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Radiation-Resistant Plants Could Be Used In Space
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that two decades after the world's largest nuclear disaster, life around Chernobyl continues to adapt, with Chernobyl soya containing significantly different amounts of several dozen proteins, including one protein involved in defending cells from heavy metal and radiation damage. 'One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation,' says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In a study to determine how plants might have adapted to the meltdown, Hajduch's team compared soya grown in radioactive plots near Chernobyl with plants grown about 100 km away in uncontaminated soil. Results from the study suggest that adaptation toward heavy metal stress, protection against radiation damage, and mobilization of seed storage proteins are involved in the plant adaptation mechanism to radioactivity in the Chernobyl region (abstract). Determining how plants coped with life after Chernobyl could help scientists engineer radiation-resistant plants. While few farmers are eager to cultivate radioactive plots on Earth, future interplanetary travelers may one day need to grow crops to withstand space radiation."
It beats bacterium gruel 24/7. Of course, you'd still need to do something about the less than radiation resistant astronauts. I suppose it would be much easier to shield a small habitation pod, than to shield a greenhouse, so that would probably be doable.
It would be interesting, though, to know how difficult it would be to produce human populations with various useful astronaut properties. Unfortunately, most of what you would want to do would involve running right over the medical ethics cliff and into some dubious stuff. You'd pretty much want a bunch of dwarves(transporting mass out of a gravity well is very expensive) with slow metabolisms(ditto) and high radiation tolerance and possibly some sort of Myostatin related mutation that would allow them to preserve muscle mass in low gravity. I can't think of any sort of genetic engineering or selective breeding that would achieve that end, without getting into rather dubious ground.
Many people believe that any radioactive event will render an area lifeless for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, the fear of a "dirty bomb" persists, despite the fact that surviving the initial blast represents less increased risk of cancer than smoking cigarettes or having a poor diet. There would be possibly huge cleanup costs, but probably cheaper than a few weeks in Iraq.
Mars has no better than a patchwork magnetosphere, and what of our own Moon? If we expect to grow plants in "biodomes" for food and use natural sunlight for photosynthesis, then those plants may have to be adapted to accepting something closer to the full brunt of that radiation than they have to endure on the face of this rather well-shielded marble.
One word: Mirrors.
This is mostly applicable to the moon; mars is a different story. Direct lunar sunlight would be bad for plants anyway; it's much more intense than it is here on earth.
So, you make your biodome entirely underground, and use reflective surfaces to direct a portion of the light from above to where the crops are. The light is more diffuse that way, which as mentioned is a good thing, and your plants aren't exposed to as much ionizing radiation.
Of course, how you get through two weeks of lunar night is a separate problem. You'd likely need lamps to provide light for those times.
For martian colonies, the radiation problem is at least reduced by distance, and very slightly attenuated by an atmosphere. You'd likely want plants that can survive on very thin sunlight, or failing that, you'd want to provide artificial light to make up the difference. Unlike the moon, I suspect you'd be alright setting up a dome on the surface without being fried.
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