Life on Mars, Pop Sci Fail
So when I clicked through an article from Popular Science about how it would be pretty easy to grow plants in Martian soil, I thought "that looks really interesting." I was in for a surprise (and yes - I am nerding out here - but I promise it is at least somewhat interesting).
"Martian Environment Is Ideally Suited For Crop Farming, Study Says
If we ever decide to colonize Mars, it might be fairly simple to grow crops in that red soil, according to a new study. Mars’ reduced gravity could let us use less water and fertilizer than we do on Earth.
Visions of future space farms usually involve greenery thriving inside hydroponic systems, but as bio-geo researchers Federico Maggia and Céline Pallud note, using old-fashioned soil has plenty of advantages.
Soil-based agriculture can use settlers’ waste for fertilizer; it can sequester carbon and produce oxygen; and it’s a reliable way to biologically filter water, for instance.
The problem is that Mars is not Earth, gravitationally speaking. Gravity affects the rate at which water and nutrients flow through soil, and plants have evolved to these constraints.
Martian gravity is about one-third as strong as Earth’s, meaning water would flow at a slower rate. This could lead to suffocation of microorganisms and roots, along with emissions of toxic gases, Maggia and Pallud write in a study published early online this week in Advances in Space Research.To study this effect, Maggi, a University of Sydney biogeochemist, and Pallud, a biogeophysicist at UC-Berkeley, simulated both Mars- and Earth-gravity root processes using BIOTOUGHREACT, a model of soil nutrient transport and microbe dynamics developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
As Wired Science notes, they realized slower water transport is a good thing. Soil under Martian gravity is able to hold more water, so less of it leaches through and is lost, the authors say.
This increased efficiency means you could use a whopping 90 percent less water for Martian irrigation than what you’d need on Earth. You could also use fewer fertilizers, the authors add.
On the flip side, Martian soil allows for faster consumption of oxygen and dissolved organic carbon, which resulted in a 10 percent increase in CO2 emissions.
So once we start terraforming Mars, our agriculture might be more efficient, but we’ll still have to worry about those blasted greenhouse gases."
Yeah... so basically the whole article tells you that water flows slower when there is less gravity. Amazing. But then it gets so much, so very much, wildly wrong.
1) We cant grow things just sitting out in the Martian soil because ITS REALLY FREAKING COLD. The temperature range Spirit and Opportunity have encountered on their sojourns across big red? A not so toasty -175 degrees all the way up to 1 degree. Fahrenheit. Know any plants which like those kind of temps?
2) Mars does not have an atmosphere. So sitting out in some nice red potting soil means that you are getting blasted by radiation. Not good.
3) And this is the big one: "On the flip side, Martian soil allows for faster consumption of oxygen and dissolved organic carbon, which resulted in a 10 percent increase in CO2 emissions." Whoa there Popular Science. I think you might have been sampling some mutant herb yourself. Last time I checked, plants produce oxygen, not CO2. I am pretty confident on that one actually. Not sure what process PopSci is trying to refer to here, other than the "lets randomly make a reference to global warming to make the hipsters happy" process - but they are wildly off base for a magazine which is usually intelligent.
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