Slashdot Mirror
A Real-Life Space Botanist Comments On the Potato Garden In 'The Martian' (cnet.com)
MarkWhittington writes: In the hit movie, The Martian, stranded astronaut Mark Watney famously survives on Mars by creating a potato garden using Martian soil mixed in with composted human excrement. According to a story in CNET, NASA believes that the movie is on the right track as far as astronauts growing their own food on long-duration space missions. However, some caveats exists concerning how the film depicted space agriculture.
If you're wondering how Matt Damon eats or breathes, and other science facts.
LALALALA
You should remind yourself it's just a show I should really just relax.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I'd be more interested in his take on maritime law.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
btw, that movie ending was terrible. Iron man, really? The book had it right.
can you grow pot, but IN SPACE?
with "night soil".
"This is where Bruce Bugbee, director of the Plants, Soils & Climate Department at Utah State University, enters the picture."
The guy should really take over the Entomology Department.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
What is it with these people, that they have to comment how their jobs are represented in movies or tv series.
Did you ever hear a cowboy or lawyer complain?
...to humans. Noooobody in the scientific community cares to mention that when they cirtique the movie?
It's full of Perchlorates. So no, you can't just scoop up some goold ol Martian soil and bring it indoors for some farming.
You routinely mix *real* science and *fiction* in this type of writing.
Every Si-Fi Movie I've seen in my lifetime had assumptions or plot devices which where hopelessly impossible based on known physics. The trick is to make the story engaging enough so that the majority of people reading/watching will suspend their thinking about reality and science and just enjoy the story. My favorite example was "Gravity" where orbital dynamics where simply ignored wholesale, mainly because what would take weeks/months/years to develop in reality, needed to happen on much shorter time frames for the sake of the story. If you liked the movie, I'll bet you didn't notice this the first time you watched it. You suspended scientific reality, and it doesn't really matter. It was a movie...
So, who cares if the scientific reality doesn't quite match the story? Of course it's always interesting when the author is clever enough to keep the impossible technology to a minimum, but let's face it. If it took hours to shuttle down/up from a ship in orbit, decades to get to the next solar system and decades to get a message to/from headquarters the stories would be really slow paced.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
In additional to figuring out how to feed astronauts, they need to also figure out how to cryopreserve them so they don't need to eat. Or at least figure out how to put people into a hibernation state.
besides, I don't see the guy making specific predictions about what would happen. What someone should do is use the data we have on martial soil to duplicate the setup and see what happens.
Also, I think that the martian light issue isn't a deal. Even in the book, the station would have to be opaque so it is purely a question of whether he had sufficient artificial lighting inside the station. I don't recall if that was a addressed in the book or not but it would have been overly bright and hard to watch so wouldn't be emphasized in the movie.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm very surprised that the producers didn't consult experts with practical experience growing potatoes on Mars. Typical Hollywood bullshit.
"Mars is about 1.5 times farther from the sun than the Earth is, and only gets about 60 percent of the light."
Of course, if you looked at the screenshot in TFA, you'll see that Matt Damon has a set of light fixtures in his grow room.
It wasn't composted. It was sealed in plastic in a box sitting outside, frozen. He was just growing pooptatoes.
...does he finally figure out who is Treadstone?
But those nitpicking details could be crucial in real life.
Biosphere II's numerous points of failure proved that part. Materials used in construction, unanticipated environmental considerations like simple condensation problems or oxidation, and ecological relationships between competing organisms proved too much for the engineers and scientists to anticipate.
Sustainability is a popular subject taught in western public schools and based on similar assumptions to those of other Cartesian reductionist approaches to 'the sciences'. But as the climate skeptics argue, earth's ecology is not static, and it's rate of change fluctuates so that in human generational terms those fluctuations may seem irrelevant to us in the short term. Part of this myopic view is rooted in our relative ignorance and hubristic belief that 'We' can always bail ourselves out of whatever jam the world holds. The latest popular belief system has it that Science! will save us.
Until recently, our world has been large enough to allow us the freedom to splinter into various groups, traveling away from each other and establishing sociopolitical outposts and trying to develop different approaches to living, not that the basic parameters for living have varied all that much. But now that Homo sapiens numbers are (probably) approaching the carrying capacity of the earth and our ecological impact is actually effecting changes to the basic chemical and energetic makeup of the troposphere, we can actually see that ecological management and environmental responsibility are necessary to ensure a healthy relationship within our primary biosphere.
The prospect of attempting to establish and manage a sustainable effort off-planet may actually be more relevant to the long term survival challenges we face right here on good 'ol Terra firma. Let's hope that the lessons we leaned at Biosphere II and during our relatively brief history of experimentation with agriculture, engineering, chemistry and physics allow us the freedom to learn from the inevitable failures we'll encounter outside our own little spaceberg.
captcha=anarchy
We've grown plants in regolith simulant.
So it's not like we don't already know that the answer is "yes".
http://journals.plos.org/ploso...
The webpage is almost completely unreadable to ads. I can't install ad-blockers on my work PC, so here is full article for those in same boat:
-- cut --
In the hit movie, “The Martian,” stranded astronaut Mark Watney famously survives on Mars by creating a potato garden using Martian soil mixed in with composted human excrement. According to a Sunday story in CNET, NASA believes that the movie is on the right track as far as astronauts growing their own food on long-duration space missions. However, some caveats exists concerning how the film depicted space agriculture.
NASA has been researching space gardens for decades. The idea is that growing food will help supplement supplies that astronauts will take on long-duration space missions. Space agriculture would also help with air recycling, turning CO2 back into oxygen. Having green, growing things would also have a beneficial psychological effects on future astronauts.
NASA’s approach, though, would involve hydroponics, using water permeated with nutrients and bright lights to grow food. Recently astronauts on the International Space Station grew salad greens and made a meal out of them.
However, according to Bruce Bugbee, director of the Plants, Soils & Climate Department at Utah State University, two problems existed with the way Mark Watney approached the problem of growing a garden on Mars.
One problem concerns light, according to Bugbee.
“The biggest problem, he said, is that Mars is about 1.5 times farther from the sun than the Earth is, and only gets about 60 percent of the light. This means that plants on Mars would grow at about 60 percent of the rate of Earth plants, even when exposed to full Mars light. Watney's habitat was designed to block radiation, which would lower the light levels even more.”
Then, the nature of the Martian soil presents another problem.
“It's mostly iron oxides. And iron makes stuff red, like rust. So it would be pretty hard to just take soil the way he did in the movie and put a little bit of composted human waste on the plants, and magically grow these great potatoes."
The first Mars explorers will use hydroponics to grow their own food. Thus, humans will bring the first life to the Red Planet in several billion years.
So, how many planets has the so-called "Real-Life Space Botanist" done any work on?
Sounds very theoretical for real-life.
'nuf said.
By the way, how much perchlorate was in the regolith simulant?
The problem with simulations is that they are just that---simulations.
We use shit here too. One company in my area uses sewage from wastewater treatment facilities as an ingredient in their soil.
To be clear, "treated sewage" from the facility. I think untreated human sewage would have various pathogens that could contaminate the food and transmit disease.
I have some vague recollection of an outbreak in Germany (?) not so long ago because someone was pooping in a lettuce (?) field.
Perhaps in primitive settings human waste was only used to fertilize a field that was being left fallow that year? Perhaps composting was required?
Nutrient deficiency would not be a problem. He had plenty of vitamin tablets. IIRC the potatoes were simply calories.
:-)
And I'm going with the idea that the regolith was processed to remove perchlorate off screen, didn't need to bother viewers with those details.
Well microgravity does make the boobs more youthful looking, really, its a fact. Probably helps with the butt too to some degree, plus all that treadmill time.
In the most recent episode of Astronomy Cast they talk about how toxic the soil is
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/10/ep-387-water-on-mars-again/
Aint nothing ever gonna grow in that with out industrial grade decontamination - think of Mars is a planet sized superfund site.
“It's mostly iron oxides. And iron makes stuff red, like rust. So it would be pretty hard to just take soil the way he did in the movie and put a little bit of composted human waste on the plants, and magically grow these great potatoes."
I'm not a botanist, so maybe I need the remedial version, but what does iron making stuff red have to do with any of this? Are there other qualities of Martian soil that would make it bad for growing things besides the red color?
Whatever deal 20th Century Fox has by which they pay Slashdot's parent for Martian adverticles, that shit is a gift that just keeps on giving.
i need aaaaiiiiirrreeeee!!!!
The Martian as "first mainstream Science Fiction movie" .. I don't think so.
2001 is pretty mainstream: Grossed >$50M (on a $10M production cost) in *1968* that's like $350M today.
And it's scientifically pretty accurate in many ways (especially considering it was filmed in 66-67, how was Kubrick to know that Pan Am had gone out of business by 2001)
There's a part where the habitat is exposed to Mars' atmosphere. The solution: cover it up with plastic and duct tape. The problem is that the opening is about 6 ft wide and Mars' atmospheric pressure is about 0.5% that of earth. Since earth's pressures is about 15 psi, that would be 280 thousand pounds of force on the plastic and duct tape. Even if you assume 3 psi (about the minimum you can survive) that is still about 20 thousands pounds of force on plastic and duct tape.
I just want to say, most people have no idea how many plants one must grow in order to survive. If you, 1 adult, want to get most of your calories from a plant, a potato is a decent choice. You can plant 5 kilos of potatoes in a 30 meter row, and expect ~ 90,000 kC. Since they take 90-120 days to mature, in order to have a continuous supply, you'd want maybe twice this many, along with lots of other plants that supply calories, protein, vitamins, and flavor. Two rows of potatoes are about a meter wide, so you're looking at 30-40 m^2. You have to dedicate about 1/25 of your potato crop to seeds, and have a good place to store them. This is also assuming that you are great at growing potatoes, nothing goes wrong, and you plant them every week and harvest them every day.
Due to low light on Mars, you might divide this yield in two. Probably the way it would go is the initial harvests would be smaller until you figured out which varieties yielded more. I'd want 80 m^2 just for potatoes, per person. Then there's all of the other plants. I'd plan on having a 250 m^2 facility, per person, at least.
I say, " WHAMMBULANCE!"
The movie took lots of liberties and simplified (or eliminated) many of the detailed explanations in the book. Don't look at the movie for scientific accuracy; it isn't. The movie is a product of Hollywood after all.
Read the book. It's far more rewarding.