In any case, if you really think you'd like eating astronaut food, you have to read Mary Roach's Packing For Mars. Food designed by scientists can be a little scary, especially when NASA recruited veterinarians, rather than dieticians, as their chief food designers.
]]>I have quite a collection of freeze dried expedition food. All nutritionally balanced for the kind of idiot who finds going away for a few weeks or months of hard labour in unpleasant environments fun.
Energy tends to be starch rather than fat based due to limitations of human digestion at altitude (relevant to low pressure spacecraft atmospheres?).
Some of the instant mashed potato based stuff is reasonably palatable. Pasta dishes are ok in a crappy instant pasta way. Rice never reconstitutes properly even at sea level, and is guaranteed inedible in the 5 minutes promised by the packaging...
And this is the premium stuff.
The saving grace is the desserts. Dried fruit actually works.
]]>Indeed. I know someone who was a military brat and grew up eating food marked APPROVED FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION BY USAF VETERINARIAN.
]]>A mate of mine used to always keep an emergency tin of catfood in the bottom of his rucsac.
He claimed that the theory was that if the shit ever really hit the fan he would get it out, look at it and find something more edible. Grass, rocks, his own leg... :)
]]>Much of the same thinking applied to the food for the Apollo-era and earlier astronauts, since toilet facilities were beyond primitive for them. Oh, and it had to be as light and compact as possible. It wasn't about flavor, so much as, erm, whole system function. Constipation was regarded as a good thing, at least on short space flights, and crumbs are definitely a Bad Thing in space.
Still, you have to read Roach's book to really understand the basic, well, potty humor of the whole thing. She really is a master at telling this kind of story.
]]>Yeah, it's not a perfect solution - I did work in astronomy for some years so I kind of have a clue of how things are (though that was more than decade ago). My main idea came from an article about globular clusters in the Finnish Astronomical society magazine, where Rosanne Di Stefano was interviewed about planets and life in globular clusters. The original article is available, but I haven't yet read it.
My idea was to have a cluster of systems close enough that slower than light flight is more possible than here, but still have a (somewhat limited) FTL system. With stars close enough you can also observe recent (high-energy) activities from nearby systems.
]]>I just finished reading Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desert, which I strongly recommend for anyone who wants to understand how American politics worked in the 20th Century, why the US has such an enormous debt, and what will hit world food supplies in the 21st Century. What the book is, actually, is a history of water development in the western US, with glances elsewhere, as told by a muckraking journalist.
Here are some points that might be relevant:
--Rivers "work" because stuff dissolves into them (we can simplify this to salts and sediments). If the river runs to the ocean, a good chunk of the salts and sediments end up in the ocean. If they run to an inland lake, they end up there, which is where all those salt lakes in the western US came from.
--Once the Mormons demonstrated that irrigated agriculture could work in the West (actually, the Anasazi and Hohokam had tried the same trick 600 years earlier), it became the preferred model for western development. A lot of the West was more-or-less terraformed by dams and irrigation canals into what we have now, and it's probably no coincidence that many of the SF writers who tackle terraforming are Californians.
--Dams and irrigation have some problems. The dams capture sediment, and a good chunk of the water in the reservoirs evaporates, concentrating the salts. Irrigation water is salty, but plant transpiration takes water out of the soil, as does evaporation, leaving the salts in the soil. Without a way to flush the salts out of the soil and careful management, salts build up in the soil until its useless. (Pre-Aswan Dam) Egypt really escaped this problem (as did parts of China and SE Asia doing paddy rice), because they flooded the fields every year, flushed the salt out, and laid down more sediment. Long story short, dams and irrigation are an ephemeral system, with a mean time to failure measured generally in decades to centuries.
--Nonetheless, between 1900 and the late 1970s, water projects became a major alternative currency (Reisner called it "wampum") by which the pork-barrel politics of the US functioned. Favors came in the form of dams, reservoirs, canals, and the like, often in places that made little or no sense in economically. This is a classic example of why you have to talk about political economics, not just financial economics. The US poured billions of dollars into subsidizing agriculture in the western districts of politically powerful people, while at the same time paying eastern farmers in rain-fed districts not to grow the same crops more cheaply. In political terms, this dams-as-wampum economy made sense, as the true costs were externalized onto future generations.
This last point is critical. The politics of economics here were about which costs to talk about, which costs to cover up, which costs to cover now, and which to externalize, either onto the environment or onto the future. All economies do this. For example, current global capitalism is struggling mightily and with little success to monetize the costs of climate change so that it can be dealt with economically rather than politically. Part of the struggle is that many people do not want to pay attention to those costs, and that's the essence of politics right there.
Also note that the US wasn't alone in its dam-building frenzy. Everyone's been building dams. They're the great pyramids and megaliths of 20th Century civilization, except that they won't last nearly as long.
Now, getting back to the question of colonies, I suspect that you can substitute "colony on another planet" for "water project" and have much the same politics in an interstellar culture as you had in, say, the 1960s US. So long as there's projected growth, politicians can assume that the future, bigger economy will cover the present costs of colonization, and that will allow them to keep using new colonies as the political wampum to pay for support on other projects. Planets can get the pork barrel benefits of new colonies to absorb all the people that don't fit in crowded existing colonies, and the system can keep perpetuating itself, so long as there semi-reasonable places to plant new colonies.
Indeed, in the western US, all the good dam sites had dams on them by the 1940s, and by the 1970s, the only sites remaining were places that returned perhaps 10 cents for every dam-building dollar invested. Similar problems could happen if we start running out of great new worlds to colonize, and have to start colonizing less and less advantageous ones. That's when this whole political economy starts to collapse under its own weight.
There's also the problem of colonies failing, and having to move the colonists. It's fairly critical to determine how long space colonies can last. If they only last 50-100 years, then the next question is how they fail, because after a few centuries of rapid expansion, an interstellar empire can fall apart under the weight of refugees borne on a rapidly contracting economy that's no longer supported by prosperous colonies using their surplus resources to build more colonies.
In any event, if you're thinking about writing space opera, here's some setting help for you. Just remember, Chinatown is a mythologized take on California water politics, and there's no reason you can do something similar with space colonies. Also remember that politics determines which part of the economy gets externalized, and which part gets counted. That turns out to be pretty critical.
]]>APPLAUSE
I'm wondering whether any other kind of economy has actually existed.
We're plenty wet enough here, but I see the same politics with highways. Imagine a fjord with ten settlements around it, all reachable only by boat (I've known places like this). Clearly none of them are more remote or "cut off" than the others. Someone with pull gets a road built to one of them, which means that the other nine become remote and cut off overnight. Later, repeat, rinse. The local joke is that the only use of the new road is by the farmer moving to the city.
After privatisation, the local politician is the real owner via shells of the road construction company, or is bribed. It's not corruption when WE do it!
]]>Very true, and relevant to the discussion a few posts up. Trade and immigration offer great benefits to residents of less developed countries, but impose considerable costs on the developed-country citizens with whom the foreign laborers most directly compete. The losers in this deal tend to be less well educated, less cosmopolitan in outlook, and are unlikely to live near major centers of finance or trade. We're currently in the middle of a struggle over whether and how their costs will be recognized.
This isn't to say they aren't dangerous, racist fascists. That's also a fair characterization for many of them. Desperation isn't ennobling.
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