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https://www.brilliant.org/SubjectZeroScience
0:00 Intro
0:50 The Problem
5:20 Not Enough CO2
Being excited for the future of human expansion in space I was curious to understand how much effort is necessary to make things possible. After weeks of research, I was shocked to find out that there are much bigger problems when it comes to farming on mars than just soil, bacteria, fertilizer, and gravity.
Forget about everything you heard so far. How scientists were able to grow crops under “Martian conditions” on Earth. Farming on mars is a much bigger setback than I previously thought, and the 1 million people mark depends entirely on this possibility.
In this video we will dive deeper into what it really takes to farm on mars beyond what has been already discussed. And why 1 million people on mars by 2050 maybe unrealistic.
Subject Zero Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/subjectzerolaboratories
References
Methanation
https://www.storeandgo.info/demonstration-sites/germany/index.html
http://www.helmeth.eu/index.php/technologies/methanation-process
https://learn.openenergymonitor.org/sustainable-energy/energy/sabatier-process
Growing plants vertical farming
https://ifarm.fi/blog/2020/12/how-much-electricity-does-a-vertical-farm-consume
Solar Energy
https://explainingscience.org/2019/03/09/solar-energy/
Agricultural carbon sequestration
https://www.yankton.net/life/article_eb501b0e-bc32-11e6-9285-03d7368af7c0.html
Cryocooler
https://www.sunpowerinc.com/-/media/project/ameteksxa/sunpower/ameteksunpower/updated-datasheets/sunpower-cryotel-mt-datasheet.pdf?la=en&revision=281ce19c-1b5d-4522-a8d7-efd607f66163&hash=2C295D8BBC61C20D7775E9199AD7FB42
Softwares Used:
Blender 2.8 EEVEE
Apple Motion
Final Cut Pro X
source
CORRECTION – as many of you pointed out, it is 8.2 km and NOT 2.6 km.
I like the video but I see one serious issue you seemed to have overlooked. You noted that farms would need more CO2 than breathing humans could supply. You seem to ignore the fact that all carbon is fixed in the plant and that humans only return the carbon mass they consume as CO2 and only part of the consumed carbon at that. Most of the plant with the fixed carbon remains (e.g., stalk, husk, cob) as well as some carbon that exits in feces and urine. Given the excess oxygen, burning this fixed carbon and returning some directly to plants (plants can use some fixed carbon from soil) would be a no brainer. This generates a nearly closed loop for carbon and oxygen. Because humans cannot maintain a perfect biosphere artificially, some outside resources will be needed (e.g., CO2 and nitrogen from atmosphere) to maintain balance. However, the effort required is significantly lower than you have suggested. The space, time and water needed may also be significantly smaller thanks to hydroponics and other applied agricultural methods. These methods however, have the serious drawback of greatly increased energy requirements. I think the main problem is with supplying plants with energy but even this is manageable if we are willing to go nuclear as starships could easily deliver the nuclear fuel and reactor tech for a population of millions with relatively few launches. Advances in agricultural biotechnology will also help a great deal. All in all though Elon is puffing the numbers to the extreme, but I wouldn't be surprised if a group of thousands semi-sustain themselves on mars by 2050.
I'm sorry, but, no. As plants breakdown they return the CO2 absorbed during their growth back to the environment. As mentioned below, it's part of the CO2 cycle. We will not need to ship in any CO2. We do not need to mine it either, at least not for plants. This video seems to be looking for the mot inefficient ways to do things so the math can prove his erroneous points and then end with a false claim. I subscribed to this channel because I thought an earlier video had some good info, but this video is giving me doubts. It's just all wrong from every starting point to the eventual bad conclusions based on that incorrect info.
One detail – everything must be dug underground to protect from radiation. People will barely walk on surface. Plus there is lots of dust.
Seems that you left out the recycling of water an human waste as you calculated the human usage numbers. Wastefulness is strangely productive!
Why not send a bunch of non-manned Starships filled with crops?
More ITER please
This is why I keep saying. Contrary to Marxist lies, CO2 is required for all plants to exist and thus, for the existence of humanity. Thus, it cannot be called a pollutant.
You have to think of crop production like an ecosystem. Mushroom does not need sunlight and produce co2 to grow. If there are plants that are producing O2, you need to counterbalance with plants that produce CO2. I think the biggest challenge here will be water. With a thin atmosphere, water will be easily evaporated. So probably, the food production will be somewhat like an enclosed biosphere terrarium that may need occasional top up in biomaterial and water. We probably need to genetically modified some of the plants to suit the local condition to thrive.
water does not just vanish once used right? Most of it might be easily reused
The biggest problem with colonizing Mars is Elon Musk and the cult of bullshit he’s created.
The thing is, elon musk has so many failing projects under his belt that you would have to be a naive fool to believe him. He just doesn't know what hes talking about.
4.47 Millons of thanks to God (Allah) that he gave us sunlight in this earth. Alhamdulillah 🥰
Why didn't this video get recommended to me? Is it shadow banned or something?
People forget Antartica. Mars and the moon will be just like Antartica. A huge place with a very small human presence. Why don't we have more people living in Antartica? Because there's no demand, no interest. Conditions are not good for human life. There is only one thing that can drive a migration or colonization: The pursuit of a better life. Mars won't be able to offer that for a LONG time, just like Antartica can't. No beaches, no forests, no wildlife, no warm climate and no lower cost of living. Even if we slash costs many times, i'll won't be even close to the low cost of living on Earth. The only thing that can drive the colonization of Mars to those huge numbers is the terraforming of Mars, which is centuries away with current technology, or if living on Earth becomes too expensive which would be hard since the population growth is decreasing. I would bet that in the short term (next hundred years) we will have at most 1000 people on Mars at the same time, between scientists and short term tourists.
Million people on Mars by 2050 absolutely no chance humanity do struggle to send supplies to the ISS we ain't even got a base on the moon which would be used as a stepping stone to mars Elon should keep of the lsd
great video
While I agree that this is a major problem, you are overlooking the very necessary role of recycling. The carbon, oxygen and hydrogen (ie. CO2, O2 and H2O) will be recycled. While large, the quantities needed are much smaller than your estimates. Once it is setup, you only need to replace the losses on each recycling loop. As long as you can supply more than the current replacement rate, the excess can be used to build up the total capacity. Doing it in 20 years is very ambitious, but the energy problems you point out are a much bigger problem.
I still agree with the conclusion. I just disagree that raw materials is a near the top of the list of problems.
Take a look at precision fermentation, with a few years of research it should be possible to support a large amount of people.
On the subject of water: Water ice was discovered at the crater site of the asteroid impact that was recently reported upon. This could mean that there is water even near the equator but you would have to dig deep enough.
On the topic of energy for the plants I would like to point out that energy could be saved by using LEDs. I haven't done the maths but the idea is that you optimise the light wavelenghts for the different plants and leave out the unnecessary frequencies (for example using only 400-490nm). By leaving out all the other light frequencies and turning their energy into even more of the optimised light you could achieve a better plant production to energy ratio. Of course this also depends on the light spectrum that reaches the martian surface after being partially absorbed by the atmosphere.
I think we need to really start clarifying the difference between impossible and really, really difficult. Because from my, admittedly amateur, perspective there's nothing in your video truly impossible. In fact, nearly everything you brought up could be solved by brute force beginning with absolutely ungodly amounts of solar and nuclear power brought to Mars. Scrubbing CO2 for plants is such a perfect dual use for creating fuel that it's hard to really see that as a downside if the goal is to continually grow and expand a Mars colony.
Seriously…. this is why I have been saying for years we should forget Mars and go to Mercury. It is tidally locked and much closer to the sun and we have confirmed massive amounts of water ice in craters, so we could use the rock of the landscape for cover and set up less solar panels for huge amounts of non-stop energy then mine and purify water to further use it for geothermal and radiation shielding. I am not saying send a million people but a small science outpost is possible, they can use hydroponic vertical farming with LED glow lamps. There are plants which are already better at surviving with less CO2 (and requiring much more water, which is fine since we have found as much as 1 trillion tons of water ice on Mercury and the Sun being right there is basically unlimited power) and the farming would be partly an experiment, partly tradition, and partly to pad out the diet which is also made up of rations which were brought in. While Mercury is small it is massive, so the gravity difference on Mercury is almost exactly the same as it would be on Mars. Heck, because of the way the orbits work out, Mercury is even the closest planet to Earth on average so shorter trips are possible more often! Mars sucks. We should start with number 1 and go to Mercury!
You're right in that 1M people on Mars by 2050 is not possible. But I think by making such an impossible requirement the target, if you get to just 1% of that goal, 10k people, by 2050, that's a huge success. Not because you have failed to put 1M people on Mars, but because you have succeeded in BUILDING THE TRANSPORT NETWORK to get 10k people to Mars. Moving people is a scalability problem, not a sustainability problem. While they are proportionately related in space, by the nature of what they are, they are two different problems that you have to solve in different ways. To move 1M people between the subsurbs and the city, where the jobs are, we needed to build cars, buses, roads, and metro systems. Then we had to build all the logic for traffic lights, rules for speed, bus tops for drop offs, energy networks for refueling, stations for trains to stop and start from, maintenance hubs to deal with the wear and tear of all transport systems, and finally the economic and logistical supply chains to manage all of that. ONCE, that was complete, then you only had to increase the number of cars, buses, and metro rails to move more people. Everything else would scale relative to that. You didn't have to design whole new systems to deal with more traffic, you only had to scale elements in this supply chain by X % to match the needs of the increase.
Which is what ultimately that 1M by 2050 goal is. Less about getting that many people to Mars, and more about figuring out all the steps necessary to build the road to Mars. Then, you can just throw more ships at each launch window and over time, you'll get your 1M people.
Edit:
Regarding the excess CO2 requirement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction. Since Starship will need a methane fuel plant on Mars to be able to send any ships back to Earth. Means they'll need to produce methane in the 1,000s of tons per ship. To have 10k people on Mars, for example, at say 25 people per ship to Mars, means you'll need to send 400 Ships from Earth to Mars. Each Starship needs about 1,000T of methane as fuel to launch. Which means at 400 starships, you need 400,000T of methane to send those 400 ships back. If then, for example, you send half the ships back and keep the other 200 on site as backup shelters, then you now have an excess of 200,000T of methane. If you burn methane, you get CO2 and water. You can then essentially convert that 200kT of methane into the excess CO2 and the second product, water, is equally beneficial for farming. You don't have to directly mine CO2, you only need to produce methane. That solves the rest.
You did address the mining CO2 issue. I enjoyed your video. It was informative. But with the Mars goal, I think its best to, in the future, aim for a 1-10% of reality vs 100%, to get a more realistic outcome of this ideal.
That is why you send robots at first!
One thing that seems to make more feasible on the gases front, would be oxy consuming forms. Livestock would help, as it would cycle not only CO2, but also nitrogen and phosphorus, among others. Yeast types don't help with this, being anaerobic. Chickens probably. It is sounding to me that a cycler colony ship, both to develop better interim infrastructure, and to make for better starter supplies for further reach might be a better way to go. A significant solid(less rubble pile like) asteroid being cored out and repositioned into the cycler. Possible meters of solid rock make for radiation hardening as well as more fail safe cabin space. One thing you missed on the Mars atmo farming problem is ambient radiation, as a lot more space rad comes to surface than earth due to the thin atmo and lack of significant magnetic field.
I think if we import the CO2 from earth would be feasible we have much more than 8 tons of CO2 here
Of course it's not. Mars evades people from the real problems.
Did you receive my email?
I think people will need to eat aquaponically grown algae for quite awhile. The co2 is a cycle not just from breathing but from a the breaking down of all waste. Turning methane into co2 and light is something we know how to do. Btw 1 million by 2050 is pure fantasy.
What about vertical water? It’s basically like no soil and a huge water saver. It can like 10x crop density
There are plenty of problems with Mars colonisation; we will have, maybe, only a few people on Mars by 2050. The way is very long, there will be a very slight chance to have a permanent colony by then. More likely, we'll have a few human "visits" by then, assuming technology advances and it becomes feasable and technically possible. Once there, at some point a few people might live permanently, being replaced once in a while; after a few decades, maybe a small permanent colony with people that do not come back to Earth. There are plenty of problems to overcome: lower gravity so -> bone loss, low atmosphere so no radiation protection, very low temperatures and everything else said here.
Why should we keep adding so much CO2 to the system? It goes in the plant but we aren't going to throw it away.
Just recycle the inedible parts and the poo from the people.
It lets just some small dispersed quantities to replace.
Water isn't that different.
Food is not the biggest problem in my opinion as food and other consumables can be subsidized by shipments since they are not heavy, Its the infrastructure that is the concern, how do you expect 1 million people to go about their day, having families, jobs, entertainment???? 1 million people is complete idiocy of a target, I would not even expect it to be 10,000 by the year 2050.
Why are people calling elongated muskrat 'eLoN mUsK'? It's elongated muskrat guys
I would tend to think that the CO2 doesn't disappear just because it goes into a plant, so that CO2 has to be floating around somewhere inside the fab, gotta get it unlocked and in the right form. Maybe burning leftover plant remains might help a bit in recovering some.
Though i do agree with you that Sustaining 1 Million People On Mars By 2050 Is Not practical it doesn't mean that it isn't possible because if you use some aquaponics you can get it down to around 25 sq feet of land for a single person though lets just say the main way mars is making the money to get all the stuff it needs to import is trade taxes and for low carbon dioxide lets just say any kid with a match can reverse that process or a oil company so yeah use fossil fuels or lighters or really any indusial prosses that creates carbon dioxide also for water quite surprisingly aquaponics uses less water then normal farming and i mean much less like 90% less and also uh comets and the ice caps are like the gold mines for water so once a colony is started you can start shipping in water from comets, ice caps, water rich asteroids, and local water reservoirs.
We will make it happen 😁🍻🇺🇸 Mercia!
Thankfully Mars’ atmosphere has about 3 million times more CO2 needed to support the estimated 8 million tons of CO2 needed for crops for 1 million people. Source: Wikipedia – Mars’ atmosphere has 2.375×10^16 kg of CO2.
This channel is a gold mine.
Subsurface water ice is abundant on Mars and so is atmospheric CO2. If you have a reliable and consistent source of electricity to power your indoor UV lights; and can also extract and store atmospheric CO2 as well as extract and purify the ground water, then I don't see why farming on Mars would be much of a problem for a reasonablely sized colony in the beginning(2-5000 humans). Where we would run into problems when the colonists begin trying to scale up their operations in order to accomodate more newly arrived colonists. Good video!
How does stacking 10 times reduces the area from 26*26 to 2.6*2.6?
Carbon is conserved during the farming, as long as you have the energy, carbon is not the problem.
All the carbon crops captured from the atmosphere will combine with the oxygen produced and turn back to CO2.