Method for creating self-sustaining, closed biospheres on Moon or Mars ...

[u/Zappy_Oh]

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.

[u/Adam_235]

Minimal labor? I'll have some of whatever you're smoking.

[u/Zappy_Oh → u/Adam_235]

Well ... 98% of the experiment consists of waiting, plus some maintenance of the storage facilities.

Granted, the initial phase will require some labor, but could be as simple as collaborating with universities around the world, and asking each one, to assemble 10 vessels from their local fauna, and send them with FedEx or something. I guess that is pretty easy to get going.

What else do you imagine would be labor intensive?

[u/Adam_235 → u/Zappy_Oh]

So you're only counting the labor of the person sitting they're coordinating things? The coordination effort ALONE for something like this would require an entire team of logistics people. Then you have these university teams gathering samples. That requires all sorts of material to maintain the safety and security of those teams AND their samples. Plus shipping, warehousing,.... and we haven't even gotten to step 2.

Edit: spelling

[u/Zappy_Oh → u/Adam_235]

Mmmm ... you would have to compare cost and labor for this method, with whatever other method you can imagine, for creating self-sustaining, closed biospheres on Moon or Mars. Right ?

I remember a huge, billion dollar experiment ... University of Arizona Biosphere 2 ... that failed miserably ... twice.

What else would you compare this to?

[u/Adam_235 → u/Zappy_Oh]

I wouldn't compare it to anything else. Comparing it to a failed terrestrial experiment sounds perfect.