Potatoes in Space! (encore)

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, a half century after Neil Armstrong took one small step onto the surface of the Moon, there are still just ten humans living in space—the crew of the International Space Station. But, after decades of talk, both government agencies and entrepreneurs are now drawing up more concrete plans to return to the Moon, and even travel onward to Mars. Getting there is one thing, but if we plan to set up colonies, we'll have to figure out how to feed ourselves. Will Earth crops grow in space—and, if so, will they taste different? Will we be sipping spirulina smoothies and crunching on chlorella cookies, as scientists imagined in the 1960s, or preparing potatoes six thousand different ways, like Matt Damon in The Martian? Listen in this episode for the stories about how and what we might be farming, once we get to Mars. (encore presentation) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, hello, and to those of you who celebrate, happy Halloween.
0:05.0	Here at Gastropod HQ, we're more into sci-fi than spooky stuff, and so we're celebrating
0:11.2	with worms in space.
0:14.5	That's right, thanks to our friends at American Express.
0:17.4	We're excited to bring you an encore presentation of one of our favorite episodes
0:21.0	all about eating and farming in space. We'll be back with a
0:24.4	brand new episode in just one week but for now enjoy.
0:29.2	There's quite some difference, especially with the moon. The moon soil is very coarse, it's very sharp, and that's one of the very important differences, not only for the plants, but also for the worms because they eat soil and if you eat soil and it's sharp it's the same as if we would eat broken glass.
0:52.0	Oh man those poor little wormies.
0:55.0	But why are we feeding worms, moonsoil exactly?
0:59.0	How does scientists even get soil from the moon in the first place?
1:02.0	Sure, we need to study it if we're ever
1:03.8	going to grow food in outer space but where does this crushed moon rock come
1:07.4	from? Guess what? You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that answers these
1:11.4	kinds of questions because it's the
1:13.7	podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history and this
1:17.3	episode is all about space farming. I'm Nicola Twilly and I'm
1:21.3	Cynthia Graber and space farming sounds like it'll be pretty challenging.
1:24.8	Why bother in the first place? Couldn't we just bring along all the nutrient-rich slurry we'd ever need to keep us alive?
1:30.3	Oh sure and have you moan about how boring that slurry tastes for the rest of all time?
1:36.3	True. But how about algae? Could we survive on that? I feel like that's what they do in the movies.
1:41.2	That sounds about as tasty as a beige food replacement.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.