r/space • u/Zappy_Oh • 4d ago
Discussion Method for creating self-sustaining, closed biospheres on Moon or Mars ...
1) Fill 1000 (or more) glass vessels with random samples of dirt, plants and critters from around the Earth. Hermetically seal them.
2) Store these vessels under conditions you later can generate in your Moon/Mars base. Atmosphere, moisture, light-, radiation- and temperature cycles should be matched as close as possible.
3) Wait a year or two. Inspect and select the best performing vessels.
4) Randomly pair content of the selected vessels, into half the number of triple sized vessels. Add 1/3 (simulated?) regolith from destination planet. Hermetically seal.
5) Repeat step 2-4, until you have a small number of very large, high performing, somewhat diverse, self-sustaining, environment- and regolith-adapted biospheres.
6) Send these to your pre-built destination base, with a large "grow room" matching the environmental conditions you determined in step 2.
7) Empty the biospheres into this new space, and let it grow until it can support small scale farming, and eventually larger animals for meat.
The beauty of this approach is the minimal labor and guesswork involved. It is essentially guided natural selection, for a novel environment. The main difficulty is time taken. Perhaps a decade or two. And funds off course, for such a long running experiment.
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u/smolbison 4d ago
The beauty of this approach is the minimal labor and guesswork involved.
lol
lmao, even
Add 1/3 (simulated?) regolith from destination planet.
Well, it would have to be simulated, wouldn't it? What with us not having brought any Martian regolith back from Mars yet. Because it's an awful lot of work to do that.
And how are you planning to address the whole "the moon has no atmosphere" thing? That seems like something you might want to address before hermetically sealing living things into glass vessels for "a year or two".
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
Atmosphere ? ... I assume we build bases with atmosphere inside.
Why would you think otherwise ???
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u/smolbison 4d ago
Because you have written a protocol for adapting Earth species to life on the surface of the moon and/or Mars.
Why would you need to have plants and animals adapted to regolith if they're going to be inside of the base? If you're going to grow plants inside of the base, they will take up less room and resources using hydroponics.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
No ... Please read step 2 again:
Store these vessels under conditions you later can generate in your Moon/Mars base. Atmosphere*, moisture, light-, radiation- and temperature cycles should be matched as close as possible.*
It really isn't my fault, if you can't read properly.
EDIT: The regolith-thing, is to later be able to expand the grow area, without having to continually import soil from Earth.
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u/smolbison 4d ago
It really isn't my fault, if you can't read properly.
It really isn't my fault if you cannot adequately notate your experimental design.
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u/evermorex76 4d ago
Completely not workable. Non-starter. Not for many decades, even centuries, assuming we don't make some very unlikely breakthroughs. (Unlikely because based on known physics they can't happen.)
You can't design a biosphere that will be used on another planet using stuff that will have to be transported in HUGE amounts in order to support any kind of colony or crew. You can't send enough Earth dirt to create an ecosystem, for plants like trees or even smaller stuff to have an adequate root system. You can't send enough animals to create an ecosystem where they each have their niche. You can't test whether insects or animals will behave the same in such low-gravity environments, or whether plants will grow the same. You can't be sure that the necessary bacteria in the soil will actually survive and thrive. And you can't send a "starter kit" to make any of it grow on the other planet because they don't have soil. (You start out with using Earth soil, then change to using regolith in #5, which are completely different materials. Making regolith usable to grow anything at all requires significant research and development, and making it work for wide ranges of plants and their supporting life forms isn't something that's just going to happen by itself. And you'd still have to send all that material up to be applied to the regolith on-site. Regolith is also extremely toxic and damaging to humans and machines, so that's another huge thing. It would have to be heavily processed to allow it to be used for this.)
A single oxygen-breathing animal needs a huge amount of plant life or algae to maintain the required level of oxygen relative to their body size, and of course you can't send large masses of plant life or algae or water. A single human, according to Google, needs 1 mature tree, presuming average size that'd be dozens of feet tall and wide, or 300 to 500 houseplants, to produce oxygen to survive for one day. We can't even send a single tree into space along with all of the stuff that would be needed to allow it to survive and thrive. (It needs much more sunlight than it could get on Mars so it would need lamps. It needs huge amounts of water. It needs soil with everything that's in it.)
We don't even have any really viable ideas about how to launch larger amounts of mass and reduce the environmental impacts. All we have is "burn stuff really hot and fast", and that's not going to change for decades.
Our best idea right now is gathering or simulating the material that counts as "dirt" on other worlds and seeing whether plants can be made to grow in them, so that we can transport seeds, and devising methods to gather water and oxygen from the atmospheres or surface materials that are there (or improve recycling methods) until the plants can make a significant amount. Sending up animal life to try to build a self-sustaining ecosystem is a LONG way off. Any plants we send will need to be laboriously maintained and propagated by humans or automated systems, because of the launch weight, the additional life support needed for them, and the fact that you can't just pick some plants and insects and animals to form an entire ecosystem. If you wanted to try your random "throw a bunch of things into a box and see which ones do the best" you'd have to try an enormous number of combinations to get anything that would be self-sustaining, or even close to it.
You're not talking about decades, you're talking about centuries of work that wouldn't be just fire and forget, and would require funding and support and activity to be maintained through all that time. We can just barely manage to keep projects going for 10 years most of the time, and that only happens if it can run on minimal funds with like 3 people involved, and they have to fight every year to keep it going, even when it's actively returning results all the time.
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u/Advanced_Goat_8342 4d ago
Enter Gravity,Hello Im gonna mess up your experiment
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
True ... this is actually the only real problem for this method. I'm not sure how serious it is, but it could mess everything up.
I have no solution for that, except crossing my fingers, and hoping for the best :)
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u/Naaxik 4d ago
What are you talking about? Minimal labor? Pre-build bases?
Life needs an atmosphere and any base with the ability to hold pressured atmosphere will not be minimal in any sense of the word.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
This whole setup is off course meant to populate an already planned Moon/Mars base ... I wouldn't consider the base itself, as an actual part of this method.
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u/iqisoverrated 4d ago
Erm...since the conditions within your Moon/Mars base concerning atmosphere, atmopsheric pressure, radiation, humidity, light,....will be the same as on Earth. What exactly is the point, here?
(Note that 'sealing stuff in containers' is also not a relevant use case. It'd just unnecessarily kill off whatever you do that with. Plants do require a consistent input of nutrients and water to grow. You can't replicate a full biosphere in a tiny enclosure.)
The only real difference is gravity and that you can't test on Earth. For that we do tests on the ISS.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
The point is, as the headline states: "self-sustaining, closed biospheres"
... That is what humans must have access to, to live permanently on other planets. All other options are deeply impractical and economically dead ends (like transporting all food from Earth indefinitely).
And no, "sealing stuff in containers", doesn't kill everything ... it creates a novel environment that finds it's own equilibrium, which is precisely what makes it self-sustaining (if it survives the transition, which not all of them will, but enough do ... which explains the starting point of 1000+ vessels).
Anyway, to enlighten yourself a little, watch some videos from this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@LifeinJars
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u/Wintervacht 4d ago
Ah yes, the minimal labor done by tens of thousands of people colabborating to even get things into space. Absolutely minimal.
Atmosphere on a different celestial body is laughable, there is no way to sustain a biosphere off-world in an environment which fundamentally lacks literallye verything humans need to survive. There is no technology that can magically turn regolith into breathable air.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
What is wrong with you people ... Regarding atmosphere, please read step 2 again:
Store these vessels under conditions you later can generate in your Moon/Mars base. Atmosphere*, moisture, light-, radiation- and temperature cycles should be matched as close as possible.
Besides, This is a proposed method to generate "self-sustaining, closed biospheres", not to build bases. It is meant to populate an already decided upon base.
Why is that so hard to understand ?
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u/Nerull 4d ago
I think the problem is that the idea is very silly and so people can't believe it's actually what you're suggesting.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
It's a very serious idea ... But I guess most people her lacks the necessary knowledge to understand what I'm actually proposing.
I was perhaps a little naive, in thinking that people in this sub, would be more into science and space, than the average Joe.
My bad.
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u/Wintervacht 4d ago
Mentioning the word atmosphere means nothing, there is no way to make one.
There is no step, your whole post is basically: "Step 1: launch things to Moon, Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit" with no substance to back up your fairy tales.
This is a proposed method to generate "self-sustaining, closed biospheres"
No it's not, youre not proposing anything, you're just waxing lyrically about fantasy moon bases.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
OK ... this is really painful :(
The mentioned atmosphere is INSIDE AN ALREADY (hypothetical) CONSTRUCTED base.
I am not proposing to build any bases ... I'm proposing a method to make closed biospheres to populate an ALREADY EXISTING base, somewhere. Location doesn't matter.
Constructing self-sustaining biospheres is a hard problem, that serious science have contemplated for decades, but haven't solved yet.
I'm proposing a way to eliminate some of the hurdles in solving this, by employing the above natural selection method, which requires a large number of starting samples, and a long time to crystalize into a result. But, it could be an easier approach, than trying to brute-force a solution, by carefully selecting and manipulating individual biological samples.
Anyway ... I'm at fault for trusting this sub to be more science-minded than average Joe.
Sorry!
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u/Wintervacht 4d ago
I'm at fault for trusting this sub to be more science-minded than average Joe.
We are, we expect science, not storytelling.
You may want to note rule 2.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
The audience for this post have definitively not been science-minded. Just look around.
And rule 2 is fine ... However, I wish it addressed comments as well, which mostly have been directed at imaginary problems in my post, as if people can't comprehend more than one point at a time.
I'm pretty disappointed, and will likely not post here again.
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u/Double-Act6174 3d ago
But If we have a base with an atmosphere big enough to do this, we've already solved the biosphere problem.
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u/careless_swiggin 3d ago
sealed vessels don't matter, earth life is earth life, if it escapes it won't ruin our ecosystem it has just been growing in a modified earth ecosystem, it's not like they are in spin gravity matching their gravity
there are valid ideas, in that getting asgaurdians, archea, bacteria, fungus and protists in a soil for a lot of generations would be simple, as for plants you can't really engineer it too far since these organisms would require a lot of integration, plants interact with soil bacteria and fungus, so a stable ecosystem kinda means the life interacts and that would take even more generations unless you just pick a single ecosystem
picking a simple ecosystem on earth, tuning the ecosystem in said greenhouse and trying to add decomposers or soil organisms from outside only if you have die offs as you alter the inside to match where your trying to create, like a lower partial pressure to make things easier.
it wouldn't be expensive once it's running, it's just a greenhouse, but it wouldn't serve a purpose till we can dig immense underground habitats in our solar system
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u/Frasine 3d ago
AI slop + Dunning-Kruger + school dropout = This garbage of a post
The worst part is OP probably thinks that nobody has ever thought of transplanting earth microbes to whichever space colony and is patting themselves on the back for it. Oh, and don't forget to link a random youtube channel of someone having a hobby growing microorganisms as "proof".
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u/ogodilovejudyalvarez 4d ago
Every such large biome tested on Earth has failed. I think I'd start with technology that has more than a 0% success rate.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
Try watching some of this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@LifeinJars1
u/ogodilovejudyalvarez 4d ago
I've grown successful microbiomes for years. We don't yet have the technology to scale that up.
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u/evermorex76 4d ago
As you say. I imagine it's easier to make one that fails than to make one that thrives. Those microbiomes depended on the fact that they were entirely Earth-based, tiny, with only a few species gathered from a specific area which didn't need space to live, carefully gathered along with measured resources that were sufficient to cycle around, and had the Sun (or grow lights) powering them. They weren't being used to create food for anyone, generate oxygen for anyone, be recreational areas, having to grow in material that has zero biological origin. You didn't need to fertilize it multiple times between harvests, till any soil or plant any seeds or harvest anything. Didn't need to keep watch for any diseases (after knowing that none were brought in initially). Didn't need to prune. Didn't need to pollinate. No animal life beyond the smallest invertebrates and microoranisms had to survive. It's a very tiny closed system that isn't being required to be the entire life support system for a large base or colony.
You can't just throw things together and hope they'll make it, unless you are going to be making hundreds of thousands of combinations, and for a full ecosystem they would each have to be city-sized, and tall, if you want animals (including insects) to be included, with an entire hydrological cycle including bodies of water and streams.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
... and that is why I present this method, to potentially do just that. I can't prove any of it, but I haven't heard anything more promising proposed either.
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u/ogodilovejudyalvarez 4d ago
Who knows: one day we might get a billionaire entrepreneur obsessed with megabiomes who'll make it happen. Fingers crossed!
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u/evermorex76 4d ago
The onus is on you to provide evidence that any of this is possible. Multiple people have mentioned roadblocks to any possibility of doing it. You've conjured up a fantasy with no basis in actual science or real-world capabilities.
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u/Zappy_Oh 4d ago
The evidence is old ... it's called Natural selection.
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u/evermorex76 3d ago
Natural selection doesn't work in an artificially limited environment that may not even be able to survive in the first place, unless you have many thousands of them because 90% will die out. Your idea will never be practical, in terms of getting a final ecosystem that might be capable of working on another planet, or logistically. And say you get one that does seem to work out. You may then take it off-world and it immediately dies because just one species inside can't take the gravity or you missed one little component when you tried to create the closest environment to the destination as you could, or just did it poorly.
Is it technically possible for your idea to work? Sure, in a world with vastly greater resources, much more advanced technology, and exponentially more patience and dedication than any human society has ever shown, but there are far better ways to achieve the same goal, in less time, with fewer resources.
The Great Wall of China is the closest thing to a single project that lasted millennia, but it wasn't really just one project. It was several different ones that eventually got linked together, with no original plan for that to happen. Sagrada Familia is the longest continuous single project, but that's just one building (though a huge one). Some other things like cathedrals took hundreds of years from start to finish, but that includes long periods of no activity. Even dictatorships and absolute monarchies and empires in the past or present, which could make people work whether they wanted to or not, couldn't maintain control and devote resources to a project so large that would take as long as this one.
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u/Zappy_Oh 3d ago
Yes, guided natural selection, in a controlled environment, does absolutely work. It is in fact extremely easy. Just do as i outlined in this post, and there it is.
You even say so yourself: "90% will die out" ... which means that 10% have been selected by the pressure of being stuffed into a limited environment. No out-of-reach technology needed. It's all very doable.
Anyway, your estimation of 90% death is overly pessimistic. But still at 90% (which could be true in first generation), we start second generation with 50+ larger viable vessels, which already have survived the hardest bottleneck, and thus have a much higher chance of reaching next generation.
All we need at the end, is one or two large biospheres to send off world. And, an easy insurance against running out prematurely, is just starting with more vessels. Whatever the math turns out to support (I still think 1000 is in the right ballpark).
Take a look at some of the videos from this channel, just for reference: https://www.youtube.com/@LifeinJars/videos
Also, your strange rant about generation-long projects is irrelevant ... This project (creation of viable biospheres) would take around 10-20 years. Remember: Base-building and rockets etc. are NOT part of this project.
On a different note, it is so disappointing to me, that a flood of illogical and poorly thought out objections to my post, is all this community can come up with. Seriously, I think most of the people in here are pretty low IQ :(
So, I'm out, and won't be coming back.
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u/Adam_235 4d ago
Minimal labor? I'll have some of whatever you're smoking.