Easy to grow plant. Hard to make living, if you don't subsidise it with other work or income.
Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general.
Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
Margins start improving fast when you turn that fruit into booze. Licensure of course is an issue but many americans are making good money today selling moonshine locally without any of that.
Except it's not especially hard? I, and I'm sure many of us, have decent little home gardens.
For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
I grew up in NW lower Michigan. Cherry and other fruit tree country. Orchards need a lot of labor to maintain to get marketable fruit. I've seen several go wild and become deer feed.
Also, they don't really scale as the grow as you need to spend more on infrastructure. Orchards now plant dwarf rootstock. This results in trees that bear fruit quicker but don't grow much larger that a human can pick by hand. They need a lot of care (water and pruning) relative to larger trees but the economics of the larger trees don't work as well as they take many years to bear fruit and then they need the infrastructure to prune and harvest because they are so big.
It's not a simple thing at all.
You should tell all the PhD agronomists at ISU they are wasting their lives before it's too late.
Running a farm profitably vs planting a tree or garden is the difference between a successful startup and a hello world app. You are incorrect to trivialize farming.
I once lived in a house that had an apple tree in the back yard. Tons of apples at the start of the season.
But then squirrels and deer would come by and rip them off one by one, before they were ripe, taking a single bite and leaving them on the ground. These same animals ate almost my entire vegetable garden, including things deer aren't supposed to like such as potato plants and black mustard.
It's a great project to get you outside but there are so many ways to be disappointed.
That's just circling back on "city boy tries to grow a plant". Your garden provided you with both fruit and meat. You were just unwilling/unable to harvest the meat.
> For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
What are you growing and where? In Southern California, I got high yields of lemons but had to irrigate more water than is naturally available, fertilize, and worry about frost damage every winter. Apples were similar except they didn’t mind the cold snaps but they needed careful thinning.
On the East coast, all fruit requires heavy efforts to avoid animals taking most of the harvest and there are diseases like rust which lowered the apple, pear, and service berry yields to zero. Things like persimmons do better but need consistent pruning to avoid storm damage.
I’ve gotten one persimmon in ten years: the squirrels wait until the start of November when all of the other food is gone and eat all of them a week or two before they ripen.
Potatoes are not a good counter example because they are indeed stupidly easy to grow and scale. You can easily grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes per year indoors with fairly small potato boxes going through a few harvests per year. The main limiting factor is energy costs - you'll end up paying more per kg of potato than you would if you just bought them at the grocery store.
But there's a very good reason potatoes will be one of the early staples for fresh food on Mars. It's really hard to go wrong with them. It's also the reason it was chosen as the first food to ever be grown in space, back in 1995!
Potatoes are easy to grow, however even if you grow 1000 lbs of potatoes per year, at farm sale prices that is worth like $130. So how much of that $130 did you spend on growing them, and how many hundreds of thousands of pounds would you have to be able to harvest and transport to make your salary - the fertilizer and equipment maintenance costs?
All but the largest corporate megafarms are happy to make just a few percent profit on their investment, its one of the lowest return investments out of any industry. And it isn't a stable return either, that is the average over a few decades, with year-to-year yield and profit varying up to 30%.
If you want to survive on all plants you grew yourself, potatoes are a good choice for the bulk of your calories and nutrients, but if you want to make any actual money off of it, the scale of operations needed quickly grow to massive proportions that makes it anything but easy.
I'm aware, I grew up on a farm growing potatoes (amongst other things). My point is, again, growing a few potatoes is very, very different to growing multiple field fulls of potatoes at an industrial scale and the whole hubris thing is people thinking such a thing is scaleable.
Sure, grow a few potatoes in your garden, growing your own food is commendable. But to pretend a home garden is scaleable to a proper farm is ignorant at best, and is exactly what happens very often when technologists talk about the topic of farming.
It's possible to go to extremes in either direction in this topic, because there are things you can do objectively better but are cost constrained. For instance with indoor potato farms you can harvest multiple times per year anywhere, get crazy yields/health by jacking up CO2 levels, grow in absolutely perfect temperature/humidity conditions, have far less issue with pests/weeds, and so on endlessly.
And in the context of an early Mars expedition, which probably wouldn't have more than a dozen people anyhow, you could get practically infinite potatoes in a very small land area. This is all dramatically better and more efficient than classical farming with long sprawling fields in every way except for cost/kg, but in contemporary industrial farming the only thing that matters is cost/kg.
As long as you have a dozen potatoes, some human poop, a sample of earth soil for necessary nutrients and bacteria, and rocket fuel to burn to make water, it should be pretty easy.
If you can’t think of reasons why it would be harder than that, consider that you might want to read up on the problem first before saying it’s easy. For example, you’re assuming compatible soil (no), nutrients (also no), and the absence of toxins (again no).
Another way of looking at: have humans over-wintered in Antarctica without relying on outside inputs? That’s a much easier problem on multiple scales (oxygen, soil, temperature, water, etc.) so I wouldn’t take any mars proposal seriously before they’ve sent the same equipment to Antarctica and survived longer than the proposed mission.
Antarctica isn't this great example people think it is. International treaties require people leave it in as close to its natural condition as possible.
Taking a piss outside is illegal, even peoples crap has to be collected and shipped back home. Any sort of development is essentially impossible.
And that article is an interview with the hipster cartoonist who wrote a largely junk science book on Mars..
Multiple countries have bases in Antarctica, so it seems unlikely that a spacecraft-sized addition to the 50 acre McMurdo station is the proverbial straw on the camel’s back for a continent’s environment. Reusing human waste shouldn’t be a problem, either, since the proposals are to use that as fertilizer - it’s awfully expensive not to use everything that you shipped between planets!
And, yes, I linked to a best-selling popular science book at the level of the conversation here. I should note that the book has two authors, and the first one isn’t the illustrator but the professional biologist. You’re welcome to provide dissenting views if you want, I’m sure they wouldn’t claim to be the last word on the topic.
It's far below the level of discussion here or anywhere where there is discussion with varying views. The reason is that the book is broken in near to every single argument it makes, often intentionally by relying on misleading arguments or assuming the lack of knowledge of the reader -- knowledge which, crucially, I'm fairly certain they themselves had or should have had with even cursory level research on the topic. In a forum with debate those arguments rapidly emerge.
So for instance, their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant.
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way which isn't the initial event, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is because it's so different than the conditions to which we prepare for -- more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
I wanted to dig into more of their arguments but this is already fairly lengthy. If you mention what you found most compelling, I can offer the data (or, as in this case, logic) to the contrary.
Also, I failed to respond to the Antarctica thing. There are small scale greenhouses in Antarctica ensuring the hundreds of people wintering there each year retain access to nice fresh veggies and the like without any external inputs. [1] It's not exactly novel technology, nor difficult to scale.
Right, which is both well known and not the question at hand. The point remains that a closed loop hasn’t been demonstrated under much easier conditions on earth and therefore it’s clearly not the easy task the person I replied to described it as.
All travel in and out of Antarctica is cancelled during the ~7 months of winter. So all of that is being done without external inputs during that time frame. A permanent (or at least practically permanent) closed loop is probably not possible because of the countless treaties. It severely limits what can be built, which local resources can be utilized, and even what you can do with your own waste.
The Antarctic treaties allow for the development of greenhouses, etc., for scientific research purposes (in areas that have already been developed).
And scientists residing there have tried to make a closed-loop system for decades now. They haven't succeeded yet. It's a lot harder to do than fiction and Hollywood would have you believe. Importantly from the Martian colonization perspective: it's irrelevant that the scientists in Antarctic can't use local resources to build their closed loop, because that's part of proving the Martian concept, where there aren't any usable local resources.
You're going to need to cite that because to my knowledge there's been 0 efforts towards any sort of long term self sustainability on Antarctica. The most I know of are the efforts to reduce diesel consumption, but that's probably more gesturing towards this 'green' political stuff than any effort at self sustainability.
And saying there are no usable local resources on Mars is ignorant of basic plans - sunlight, regolith which can be processed, hydrated minerals, CO2, water, and more. In the longer term the other various minerals and metals will also be highly useful, but those I listed are valuable right off the bat and easily accessible.
That's not about long-term sustainability. It's just the doing away with diesel stuff, which is largely irrelevant.
And you're spewing nonsense on Mars - all of the resources I mentioned are obviously directly accessible with minimal energy requirements. The one thing you're right on is that solar will never be a primary source (at least not without extensive and heavily redundant battery backups) because of intermittency and unreliability.
Fortunately we have the Sabatier reaction. [1] CO2 + H2 => methane + water. Given the atmosphere on Mars is about 96% CO2 and H2 is readily extractable from the vast water ice resources (or even the dirt if necessary), we've got access to basically endless methane on Mars. And on Mars we'd love to dump as much as we possibly can into the atmosphere. Early expeditions will also probably bring along some largish radioisotope generators again for the sake of emergency power generation. In a domain where one failure means everybody dies, redundancy is nice.
I think your vision of Mars is based on Hollywood.
The Sabatier reaction is inefficient; as Wikipedia notes, it requires 17 MWh to produce a single ton of methane, not including the energy costs associated with electrolysis of local water sources for the H2. Hydrogen represents about 1/4 of the weight of methane, and so you'd need another roughly 0.4 MWH for the electrolysis, for a total of 17.4 MHh to produce 1 ton of methane.
Each MWh is roughly the energy needed to power 1000 homes. That's not some "largish radioisotopes." That's a full-scale power plant. We don't have many power plants that can produce that sort of output but which are light enough to launch into space or simple enough to be assembled on-site. Solar (the easy option) would require a minimum of 15-20 acres on Mars, and approximately 120 tons of solar panels, not including wiring and other supporting infrastructure. We don't have any spacecraft capable of taking that much weight, so that's multiple orbital launches and multiple spacecraft just to get the solar panels to Mars, and we haven't even started discussing the weight or other equipment needed to get the solar panels down to the surface, let alone transport the habitat modules or other equipment, or the astronauts and colonists making the journey.
TLDR: Mars is a pipe dream with current technology.
I assume you're basically trolling here, but as I mentioned, obviously the radioisotopes would be for emergency power generation - life support in the highly improbable case of all other power sources simultaneously failing, not as a driver for industrial level manufacturing. You're also far off on solar estimates, probably in part because that Wiki page hasn't been updated in well over a decade and solar tech has rather change in the interim. You're looking at ~590W/m2 solar irradiance at Mars' equator, so production of something like ~100W/m^2 with typical consumer panels and perhaps 150W/m^2 with high end panels. So that's in the ballpark of ~0.1 acres for a MWh of production.
Hollywood, so far as Mars is concerned, is mostly based on the Martian which is a hard sci-fi and phenomenally well researched book. The mistakes it made, inadvertently and intentionally, only make Mars colonization even easier than demonstrated. For instance the raging dust storm of the movie (and book) does not exist (and was an intentional fib). Low atmospheric pressure means the most fierce dust storm would have all the force of a very light breeze. And similarly his adventures to extract water from the rocket fuel were completely unnecessary as it turns out the seemingly barren regolith is surprisingly moist at 2-11% water by mass, an unintentional mistake as this was only discovered after the book was published.
It’s done with at least two external inputs (air, water) and far more resource availability than a Mars mission would have. A long-term closed loop isn’t banned by treaties - McMurdo alone is like 50 acres and a hundred buildings, something the size of a plausible interplanetary mission at our current technology level is not going to dramatically exceed that footprint.
Again, I’m not saying it’s inconceivable that it could be done, only that it’s harder than the sales guy would have you believe.
Mars has more than sufficient resources to provide practically endless air and water as well.
Beyond that I think you're also on a red herring here. There's no plan for a long-term closed loop on Mars to begin with. In the distant future most likely, but complete self sustainability is not practical in short to mid term timeframes. That would require essentially duplicating absolutely all forms of industry on Mars which probably will happen but only in the very distant future. In the interim a Mars colony would be receiving regularly shipments from Earth, and those return trips would also enable colonists, who decide it's not for them, to also return to Earth.
Neither Antarctica or Mars should be a problem, as long as you have sufficient energy source, and bring some soil & nutrients with you. After all, people make money growing weed indoors with only electrical lights. My country has freezing and dark winters, yet we enjoy fresh tomatoes all around the year, grown in heated greenhouses with extra artificial light.
I’m not saying it’s beyond possible, only that it’s not “easy”. If someone is saying that we can colonize Mars, it’s orders of magnitude easier to send the same payload to Antarctica and see if it works somewhere that, say, a failure in the air processing system can avoid loss of life by opening the windows.
