Guest post: Biology has been dismissed at every turn
Originally a comment by iknklast on You have to get water there.
This is my field, building and restoring ecosystems. Doing it on Earth we get it right less than 3% of the time. It is more than just water, and how likely are the lunar poles to provide enough water to keep more than a handful of humans for a short time? Who knows? There is research going on to determine how much water is on the moon…and other planets.
But there are a myriad of things we depend on, many of which we might not even know about. Fungus. Bacteria. Plants. Animals. Protozoans. Water. Soil. Atmosphere.
A moon colony – or any other planet – would not be more likely to succeed than an Earth colony, it would be less. And the expense is simply unacceptable to keep a handful of rich assholes in a colony on the moon while they strip the earth of its resources – because that is what they will do. And probably still die, because space is not friendly to human life.
The reality is our solutions will not come from purely technological ingenuity. That might be necessary (for instance, including nuclear power in the mix, though I remain skeptical it will ever be sufficient enough to replace all other forms of energy because of some limitations). There are technological things we can do, some we are doing, but space colonies are still the stuff of science fiction. EVERY TIME I talk to someone about this, I get the same sorts of answers. A writer I know (a prof in my writing program) has been writing a book about the moon from this standpoint. I asked him once if he planned to consult any scientists, since his sources didn’t include any so far. He said yes, he planned to talk to NASA psychologists about the possibility of mental problems in astronauts.
Really? You’re not going to consult ANY biologists? You’re talking about LIVING on the MOON, and you’re not going to listen to BIOLOGY, which is, simply defined, the study of LIFE?
Biology has been dismissed at every turn. I find it difficult to get environmental activists to consider biology. It is impossible to get those interested in space colonies to consider biology. Trans won’t consider biology. Creationists won’t consider biology. Quack herbalists and others won’t consider biology.
FACE IT, EVERYONE. Biology is the science of us. Of our pets. Of our crops. Of our forests and grasslands and hot springs and oceans and deserts and any other place life exists. If you dismiss biology, you dismiss life, and if you dismiss life, you really aren’t talking about LIFE on other planets, you’re talking about STUFF on other planets.
The basic requirements for life:
Food
Water
Shelter (at least for some forms of life)
Atmosphere
A livable temperature range
A livable pH range
An appropriate level of gravity
An appropriate level of pressure
Lack of exposure to radioactivity
At this point, few if any of these are available on other planets, or on the moon. Those who are in love with technology insist we can make them. Many of these are people who dismiss single-payer healthcare as too expensive.
Let that last sink in. Thank you.
Just the issue of cosmic rays alone is one that bothers me in extended space travel, such as to Mars, and in terraforming.
It always amazes me to hear or read the denigrating of biology as a science, since it’s all interrelated with chemistry and physics.
Conditions are more amenable to permanent human settlement at the poles or on the bottom of the ocean than they are on the moon or Mars.
Yes, Mike – All Biology is Chemistry and all Chemistry is Physics.
Back in the 90’s I attended a lecture at a skeptic convention which was given by a scientist (physics, I think) on the viability of space travel and the colonization of other planets. It was absolute hogwash, he patiently explained. It would be much, much easier to create an artificial life-sustaining environment under the ocean near Antarctica. And that was foolishness.
Chemistry is applied physics. biology is applied chemistry. It’s why physicists so often feel they are experts at everything and why everyone sneers at Biologists. Generalising like crazy of course.
There are a few Sci-Fi authors who dwell on the difficulties. Sometimes to eventually overcome them, and sometimes to dwell on the ultimate futility. Even iknklast’s list above is a gross simplification of the basics, and that’s before we get onto contemplating the unknowns and the fact that what is known and works on earth, doesn’t mean that even a near perfect replication elsewhere would work given the different baseline.
All of the above, followed by an outbreak of dysentery in the cabin of the spacecraft.
The mind boggles.
Couldn’t resist – https://farcornercafe.blogspot.com/2022/10/while-on-subject-of-billionaires.html
Complex, complex systems like ecosystems cannot really be realistically modeled at this point. We don’t even know what the variables are let alone know how to get them to autoregulate over long periods To create something with the buffering capacity of our oceans? forgetaboutit. Lifeforms on other planets will likely be fine tuned to their planet much like us.
How important is that tuning? – All these billionaires should be required to maintain a salt water aquarium for a year without a die off and then they might have a slight amount of insight into how vulnerable simple, complex systems are to perturbations.
More interesting to me than space colonies is the fact that our planetary exploration probes have identified far more types of systems where life MIGHT be able to evolve than the old goldilocks zone, earth-like planets they used to talk about with the Drake equation.
There’s definitely a weird fascination with off-earth colonies among a certain segment of society. I like to ask them how they think such a thing will ever be workable when we cannot seem to maintain our earth home very well (or at all)–are people going to suddenly become better caretakers of their environment? One might answer “yes”, given that proper management will be crucial in environments where the smallest misstep might spell death, but I really don’t buy that. It assumes a lot of responsibility that doesn’t seem to be inherent in our particularly selfish, egomaniacal species.
Pliny, I really like that one. I read a book by Neil Asher a while back (that I found rather distasteful in many ways) which made the point that there can be no democracies in space – which included a mars colony. Maybe that’s what appeals to some people. They imagine they will be the heroic swashbuckling explorers, not the guy fixing the clogged plumbing and scraping the invasive silicone destroying fungus off the window seals to ensure survival.
Pliny, that’s a point I make in class a lot of times. I start by asking my students if they understand how the economy works. Once in a while, a student will put their hand half up and wave it around, but no one claims to understand it – including me. Then I tell them that the complexity of ecosystems is orders of magnitude more than the economy, which looks simple by comparison. Then, after explaining what orders of magnitude are, they get it…sort of. Ecological things are difficult for most people to grasp. People do better understanding the billions of years on the geologic time scale than they do understanding the simplest grassland ecosystem (I use simple ironically, since grassland ecosystems are extremely complex, probably more so than forests).
Precisely.
I wonder if part of this could be an urban/rural difference as well. To someone whose connection with food is a supermarket or restaurant rather than a farm, (or a forest, or an ocean), the difficulties of farming on the Moon might not spring to mind. At the grocery store, the food is already dead and processed, a box or carton of materials that conceals behind its neat packaging the messy biology that preceded its appearance on the shelf or dinner plate. I would think that someone with a farming, hunting or fishing background would be more cognizant of the natural rythms, processes and cycles that are relied upon to raise those living beings that become our food.
Perhaps this is a side effect of the success of large scale, industrially mechanized agriculture. In areas where this is the way of growing food, far fewer people are needed in the process than was the case in the past. Under this regime, food of whatever kind becomes just another product to buy, the steps involved in its production as hidden from the awareness of the consuming multitudes at the check-out line as the water that comes out of the tap, the electricity that comes out of the wall and the gas that comes out of the pump. The industrialization itself helps to obscure the fundamental importance of the natural, planetary services, biological, atmospheric, and geochemical, systems which came first, and upon which our own agriculture stands. People see the shiny tractors and combines, but miss the microbial and climatic underpinning we can’t take credit for, or build from scratch.
When humans moved from continent to continent, they didn’t have to bring a biota or climate with them. They brought their favoured plants and animals with them, but they had soil, and sun, and water waiting for them, unless they were particularly unlucky or unwise in their choice of landing. When we move off this planet, the story will be very different. Apart from whatever materials might be found in situ, EVERYTHING ELSE will have to be brought up out of Earth’s gravity well. Despite their best efforts, our would be colonists will find, as iknklast found in her own restoration pilot project, that some things don’t travel well. Or at all. Ecosystems grow and evolve. They have never been built.
I’m guessing that the size of a closed, self-sustaining system capable of sustaining a viable community of humans large enough to avoid immediate genetic bottlenecks from inbreeding would need to be much bigger than can be practically created in the near future. Or maybe ever. Not that this will stop the billionaire technocrats from trying to create their vanity, boutique space colonies, which will always be the barest margins of safety away from devolving into some ghastly, hi-tech replay of the Franklin Expedition and the Donner Party. Now that would be some reality TV.
Another anecdote on the ‘how little we know front’. New Zealand relies heavily on dairy farming for export earnings. unlike many countries our dairy farms are fully outdoor pasture based all year around. By international standards the carbon cost is low. The trend has been to use more and more fertiliser and irrigation with consequential adverse effects of surface and groundwater quality in farming areas. pasture feed has been supplemented at times using palm kernel. The push back has been considerable.
I saw an interview with one dairy farmer who had demonstrated that by reducing his heard size and using lower inputs, he could actually increase milk solids enough to compensate for the drop in milk volume. Some farmers are moving in this direction, while others are trying other approaches.
This particular farmer was applying ‘regenerative’ farming. The idea being that you managed the farm in a way that allowed soils to recover and return to what they used to be. The main feature of the practice seemed to be to plant mixed grass and herbaceous species, stop spraying and fertilising, restock and wait. The transition seems to take a few years, but one key feature is that when you dig a hole you find lots of evidence of fungal activity in the soil to a significant depth compared to the farm across the road using ‘conventional’ farming. Key point — no one really seems to know exactly what is going on, but the key lesson seems to be to get the fuck out of meddling and let nature heal itself in a distressed system. How do you apply that in a 100% artificial engineered system that MUST. NOT. FAIL.
Ah, yes, the symbiotic fungus. If we want to grow plants places they currently aren’t, we learned the lesson the hard way – you have to inject the proper fungus. Because when we move things, we have to sterilize the roots so we don’t transport something unwanted, but the plants must have their fungus.
So what might we end up transporting to a space colony without planning it? Probably some microbe that might run wild in the new system.
Also, how long before the settlers in the closed system, without enough food or water, began slowly (or quickly) becoming delusional, hallucinatory, and violent? The reference to the Donner party is a good analogy.
YNnB, Rob, it isn’t just farming. Our more recent ancestors, like my parents and grandparents age, gardened and knew the plants. I take my students out, they can’t even recognize a dandelion. I loved dandelions when I was a kid; they were so fun for blowing. Now the younger generation doesn’t even know what they are. They can’t recognize tree species, or fruits in the wild. When I am discussing classification, and I ask them to name an animal, it has always been all mammals; now it’s mostly dogs, cats, and cows. They don’t know any others. And they don’t know what eats what.
These are rural kids, growing up in a farming community. It used to be that the kids in the small towns and small cities that were ringed with farms would know a lot of this, too, because they were in school with farmer’s kids, they played with farmer’s kids, and they weren’t far from the land. Now they might experience Sim Farm, I suppose. But most of them seem to prefer car crash, superhero, and blowing shit up games.
I’d go a step further: theoretical vs practical knowledge carries different weight. The former is valued and To Be Sought, the latter is denigrated and not worthy of the attention of True Intellectuals. The more theoretical you can get, the closer to a religion you can get, the more capital-T-Thoughtful and the more capital-C-Cerebral and thus the more capital-V-Valuable you are, right?
(I’m a biologist by training… But hey I have a physicist friend and a mathematician friend so :-P)
Of course people in rural areas, at least in the U.S., are more rather than less likely to be creationists and climate change deniers and vote for Trump, so… For whatever it’s worth, the one farmer I know personally in my own country is the most right-wing, anti-immigration, conspiracy theorist and climate change denier I know, thinks Trump has made some good points, and used to rant about how unfairly Western media were treating the totally admirable Mr. Putin. For all I know, he still thinks so. I haven’t met him since Volodya’s latest “peace-keeping” adventure. Also, for whatever it’s worth (i.e. not much!), my subjective impression has been that fishermen tended to be among the very last to acknowledge that over-fishing was anything to worry about (unless, of course, foreigners were doing it).
@9 I once gave a lecture on another topic (I forget what now), and ended up pointing out to the audience that the people who want to go into space, and the people our governments (and now corporations) send into space, are the exact opposite of the people who might have any chance of actually surviving in space. Who do we think of as ‘astronauts’ or ‘space pioneers’? Young, healthy men from ‘successful’ families–individualistic, competitive, ‘alpha males’; we’ve traditionally sent military men, and the model in our heads follows from that. What personality and cultural traits would people need to survive in space? Collective attitude, attention to detail, willingness and ability to do the work. Nurturing and caring. Ability to withstand hardship and to act for and sacrifice for the group. Ability to follow the rules to the letter (any deviation could kill the entire population) and get along with each other. Who might possibly make a go of it in space? Janitors, nurses, caretakers, cleaners. Exactly the people who would and could never go. Hoo boy did the audience not want to think about this.
Synthetc urea is an important nitrogenous fertiliser here in Australia, where soils are notoriously deficient in the elments N, P and K. The hydrogen for making synthetic urea comes not from the elctrolysis of water, but from the far cheaper hydrocarbon gases extracted from oil wells.
So we are all effectively dining on petroleum; the world over.
I love this discussion.
Carry on.
We have seen the devastation of introducing a new species in a colonised space. There were famous plant hunters from Scotland who introduced rhododendrons from the Himalayas. Now they run rampant on the west coast of Scotland, taking over whole hillsides. My native New Zealand is a killing ground of unique flightless birds being eaten by cats, rats, possums and stoats, against which they had no natural defences, and of gorse, blackberry, old man’s beard, ragwort and hundreds of other European and American plants running rampant against the slow-growing natives. A friend of mine spends masses of time nursing the native seedlings that he finds until they are big enough to hold their own against the interlopers. A friend of his shoots any feral cat he sees.
Re the rural vs townie – I was brought up on a farm in New Zealand and I’m afraid our attitude to land was pure cultivation. Regenerating land we thought was simply waste land, owned by some idle, inefficient farmer. We admired the native bush, but only when in full majesty, not when struggling to come back.
I think these attitudes would have changed now but I would guess the impetus came from urban greens – whom farmers used to despise.
In an environmental science course, I learned to my surprise that earthworms are an invasive species to the upper midwest. As kids we were taught that the are beneficial because they break down waste and their poop enriches the soil, as well as aerating in with their burrowing. In fact, they change the soils from being fungal-based to bacterial based. They breakdown leaves to minerals in a way that robs plants of vital fertilizer and nutrients. There are 14 varieties of earthworms here now, and I while I haven’t noticed them in my yard that doesn’t mean they aren’t here. Fishing with them as bait should be prohibited, because many fisherman discard them on the ground at the end of the day despite warnings not to.
The importance of biological sciences in continued research can’t be overstated, as the value of worms was considered “common sense” when I was younger, but research determined that not to be.
In science fiction, hydroponics are often presented as a deus ex machina means to carry and grow food on a star ship, but really, as has been stated above there is no real discussion on just how much food and nutrient cycling can take place without a full natural environment for plants to thrive.
In my field, I experience the opposite; only applied science, thanks. Theoretical? Not worthy of funding. Then, they declared ecology and environmental science to be theoretical, not applied, and it’s damned hard to get funding. The only thing getting funded much around here is meat animal research and increasing crop yield.
Exactly what I see around here, and the conservative, creationist, anti-woman, anti-gay rhetoric is breathtaking.
And I know too many biologists and farmers who have bought into just that.
This is probably closer to the division I actually had in mind. Kinda like management/labour, or officers/footsoldiers. The difference between theory and practice. “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Industrial agriculture might also foster an approach towards farming that is more akin to strip-mining and the maximization of immediate profit that would have doomed the traditional family farm in a time before the availability of commercially produced fertilizers. Then again I could be romanticizing about a past that never existed. My knowledge of this does tend more to the theoretical than the practical….
YNNB –
My dad had farmland that he sold in the 1970’s to a large production farmer. Dad had grown wheat, including durum, barley, and oats. He was happy to get 45 bushels an acre, and this was in the clay soil of the Red RIver Valley. The farmer who bought it from approached it very much like you say, getting as much out of it as he could by spraying mass amounts of fertilizer and pesticide, and the soil was pretty much depleted in 5 – 7 years, and sold again. There are farmers who do a good job supporting themselves as family farmers, but it’s tough to compete. My cousin does pretty well, but he also has other businesses to maintain his income during lean years.
YNnB, I do think it’s mostly about industrial farming. I remember when I first heard about precision farming as a possibility to resolve environmental issues by reducing the impact. Now we have precision farming classes, and all they’re teaching is how to increase profit by using fewer inputs. This doesn’t really translate to environmental protection, though, because they also teach how to do this to open up marginal lands that are set aside. That’s all they’re interested in, how do we turn more land into farmland? While meanwhile the cities are saying, how do we turn all that farmland into urban land?
But I think corporate farming has been with us longer than we realize. The old family farmers of romantic imagination were often share croppers, not owning their land but working for some enormous landowner who had never set foot on a farm. I was startled to read once that most of the “Okies” of the dust bowl were fleeing farms they didn’t own and couldn’t even produce what was required any more. Not all, of course, but then, not all farms are industrial farms today.
It’s just now industrial farms have so many great big motorized toys to play with…a lot of them remote control. Even most of my students from farming families haven’t had that real experience of where the food comes from because they spend the day in a remote controlled, air conditioned tractor listening to whatever music they prefer through their headphones. Even farmers are becoming detached from the land.
“Chemistry is physics that is too hard for physicists & biology is chemistry that is too hard for chemists.” ;)
“Doing it on Earth we get it right less than 3% of the time”
Are you (plural) increasing that percentage or are there a lot of factors affecting success or failure that you stil don’t know what they are?
BTW I thought a major mistake the “Biosphere 2” people made was thinking they could possibly get it right the first time.
I thought what they should have done was – close it up, find something going wrong, open it & fix the something, close it, find something else going wrong… rinse & repeat for decades & eventually we might understand ecology well enough to put a closed habitat in space.
“An appropriate level of gravity”
That’s the one I keep bringing up as something that is likely to kill the practicality of a Mars colony. We *know* from the ISS that months at zero gee is bad for human health & nobody has spent more than a few days at anything between zero & 1 earth gravity. I maintain that humans to Mars needs to wait until we have had a moon base for years so we have some data on whether years at in between gravity will kill the humans.
So I suspect that even if all the ecological issues you point out get solved, humans living off earth will be in rotating habitats to give 1 earth gravity.
Rob #9 “made the point that there can be no democracies in space”
I ran across that claim & replied that it was dictatorships in which Chernobyl & the Banqiao dam collapse occurred. Democracies are imperfect, but so far less bad at finding & correcting errors, than authoritarian systems.
See this for something on Soviet hubris
http://alderspace.pbworks.com/w/page/140916051/The%20upside%20of%20Chernobyl
Do so love this one! It’s annoying to have physicists and chemists go on Twitter (or other sources) and lecture biologists and get it all damn wrong. We have non-majors study Biology; I think we should have them study Chemistry. It’s more straight forward, and you can’t really understand Biology properly without an underpinning of Chemistry anyway, so why are we doing things backward?
Are we increasing it? Depends on who you listen to. There are a lot of measures of success, and some people will account a wetland a success if they dig a hole in the ground, plant a couple of willow trees, and go. Others feel it should be a functioning ecosystem to meet the criteria of success (I am one of those).
It’s sort of hard to know, because the figures are so vastly different in their calculations. Is a tree plantation a forest? (No, but they are counted as forests when they talk about the increase of forests in the US). For some people, they think it’s a success if they plant a set of plants they predetermined based on historical data, but that doesn’t take into account the dynamic nature of the Earth. For instance, this area of Nebraska has been farmed for about 150 years. What if there had been no disturbance? Would it look exactly as it did when our ancestors arrived? I doubt it; the Native Americans were actively managing the system anyway. And the Earth changes.
Frankly, I suspect the 3% is a tad high. But don’t quote me on that; it’s just my opinion, because of what I consider a success.
The essay on the New York Times’ “The Daily” Sunday read this week was on seeking extra terrestrial life based on bio-signatures and techno-signatures as opposed to radio signals. The writer stated that when the Spaniards first started exploring California they found forests that the indigenous people had carefully managed in order to avoid forest fires. If you know what you are looking at, this would be an example of a “techno-signature” because the forest were not in a natural state, but there is no real biological marker in the form of atmospheric gases that an observer would be able to use to detect that they were being managed. It’s something that makes detecting alien life difficult or easy to miss.
I think the point of ‘no democracies in space’ is that while democracies may well be better at finding good long term solutions to societies problems, they can be terrible at identifying and putting into practice (and sustaining) optimal short term solutions. Has democracy fixed climate change? How quickly did it do away with global tobacco (it hasn’t)? When survival absolutely depends on rigorous holding to specific behaviours, or making a snap decision, you just can’t stop and hold a discussion and then a public vote which might result in either lethal delay or a stupid decision. No political or decision making system is perfect, but there’s a reason ships and planes are not run as democracies.
KB Player (and iknklast), I grew up as a townie in NZ, but was lucky enough to be exposed a little to farms through friends of family, and have since had friends who are farmers. I’ve been bewildered frankly at how little the young people I know understand and observe of the natural world around them. How little curiosity they have about that world. Even ones growing up on lifestyle blocks. Probably a function of how much time they spend pinned to phones and tablets rather than playing and mucking around outside.
I think farmers are very socially and professionally conservative by nature. It took a couple of generations for them to come around to the idea of ‘modern’ farming and another 3-4 generations for them to adopt corporate farming (which many still resent). We’re at generation ‘1’ of farmers considering a return to a modern version of their forefathers farming methods – relying more on nature with application of a better understanding of how to manage water, nutrient, crop and stock rotation, pest management etc. There are certainly farmers in NZ and overseas who are very committed to operating in a lower impact manner with better environmental outcomes, without a return to the subsistence mode of the past. If we survive another few decades they might be getting somewhere (if not underwater, baked dry by drought, or swept away by floods and hurricanes of course – sheesh).
That business of being constantly pinned to devices drives me nuts, which I know is very codger of me but all the same, when you’re outside, engage with the damn outside.
I was involved in the pro space movement for many years. I retired from it about a decade ago.
I can attest to the lack of attention given to biology. There was the assumption that we would develop technological solutions to life support issues. And for Earth orbit, there was the assumption that we could continue as usual – resupply from Earth and send waste down to Earth. There was some research into closed loop environmental systems. It was no where near enough, though. And it leaned heavily on technology.
There were some in the movement arguing against that mindset, but they were in the minority. One of the things they were pushing for was for space colonies to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. The colonies should cut the umbilical cord (as one of them phrased it) to Earth, and the sooner the better. One of their points was that a colony would need a whole biosphere, ideally encompassing the whole colony. It would provide food, waste treatment, and morale. It was thought that because of the small size of the colony’s biosphere, especially relative to Earth’s, there would be a need for technological support for at least some aspects of it. Biology and environmental science should have the lead roles, though, in designing and developing the systems.
Another topic this group pushed was waste generation and treatment. The goal should be to reuse and recycle everything. No garbage dumps. No cemeteries. No tossing stuff out an airlock. Manmade items (eg tools, equipment) should should be designed and built so they are more easily taken apart for reuse and recycle. Organic material will be a very limited resource on space colonies, even more limited than water. Colonists would need to maximize how much of it cycles through the colony’s biosphere.
One of the things that annoyed me was people wanting to use the water on the moon for rocket fuel (electrolyze it to hydrogen and oxygen) for shipping things from moon colonies to colonies elsewhere. WTF?! It’s needed for the moon colonies! No moon colonies, no stuff to ship. Use it for rocket fuel and it’s lost to space.
As people here have been saying, we don’t know anywhere near enough to build a viable space colony. We don’t have the required knowledge about ecosystems. And our technology is likely not advanced enough. And then there’s all the behavioral changes required.
Jim Baerg@25
Agree.
I encountered plenty of people in the pro space movement whose attitude to it boiled down to “It failed, so it’s of no use.” Really?! And you call yourselves scientists and engineers?
I am “pro space” too. That’s why I don’t want human stupidity and evil to spread beyond the Earth. And, luckily, I don’t think it will.
Karen the Chemist #30
“One of the things that annoyed me was people wanting to use the water on the moon for rocket fuel (electrolyze it to hydrogen and oxygen) for shipping things from moon colonies to colonies elsewhere. WTF?! It’s needed for the moon colonies! No moon colonies, no stuff to ship. Use it for rocket fuel and it’s lost to space.”
That would be good for moving between the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, those bodies are mostly made of water ice. For launching from the Moon I like the ‘Aluminum-Oxygen Rocket’ idea. That would save valuable volatiles for life support.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#aluminum
Isn’t this a problem with a known solution? Provided the necessary norms are followed – which seems to be the weak point for modern democracies anyway. ;-)
(mostly joking)