plant – Page 2

Farming Mars

December 12, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Another one wants to colonise Mars! Sorry, I can’t help myself:

Breakthroughs happen only when we stretch our physical limits

To make Planet Earth survivable, we envision what’s possible on Mars.

The Mars Farm Odyssey is an international consortium of like minds: companies, researchers, NGOs and government groups from the United States to China. We connect bleeding edge technologies and science in Controlled Environment Agriculture to feed a planet of 10 billion Earthlings at home and on Mars.

http://fluxiot.com/marse.io/

Whenever I see people talking about colonising Mars, I just have to speak up. And sorry for the language that is going to come, but I feel very passionate about this.

Dreamers! I think you’ll find that Earth, even in the “semi fucked” state that it’s in, is a far better home for people. Nicer. Easier. Cheaper. Better. Better ROI. Easier for people to adjust to.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is not enough rocket fuel on this planet for 10 billion people… not only that, but the more people you get there, the more you are going to fuck things here. The fable “the dog and the bone comes to mind”.

And if it did work, if it was self-sufficient on Mars for a few hundred or thousand people, Marslings are only going to be telling Earth people about sustainability. They’d be telling *us* not to fuck our air, water and food supply. They’d be telling us to plant more trees and buy less stuff.

I think we should only go when we can do it sustainably.

Good luck with it, seriously. I wish you good luck. And note that I’m not saying it can’t ever be done. But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

A word about forest efficiency

September 25, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Scientists are hard at working devising new ‘technologies’ that can strip carbon dioxide out of the air. There is even a prize for the most efficient inventions that can capture this carbon and put it to good use; twitter is abuzz with the hashtag #reimagineCO<sub>2</sub>. But you know, I already know that the most efficient, sustainable oxygen factory (that also happens to double as a carbon sink) is none other than a natural forest:

Imagine this robotic-like device that can adsorb CO₂ molecules at the ppb level directly out of the Earth’s atmosphere through a process of reverse-osmosis and then transmorgify those carbon atoms into stiff and lightweight fractal-laminar-nano-composite material that is 100% biodegradeable, 100% compostable and 100% renewable! Once the carbon dioxide molecules are split into their atomic components, one of the only gaseous waste byproducts is diatomic oxygen²!! It gets better. It’s solar powered, of course!!! And believe it or not, but it uses *self-assembling technology*!!!! Really — this thing, it just unfolds itself to the final shape in front of your very eyes!!!!! Literally all you do is wait and let it do its thing!!!!!! And did I mention that it is self-repairing? Meaning it will heal its own damaged components!!!!!!! It’s that simple!!!!!!!! And it works!!!!!!!!!! It actually works!!!!!!!!!! This incredible machine, okay, will keep on going even if sections of it are completely hacked off!!!!!!!!!!! And it is like a 3D printer, so it will literally print practically unlimited copies of itself!!!!!!!!!!!! I am going to be the world’s first trillionaire!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have almost lost count of how many exclamation points I am using here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ²And if you’re paying atttention, even the fineprint is good—the only other byproducts are aromatic hydrocarbons that are shown to enhance mood levels in the general human population.

I might be wrong about this but I’m willing to bet that the more biodiverse a forest is, the more carbon it can absorb. Simply because a dense tropical rainforest has more biomass than a ‘monoculture’ crop (soil is another matter).

So. We already have the ‘technology’ in the form of trees. All we have to do is reverse the landclearing. That’s why when someone tells you the best advice they can give is to “plant a tree”, they are almost certainly correct.

Wisdom

September 11, 2016 — leslie dean brown

“The tree breathes what we exhale. When the tree exhales, we need what the tree exhales. So. We have a common destiny with the tree.” — Oren R. Lyons

Wiser words have never been spoken. I think we need to really start listening to these people. Science will never be able to invent a more beautiful, efficient or sustainable oxygen factory… as the humble tree. That’s why I agree that we should all plant more trees (and also avoid cutting down any to begin with). It was also a reccommendation of the book “small is beautiful”.

If we were living on Mars…

September 5, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2019. All rights reserved.

I’d like to remind people of two things:

1Would Mars colonists be doing things the same way that we are here and now? For example, would they be mowing grass if and when they manage to get it to grow under their domed little base stations?

I think not. Not very sustainable, is it? Using up petrol and mower parts all for what? To keep the grass shorter and produce less oxygen? (at least that’s the excuse I give now for only mowing 9/10 of our backyard rather than the whole darn lot) Why do we cut grass anyway? Those are the sorts of questions humanity ought to be asking itself.

2Just imagine if all of 7.4 billion of us humans were *already* living on Mars (indoors) and we just happened to “find” Earth in the ‘state’ that it is in now, except with no people…

Do you think we would stay on the planet Mars? Where do you think we would move to? That’s right, we’d move right over to the planet Earth, where you can breathe freely… where the essential things like oxygen and rain are still free… where dirt is *almost* free (right now it costs $10,000,000 to launch a tonne of dirt into outer space). The planet with the deep oceans and millions of species already there. The planet that doesn’t need terraforming because its already terraformed.

So now knowing these two things.

Why the hell would we want to even consider moving away from here? Why would we want to cut down more forests here, if next-generation colonists wouldn’t do it on another planet in future? Otherwise, we’re just going to make the same mistakes on planet #2.

Here’s a simple thought experiment. Why aren’t we simply pretending to be living on a new colony already? That way we don’t even have to waste resources getting there.

Of course, getting other people to change is very, very difficult. All I can do is change myself. So what if I pretend that I am living on the planet Mars. What would I do if I was living over there? I would plant trees, not cut them down. I’d grow more forests that I cut down.

What else would I do? Why, I’d use my own urine as liquid fertiliser instead of going to the store and buying something that was obtained from a phosphate mine, wouldn’t I?

I think a lot of people on Earth have lost hope and they think that it’s almost like a “lost cause”. And I say: “fuck that”. I’d like to remind everyone that it’s FAR easier to get ourselves back on the right track here than to start from scratch over on Mars…

I do think that the biosphere is a lot more resilient than people realise. It just seems to me that people are giving up or losing hope on this planet that we all call home. But right now, Mars is in a much worse state than what we already have here!

I hope this has given a few of you some much-needed inspiration!

Would you want live on Mars? I wouldn’t. Please comment, and let’s get this discussion started.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

May 8, 2016 — leslie dean brown

There’s a lot of pessimism at the moment about our long term future. Will we still be here in a 100 years’ time? 1,000? 10,000?

It’s clear that we need some pretty significant changes if we’re going to survive as a species for that amount of time…

What do most people do about it? They go home and watch TV because they’re depressed about the whole predicament. I’m not even going to label the problems. But my point is that most people distract themselves any way they see fit. They fall into the trap of hopelessness. They end up doing jack shit. In short, they don’t change. [Read more…]