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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the nom-nom-nom-nope dept.

Microbes may help astronauts transform human waste into food

Human waste may one day be a valuable resource for astronauts on deep-space missions. Now, a Penn State research team has shown that it is possible to rapidly break down solid and liquid waste to grow food with a series of microbial reactors, while simultaneously minimizing pathogen growth.

"We envisioned and tested the concept of simultaneously treating astronauts' waste with microbes while producing a biomass that is edible either directly or indirectly depending on safety concerns," said Christopher House, professor of geosciences, Penn State. "It's a little strange, but the concept would be a little bit like Marmite or Vegemite where you're eating a smear of 'microbial goo.'"

[...] "Each component is quite robust and fast and breaks down waste quickly," said House. "That's why this might have potential for future space flight. It's faster than growing tomatoes or potatoes."

Today, astronauts aboard the International Space Station recycle a portion of water from urine, but the process is energy intensive, said House. Solid waste management has been a bigger hurdle. This currently is ejected into the Earth's atmosphere where it burns up.

"Imagine if someone were to fine-tune our system so that you could get 85 percent of the carbon and nitrogen back from waste into protein without having to use hydroponics or artificial light," said House. "That would be a fantastic development for deep-space travel."

Coupling of anaerobic waste treatment to produce protein- and lipid-rich bacterial biomass (DOI: 10.1016/j.lssr.2017.07.006) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:16AM (5 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:16AM (#630210) Journal
    You know what soil's made of?

    The only thing different here is that in the past few millenia we've learned to specifically keep *human* waste as far from the process as possible.

    This is adaptive because of diseases. Hopefully the astronauts will all be squeaky clean.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:27AM (3 children)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:27AM (#630214) Homepage Journal

      that North Korean soldier who defected recently was full of tapeworms.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:46AM (#630222)

        *defecated

        FTFY

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:24AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:24AM (#630228)

        that North Korean soldier who defected recently was full of tapeworms.

        You should familiarize yourself with the lifecycle of the actual parasite. You don't get it by eating poop. And if you did, you would probably not be very happy about it since it would not exactly be living in your gut.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapeworm#Lifecycle [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:38PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:38PM (#630445) Journal

        I thought a tapeworm was something you fed to a computer in War Games the 1984 movie.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:50AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:50AM (#630250) Homepage
      I'd always presumed it was more green manure than brown manure - do you have any data to support your side?
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:27AM (5 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:27AM (#630213) Homepage Journal

    I just stopped hoping I could be an astronaut someday.

    Eating one's own shit might be completely cool but does it _really_ have to be like Vegemite?

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:24AM (#630227)

      vitameatavegamin [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:30AM

      by Arik (4543) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:30AM (#630229) Journal
      Vegemite is quite tasty if used in sufficient dilution.

      Marmite, on the other hand, is simply a crime against humanity.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:50AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:50AM (#630270)

      Micro-ecologies of microbes can be engineered to work together to create whole foods from waste while still in the gut. Different astronauts could be inoculated with different set of microbes so that one shits whole carrots, another whole potatoes, yet another lima beans, and so on. Then they could just pass the crock pot around every morning and let it cook until dinner. The missing 15% could be filled in with regular hydroponically produced foods or crickets or something.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:33PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:33PM (#630319)

      I've got news Soylentis, we're all astronauts, travelling on a tiny space-ship [half-earthproject.org]. Keep growing the population and eventually we'll all be eating our own waste (including the dead people) converted into a smear of microbial goo, because microbes are the only thing that can withstand the relentless pressure of humans on their habitat.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:47PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:47PM (#630449) Journal

      Make sure it has an appalling appealing form.

      It needs to work like those modern soft drink machines where you get an overly complex menu for a huge number of choices and variations of soft drinks.

      The neutral color and flavor of Facebook branded poo sludge food-like substance would have artificial flavors added based on 87 flavors with 14 options and 3 variations. (Sort of like selecting which edition of Windows to install.)

      I always wondered what kind of menu the star trek replicators would have if you can also replicate objects and drugs.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:39AM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @06:39AM (#630218)

    Should be easy to turn into chocolate pudding, it already has the proper color and depending on have regular they are and the consistency of space-poop they might have texture and viscosity down to. Just add flavor. But then considering they already drink pee and do other weird things for science perhaps it won't be a deterrent to space travel.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:04AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:04AM (#630226) Journal

      Should be easy to turn into chocolate pudding, it already has the proper color and depending on have regular they are and the consistency of space-poop they might have texture and viscosity down to. Just add flavor.

      If you want to go down this line, go full "Human centipede" and save the energy cost for flavoring.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:36PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:36PM (#630320)

      We all drink our own pee [nasa.gov], didn't they teach you this in 5th grade? (Ha, wasn't searching for a NASA link, funny that it's the first result.)

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:41AM (1 child)

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:41AM (#630231) Homepage Journal

    I wonder if there are any applications for this back on Earth. I was thinking of a replacement for a septic tank where there isn't the space but I expect it uses rather a lot of energy. How about rebranding it as a novelty "superfood"? I'm sure some pretentious fools could be persuaded to part with their money! Especially those who are, errrrr, into that shit!

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:57AM

      by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:57AM (#630235) Journal

      If solar produces enough energy, turning your waste into food this way would potentially cut down on the amount of space required to go "off grid", and you could always just feed it to your animals, rather than eat it yourself!

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:52AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:52AM (#630259)

    Deep-space missions have a problem. Once you leave the protection of Earth's magnetic field, the radiation becomes far worse than it already is in space. Just the short trip to the Moon caused the Apollo astronauts to develop cataracts. You need shielding.

    You can bring a bunch of lead shielding and then save weight by recycling your shit to eat, or you could just surround yourself with normal food.

    For complicated radiation reasons, stuff with a modest atomic number is bad. (causes a shower of particles from a single one) Skip the aluminum, both in your spacecraft structure and in your food packaging. Use steel.

    Got a mission to Mars that will take a few years? Pack a decade worth of food. Pack jars of pickles, cans of olives, cans of salmon, buckets of ice cream, salami, lentils, frozen steaks, butter, and everything else that will keep long enough. As each compartment of food is emptied, fill it with waste. Poop ought to be frozen to prevent gas generation; you wouldn't want to vent any shielding mass.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:49PM (5 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:49PM (#630326)

      AC, I think you got that complicated radiation shower thing wrong - the nuclear physicists I've worked with claim that, pound for pound, lead is worse for shielding than hydrocarbons because of the scatter effect. They did agree, it's a complicated thing - and thin aluminum is worse than no shielding at all (well, except that you really want something to hold an atmosphere in...), but, all in all, you're best off with a couple of miles of low density atmosphere between you and the cosmic source, after that, pound for pound, the thinner the shield, the worse the scatter effect.

      My preferred Earth-Mars transit [arxiv.org] vehicle would be a converted asteroid [nasaspaceflight.com], preferably one large enough and with enough structural integrity [nasaspaceflight.com] to be spun for some gravity on the inside [newworldencyclopedia.org].

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:21PM (1 child)

        by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:21PM (#630432)

        A Mars-Cycler is an interesting idea, and would be an interesting orbital habitat location, but it seems to me that it would be of dubious utility for actually transporting things between Earth and Mars. The problem is that a simple transit between Earth and Mars orbits is useless on it's own, you have to actually pass near the planets themselves to transport passengers. Which makes the orbits considerably more complicated, and the cycle considerably slower.

        Probably the simplest and fastest is the Aldrin Cycler, with a cycle time of 783 days (2.14 years), making a cycle with every relative planetary alignment. Starting at Earth at t=0 it reaches Mars in roughly 5 months (t=150 days). So far, so good. But then it takes another 21 months to get back to Earth (t=783 days). So, it's going to be a long trip home if you don't build a second inbound cycler. Most damning, it also requires a significant course correction on every orbit to create the necessary 55-degree precession of the cycler's elliptical orbit on every pass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCVfUlFZQ4U [youtube.com]

        It's that correction that's going to make things rough - without it we could just hollow out a big asteroid and set it on its way. But regular significant course corrections are going to put a serious cramp in that plan because it means that the mass is still extremely relevant - even if a gravity assist is used for the bulk of the acceleration, fine-tuning will still be necessary. Of course, such fine tuning will be relatively minor compared to getting the thing into the proper orbit in the first place, so maybe it's not such a major concern. There's also some orbits that require minimal ballistic corrections, Wikipedia mentions the VISIT 1 which encounters Earth 3 times and Mars 4 times over the course of 15 years. Ignoring the one Mars-Mars trip in that cycle, which would presumably sit unused, that's an average of one interplanetary trip every 2.5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler [wikipedia.org]

        The common theme, from what I can see, is that you end up building a nice big well-shielded habitat, that mostly sits empty waiting for passengers on the "good" legs of the journey. Whereas, if you're going to build a habitat it seems a shame to not actually have people living there full time. Could perhaps be an excellent location to work on developing asteroid mining technologies - have a full-time industrialized mining facility, conveniently cycling between Mars and Earth, with recreational facilities etc. for both residents and passengers. After all you don't need to spin the asteroid for gravity - which not only does that require untested structural integrity of the asteroid, but also robs you of all the benefits of microgravity. You could instead just hollow out a disc within the asteroid in which a "traditional" spinning space station could be built.

        Or, I suppose, you could just make a big hollow within the asteroid within which you park your rockets, and everybody just stays in their ship for the journey, with the cycler offering nothing but shielding. That seems like an awful waste of potential, but might make for a decent starting point.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:47PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:47PM (#630450)

          Whereas, if you're going to build a habitat it seems a shame to not actually have people living there full time.

          See, that's my thought, exactly. Make each transit-habitat a colony onto itself, say 100K residents, with capacity to host another 30K transit passengers on every useful leg. If you're going to transit lots of people between Earth and Mars, having a large, comfortable, well radiation shielded way to do it would seem to be a worthy goal. And, I can't imagine that life in such a habitat would be any less appealing than a Mars surface colony.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:46PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:46PM (#630448)

        As a cosmic ray physicist, I want to point out that yes it is indeed a complicated problem, and what makes it so complicated is that shielding effectiveness is dependent upon the energy of the particle. For certain charges and energies, thin aluminum is worse because you can create more ionizing radiation secondaries (knock-on particles, "delta rays", etc.) in the aluminum, but that effect goes down as the particle incident energy goes up. And we cosmic ray physicists scoff at what nuclear physicists think are very high energies.

        I remain very pessimistic about the prospects for a reasonably safe trip to Mars from the standpoint of radiation exposure. Apart from ideas mentioned like boring out an asteroid, it will be very expensive and massive to get a sufficient amount of shielding material up. You can't shield against the galactic cosmic rays, but fortunately the fluxes of those particles are orders of magnitude lower than the solar cosmic rays (but though it will be low, they will be a source of constant radiation). It will be an optimization problem where you'll be shielding against anticipated solar storms. It will probably be a trade-off between the expected background vs. the worst case. The astronauts will probably also need luck in avoiding going through any major storms.

        • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:37AM

          by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:37AM (#630885) Journal

          In your opinion, is there any hope in shielding astronauts by means of magnetic fields? I don't think the tech is there yet to create a powerful enough artificial magnetosphere, but theoretically it could be done. Would that be sufficient?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:47PM (#630585)

        Hydrogen is tiny, and carbon isn't much more. The hydrogen is great, and the carbon isn't bad. Water and polyethylene are OK.

        The bad ones are aluminum, titanium, and similar.

        It gets better again with heavier stuff like iron, copper, and nickel.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:45PM

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:45PM (#630403) Journal

      How about this?

      All sewage / biological waste on the spacecraft should be mashed into a watery sludge and slowly pumped through an array of thin tanks - more like panels, really, stacked atop one another, on the outside of the vehicle.
      It takes days or weeks for the sludge to pass through the full set of tanks, starting at the outermost one and working its way back in. Basically, you want it out there for however long it needs for the solar / cosmic radiation to kill 99.99% of all bacteria. By the time it makes it back inside the ship, it is more or less sterile, but full of nutrients. Dry it 1, spread it out and add some nice soil bacteria. Now you can grow crops in it, completing the cycle.

      It's a long process which would require a lot of material, but as long as that sludge is on the outside of the ship (and there always would be some, as long as the crew keeps eating) it is providing radiation shielding. Might work better on a fixed habitat (moonbase?) than on a ship, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work.

      For bonus points: Use it as a heatsink too: Excess heat from the engines or wherever can be transferred to the poosludge, whence it can radiate off into space. This will help maintain the ship at a livable temperature and further help kill off the bacteria2

      1 All extracted water is recycled, obviously
      2 Well, it depends how much heat you transfer, obviously. You shouldn't need to get it too warm to screw with the bacteria's lifecycle.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:51PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:51PM (#630452) Journal

      Is the radiation directional? If so, then maybe most of your shielding can be along one axis?

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:17AM (#630278)

    ... to eat their own shit? All the rest of us have to do is go on Facebook.

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:21PM (#630393)

    I'm just very glad that I am not one of this guy's graduate students, or worse, undergraduate lab helper.

    "Here, eat this and tell me what you think."

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by srobert on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:12PM

    by srobert (4803) on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:12PM (#630534)

    Soylent Brown is Shit! Soylent Brown is made of Shit!

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