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Log Entry #48: The Garden
🕑 Added 2020-10-10 10:27:52 +0000 UTCIt was decided from the start that we would need to be food self-sufficient in space.
That is not such a hard thing to do with the level of technology available to us. All you essentially needed is oxygen, sunlight, water, and the nutrients to grow pretty much anything. Oh, yeah, you’ll also need a place for all that growing to go on, but the Ascension was built from the ground up with that in mind. (I have some ideas for space farms in the future. Entire independent habitats only dedicated to growing food, but for now, we needed to start small.)
Well… if you can call the area of two hundred and fifty acres small since it was an entire level of the Ascension dedicated for food production. All of it completely climate controlled with energy screens separating various sections, so the plants from different locations on Earth could be cultivated. (One cannot grow tropical fruits in colder climates… who knew.)
We managed to bring some of the most fertile soil from all over the planet and we are big believers in hydroponics. To be honest, only fifty acres are in use, since we are still at the beginning of this project and need more topsoil to cover the entire expanse of the level. Even so, from the number of requests from our new citizens that originally came from Africa, the demand for good arable land was skyrocketing.
One of the tribal elders, Chief Abu, was brought to look at the soil, and the man got on his knees and tasted it. I don't know what he tasted in it, but he was quite euphoric after that. (If I only knew that it took so little to make him happy, I would have given him a few metric tons of soil for his birthday.)
The quality of land was very important for his people, and I had one hundred volunteer farmers by that evening. He immediately expressed his happiness with the demands for tools, crops, and all the quirks a modern farmer should need. He may be in his 70’s, but he had undergone a session in the AutoDoc and was using his CEI to the fullest extent. Seriously, the man was taking virtual courses in Agricultural Sciences, and by his grades, he was acing them.
We even had some volunteers from the scientist contingent that were interested in Hydroponics and Aquaponics gardening, and they got a few acres to experiment. The thing snowballed from there, and in no time at all, we transplanted an entire vineyard from France (by scooping it up, and a big chunk of the surrounding ground). Then a few small orchards and about two hundred nut-trees. (Why wait for the trees to grow from a sapling when you can take the whole thing, and with enough love and care make it thrive in the new environment.)
Interestingly enough (and by popular demand), the research in coffee production was put near the top of the list. It would seem coffee was deemed as one of the most essential plants that needed to thrive in the space environment. Even Michael gave his wholehearted approval (he was a bit overenthusiastic about it.)
Ok, I’ll admit that most people need that morning hit of coffee, and there is no use arguing with junkies. (Even I partake in a digital version of the black brew.)
Therefore, many coffee plants were expediently transplanted to this level. I do not know if such a rush was needed since I have tons of the stuff in storage (vacuum-sealed).
By this time next year, we should be entirely self-sufficient with vegetables and would even have some for export. An anonymous survey Ares did, showed that people on Earth would pay a crazy amount of money for ‘space-grown food’, so why not use that.
I cannot even imagine what the price for SpaceCoffee® would be. Well... Actually, I can, that is why I registered the name. Let me just say this, if you need to ask the price—you can’t afford it. (FYI—free for all citizens of the Solarian Union.)
We had stored food to last us a long time, but that was not what everybody wanted, and I have plans to really step up our production (as soon as some other projects are completed).
For now, the Solarian Union is an importer of food; we purchase everything in bulk and are spending a truckload of money on it. However, (fingers crossed) that would soon change. Our new farmers are promising great results, and are already demanding more soil to be brought from Earth.
The thing that gave me the most trouble from the start was the light, as the ordinary artificial light would not work for plants. That was a problem I had to deal with while we were still on Pagan Island (while the Ascension was being built). Many were already living inside the ship, giving their contribution to finishing it sooner. Humans require certain light wavelengths to remain healthy. Since this ship is essentially a closed shell (where the sunlight cannot reach inside) I had to ask our scientists for help at rectifying this problem.
They solved that by making me build a big UV and yellow light strips that are hidden behind holo-emitters. Without them, there would be a problem for plants to make use of photosynthesis, and they would wither. People need ultraviolet B rays to make vitamin D; not much to burn but enough to keep them healthy.
Hey, it’s simple really, you are where you are. If that is confusing, then think about evolution for a minute. Almost everything on Earth evolved by adapting to the environment, not the other way around. Be that as it may, humans are doing their best to change that same environment in recent times. What is more, they are doing it without reason or knowledge of what those changes will do.
In most cases, it is because they don’t want to know. Let me give you an example. There was this great French Glaciology scientist by the name of Claude Lorius (rent a movie by the name ‘Antarctica: Ice and Sky’ if you don’t know about him).
In any case, he spent most of his life studying ice, or more importantly the chemical composition of trapped ice bubbles in it. He went to Antarctica and drilled holes into the ice, going back into Earth’s past. He got ice cores that were keeping tiny bubbles of air trapped there for hundreds of thousands of years. A record of the time that is the closest humans can come to a time machine. His results revealed how the Earth works on the geological scale; ice ages, when and why they happen, what precedes them. All his work tells that what Earth is now experiencing is unprecedented in all of its past. Although, humans are turning a blind eye on those results; if they face them with reason and logic, they would collectively understand that they had screwed up and that time to some inescapable event is ticking away. (Just one of the reasons why we are now in space, and why we are trying to grow food.)
My plans call for a lot more than simply growing food; this all is an experiment that will give me strong data for some much larger projects. In a nutshell, I want to build Noah's Ark. Yeah, that one, except I didn't think the mythical Noah was ambitious enough, rather lazy in fact. Then again, he was little more than an uneducated savage, so I don’t hold it against him.
My long-term plans involve building habitats that can be self-perpetuating gardens which will keep most of Earth's plants alive. That way we will not lose that enormous diversity that Earth painstakingly nurtured for millions of years. I’m not saying the whole planet will go boom and that all will be lost. Just that I want a reserve, a bio-vault that will be some sort of insurance for future generations, no matter what happens. That means I will need an insane number of gardeners. So, if Chief Abu wants to work the land, I am all for it.
To build the same thing for animals (as I intend to do with plants) is a bit more ambitious project. (That a bit, was pure sarcasm.) I will need structures that defy all reason. Can’t you even imagine what it would take to make artificial habitats of that size? It makes building pyramids, or the Great Wall of China, a child’s game.
That is all in the future, I have made a note to consider those plans for future projects, and you will not believe how many such notes I already have.
For now, Chief Abu and our teams of botanists will have to do, planting trees and working the land the old-fashioned way.
In time… who knows?
