yack.
Don't forgot all the thousands of old people that died a few summers back in France from the heat. Yes I can see why AC is a bad thing. They had to call back Grave diggers from vacation and retirement to handle all the heat deaths.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the French Culinary Institute in New York City on the 12th of January 2022. My pastry instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me this recipe. If...you'd like...to try...it...I...can...prepare...it...for...you..... .
No, quite the opposite. There won't be much meat in a long-term colony on the moon or mars, you know ;).
Me (Blog)
is Marijuana. It's been done this way for decades and the results have been spectacular, or so I'm told. Not only that, Cannabis is one of the most tenacious plants out there and will outlive almost any other plant in the harshes conditions.
I say the ESA should establish a large pot plantation on Mars. They could harvest the crop every 3-6 months and with the revenue they generate from the bud, they'll have enough money for the next launch. Now, all they have to worry about is looking out for those Martian potheads...
There won't be much meat in a long-term colony on the moon or mars, you know
Oh, that all depends how many of those tasty vegetarians get sent along with you! Mmmmm, herbavors....tasty, tasty herbavors...
The algae I can see flourishing, as it is a far simpler organism that has proven that it can eat rocks. (it was the first lifeform on earth) Tomatoes are somewhat more picky.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Mangez mon âne vous baiseur détestant français de mère.
One of their long term missions? Perhaps I missed when they've ever had a successful human _short term_ mission in space. I know the yanks have done it, and the russians, and the chinese, but the EU? Do they even have a manned space program?
Alain Ducasse, the French chef who has almost as many stars in the 'Guide Michelin' as there are planets in our Solar system.
So...he has one?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Idiot. That's "colonists", or, after naturalization, "Martians".
mark
Absolutely. That's the whole purpose of the subsidies. Why do you think Bush increased that already bloated government program by another $30 billion as soon as he got into office? By making sure third world local farmers can't make a living growing food, the U.S. assures its position as the bread basket of the world. Going into the 21st century, arabs may have the oil but we have the corn syrup. And ultimately that is much more valuable. After all, Juan Valdez can get by without driving a car but the man has to feed his family.
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But don't get me wrong. I think it's a better way to maintain dominance than, say, invading and occupying some viper pit on the other side of the planet.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.