Futuof Humanity

sailorbarsoom@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> Well, the only way to find out how difficult or easy building a CELSS
> is, is to try building one. I agree that we should get real good at this
> on Earth, on land, before we have a group of live human beings depending
> on it to remain live human beings.

Agreed. Though there's an interesting philosophical question as to
whether we should rely entirely on ecological mechanisms, or whether
it's fine to include industrial processes in the mix.

Biosphere 2 was trying to rely (almost) entirely on ecology, but found
that to be a very difficult thing to keep balanced. My own feeling is,
instead of just trying to recreate how nature does it, look at the whole
thing as an engineering problem, and tackle each part with whatever the
current best solution is. In at least some cases, that's likely to be
an industrial process, which is much easier to control than an
ecological one.

So rather than throwing everything plus the kitchen sink into a closed
environment and hoping it just self-regulates, we might be better off
starting with a fully industrial life support system, and then adding
plants and animals that we want, and the minimum additional
plants/animals needed to support those (e.g. pollinators). And if the
base of our food chain is very un-natural but easily-controlled vats of
plankton or some such, that's just fine.

Best,
- Joe