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Life In A Bottle

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• Life In A Bottle

  Michael > April 23rd, 2023, 12:13 AM

  Here's an interesting article about the world's oldest terrarium (it hasn't been opened since 1972).
  
  "World's Oldest Terrarium"- Sealed Garden That Hasn't Been Watered Since 1972
  
  The article says NASA (and I would guess other space agencies) is considering using terraria to transport plants/seeds through space. It makes sense. They would thrive on 1-2 year voyages and survive even the harshest Lunar or Martian environments while proper greenhouses are built.
  
  But what about longer trips? How long would a terrarium survive in space, assuming it could provided with sufficient light to keep the plants alive? The Voyager space probes are still operating on nuclear power packs that were built in the 1970s.
  
  Could we seed the stars with robotic probes that keep plants alive in specially designed terraria?

• RE: Life In A Bottle

  Alvin Eriol > April 24th, 2023, 09:25 AM

  Hard radiation in deep space, and Solar radiation and that of any stars it might eventually approach, would be another factor determining whether this method is workable.
  
  On the other hand, it's doubtful the starlight of deep interstellar space would ever be intense enough to support photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is in fact inherently reversible. Left to itself, in darkness chlorophyll would break the sugars down. Green plants have additional enzymic mechanisms that shut down the reaction when a threshold amount of light is not reached.
  
  Therefore, the space probe's power supply would have to power a suitable light source to keep the plants alive, as well as power its other functions.
  
  Some fictional treatments of generation ships include an artificial sun to power an ecology, e.g. Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun cycle. Don't recall if Star Trek's Yonada from "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" revealed any details of how its light was generated, but it clearly had a light illuminating its interior and making agriculture of some kind and scale possible.

• RE: Life In A Bottle

  Michael > May 5th, 2023, 11:36 PM

  I don't think something as exotic as an artificial sun would be required. We've got some pretty good, energy-efficient light sources now. And cosmic radiation itself might one day prove to be a viable energy source.
  
  Alternatively, if we can improve spacecraft speeds enough to where journeys last only decades, not hundreds of years, we could probably build nuclear power plants capable of sending robotic probes with terraria to nearby stars.
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