/sci/ - Science & Math

Guys I don't think we'll be eating a lot of tilapia or lettuce in Mars. You need big ass tanks to grow tilapia and lettuce is nutritionally useless. What I think we'll be growing for protein in mars are guppy fishes, mosquito fishes, maybe neon tetras. Tiny fishes.

The cycle will be like this:

- Take sewage
- Run it through gravel beds to nitrify everything
- Some of the output is used for cyanobacteria, which will be used as sugar (in mars you'll drink a lot of just sugary water, on the other hand you'll need way less calories because you'll weight only a third of what you do here)
- Some of the output will go into algae reactors
- Algae tanks will be recycling the CO2 which you will breath. Some of the atmospheric CO2 will also be bubbled through them in order to obtain oxygen for fuel cells and the like.
- Algae is used to grow copepods, which will become food for genetically engineered neon tetras, which will be ground down into a paste and made into food pellets. You'll receive 12 food pellets and consume one for each waking hour. That will be your protein source, and when you drink the sugary water you'll be consuming all the calories you need. Now, the idea of eating a neon tetra food cube may sound disgusting to you, but people that are born in the colonies will enjoy it in the same manner a cat will eat kibble every single day of his life.
- Your pellets will certainly be enriched with some sewage extract. There's a lot of protein in fecal matter since our digestive systems aren't very efficient.

A more extreme approach would involve completely removing the digestive system and using intravenous feeding instead. Again, if it's done to you as a baby, you won't ever notice anything unusual about not eating.

Now: why won't breed insects in Mars? Simple: they only eat fresh, high quality vegetables (ask anyone who has raised crickets).