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NASA Is Offerring $1 Million To Turn CO2 Into Sugar (space.com)
NASA is challenging people in the United States to come up with an efficient method to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, a simple sugar. The atmosphere of Mars consists predominantly of CO2 (95%), and glucose is a great fuel for microbe-milking "bioreactors" that could manufacture a variety of items for future settlers of the Red Planet, NASA officials said. Space.com reports: The new competition consists of two phases. During Phase 1, applicants submit a detailed description of their CO2-to-glucose conversion system. Interested parties must register by Jan. 24, 2019 and submit their proposals by Feb. 28, 2019. In April, NASA will announce the selection of up to five finalists from this initial crop, each of whom will receive $50,000. Phase 2 will involve the construction and demonstration of a conversion system. Winning this round is worth $750,000, bringing the competition's total purse to $1 million (assuming five finalists are indeed selected from Phase 1). You don't have to win, or even participate in, Phase 1 to compete in Phase 2. The challenge is open to citizens and permanent residents of the United States; foreign nationals can compete if they're part of a U.S.-based team. To register or learn more, go to the CO2 Conversion Challenge website.
The key is "efficient". Sugar crops as a whole generally only yield a fraction of a percent of their received solar energy as sugar. Even just considering the leaves alone, they only net about 5% net sugar yield.
If you want efficiency, you're going to want a direct chemical process. I looked into this at one point and was surprised at how complicated it appears to be to make simple sugars, in terms of the number of requisite steps. Much simpler would probably be a direct conversion to fatty acids; they're carboxylic acids and there's a number of ways to directly synthesize free carboxylic acids from simple raw materials (the main challenge would be specificity)
They carry weapons and they know if you've been bad or good. Not everybody's good, but everyone tries.
If a chemical process works on Mars it will almost certainly work here. It's also possible that this is Mars-focused to avoid the inevitable political wrangling if it was directly aimed at climate change.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Especially something like potatoes. We can science the shit out of this.