Farming on Mars

[Kyng]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mars...olith-soil

In the film The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) survives being stranded on the Red Planet by farming potatoes in Martian dirt fertilized with feces.

Future Mars astronauts could grow crops in dirt to avoid solely relying on resupply missions, and to grow a greater amount and variety of food than with hydroponics alone (SN: 11/4/11). But new lab experiments suggest that growing food on the Red Planet will be a lot more complicated than simply planting crops with poop (SN: 9/22/15).

Researchers planted lettuce and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana in three kinds of fake Mars dirt. Two were made from materials mined in Hawaii or the Mojave Desert that look like dirt on Mars. To mimic the makeup of the Martian surface even more closely, the third was made from scratch using volcanic rock, clays, salts and other chemical ingredients that NASA’s Curiosity rover has seen on the Red Planet (SN: 1/31/19). While both lettuce and A. thaliana survived in the Marslike natural soils, neither could grow in the synthetic dirt, researchers report in the upcoming Jan. 15 Icarus.

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I have to admit, it's kind of a shame it's more complicated than The Martian makes it look . I think it's a very enjoyable movie (and also reasonably accurate with the science of the time), but as ever, science marches on.

Still, I hope this comes as a warning to aspiring astronauts who aren't too worried about getting trapped on Mars .

[Spook of the lost]

The book is much better.

As for Martian soil, its the same problem with lunar soil.

It's dead and barren, there's no microbial life or nutrients in the soil to grow i n which is why I  the Martian they needed feces, its full of nutrients, minerals, and most importantly microbes unlike the dead soil.

Basically, you need to make the soil alive before you can grow anything in it.

Doubly so because mars soil is iron rich and severely depleted due to the planetary conditions.

[Kyng]

Yeah, pretty much - although, these recent discoveries about Martian soil make me wonder how exactly the composition differs from lunar soil, and which would be easier to make fertile .

As for the book... I haven't read that yet, although my dad does own it, so I could very easily read it at some point!

[Spook of the lost]

they cut huge sections of the book out of the movie including an even more epic ending!

but yeah, good book.

as for the soil, I'd imagine you'd need degrees in astrobiology, biochemestry, and botany just to properly grow stuff on mars.

[Kyng]

Sadly, I guess that's pretty much inevitable with any book-to-move adaptation: unless the book is fairly short, or you're willing to do a two-part movie, there just isn't time to fit everything in . Still, it makes me even more curious about the book .

And, yeah, you'd probably need those degrees (or, at least, any two of the three) - and you'd probably need to know what materials to take in advance. (In fairness to The Martian, this is an area where it's quite easy for my mind to fill in the blanks: they probably did bring those chemicals and use them, but there wasn't any need to include an exhaustive explanation that only the nerdiest of viewers would fully understand )

[Spook of the lost]

@ Kyng it was actually less detailed than the book lol.

but if you really are interested in astrobotany there's a few things to keep in mind.

what I said about living soil is important but so is distilling the water, especially on mars because the soil is rich in both sodium and iron, we know this because water does occasionally appear on the surface but due to the atmospheric density and average temperature it's obvious that's it's rather thick salt brine.

and salt water is generally bad for plants, especially farm crops, (see salting the earth and killing someone's grass with salt).

this would be true on most planets though since earth plants can really only grow in an earth like environment and a lot of planets have soils and water containing stuff that can easily kill plants meaning you need to treat both before introducing stuff like bacteria and nutrients for the plant's themselves.

the good news is though once you have viable soil increasing it is fairly easy to do, you just take the treated local soil and mix in the viable soil which will infuse the treated soil and make it viable.

that's a technique used in places where it's difficult to grow stuff like deserts and the arid polar regions.