Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth
The basis of food systems on Mars would involve water harvested from the soil (rovers have shown that there are small but significant amounts of frozen water in the crust) and cyanobacteria, often referred to as blue-green algae.
By Lenore Newman, Evan D. G. Fraser
ECW Press (Oct. 11 2022)
Excerpts:
Feeding a Martian is one of the greatest challenges in the history of agriculture. Will a Red Planet menu involve cheese and ice cream made from vats of fermented yeast? Will medicine cabinets overflow with pharmaceuticals created from engineered barley grown using geothermal energy? Will the protein of choice feature a chicken breast grown in a lab? Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out “what’s for dinner on Mars” is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home.
Imagining what agriculture could be like on Mars is a fascinating project, but it’s when we think about how these technologies may affect life on Earth that this topic becomes extremely serious. This is because on Mars — where each gram of organic matter, millilitre of water and photon of solar energy is scarce — there can be no inefficiencies. The “waste” products of one part of the system need to be deliberately used as inputs into another part, such as using the dead cyanobacteria as a growth medium for later parts of the food system.
