Japanese indoor farm

On 9/11/14 5:08 AM, 'Stephen Covey'
stephen.covey@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> The bottom line: we need to produce four times the CO2 that humans
> exhale to grow the crops we depend on for food; as they grow, those
> crops will produce four times as much oxygen as we need to breathe. In a
> large ecosystem we can handle those imbalances by burning (in one way or
> another) the plant residues of the previous crop to grow the next crop
> but we must do that carefully and gradually to maintain the balance of
> CO2, oxygen, people, livestock, and growing plants.

Agreed. Maintaining this balance will be delicate and important work.
However, I don't think it's particularly *difficult* work, at least when
CO2 is too low; as you said, fire is fast and easy to control.

When CO2 is too high, it's a thornier problem. Plants will eventually
balance it out, but you may not be able to wait for that. In this case
I think industrial processes would need to be used.

Here's an interesting account of what went wrong in Biosphere II ...
which I consider a great success, because we learned so much from it.

http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/bio3/2000projects/carroll_d_walker_e/whatwentwrong.html

I hope we'll see more experiments like this before we try to do it on a
big scale in space!

- Joe