Timeline for How large would a space ship need to be to feed 10,000 people?
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7 events
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| Mar 10, 2019 at 18:13 | comment | added | Bitsplease | To address your last point, if a ship is making a long enough journey that they'll be growing crops onboard, I think its safe to assume that they'll be using a closed loop water recycling system (e.g. no blowing wastewater out of an airlock). So no water should be lost by growing plants, runoff water can be collected and recycled and the water in the actual plants will turn into human waste which can be recycled. Earth doesn't lose any water when you water a plant afterall | |
| Sep 20, 2015 at 22:06 | comment | added | Brythan | This doesn't answer the question. Assume that 3D printing of chemically produced nutrients will work. How much space do they need to do it? How big are the 3D printers? How big is the chemical plant for the creation of the nutrients from sewage? That's what an answer needs. It's a neat and off the wall suggestion but it is not an answer to this question. This is a comment masquerading as an answer. | |
| Sep 20, 2015 at 20:07 | review | Low quality posts | |||
| Sep 21, 2015 at 4:43 | |||||
| Sep 20, 2015 at 8:48 | comment | added | celtschk | 3D printing can change the appearance, but you still need a process to convert energy into a human-digestible form. Currently the most efficient known process to do that is growing plants. Of course it is possible that by the time humanity is able to build large space ships it is also able to produce all food substances efficiently by purely chemical processes. But that's orthogonal to the question of 3D printing. Just bringing enough nutrients from the home planet (as in the NASA case) is not an option for a huge space ship that won't be able to restock for an unspecified time. | |
| Sep 20, 2015 at 7:18 | history | edited | Keltari | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 111 characters in body
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| Sep 20, 2015 at 7:13 | review | First posts | |||
| Sep 20, 2015 at 11:39 | |||||
| Sep 20, 2015 at 7:11 | history | answered | Keltari | CC BY-SA 3.0 |