The final frontier

I am curious as to how one would do permaculture in a space ship while travelling to a distant planet in order to provide food.This is a very real issue as scientists are now trying new ideas to get us further in space.

My idea is to create a tropical micro-biome grow room. This could have many annuals and perennials, fruit, nuts, and other supporting plants. Insects should also be given a habitat.

what are some of your ideas?

Hi Daniel,
Not permaculture in a spaceship, but permaculture on Mars! Permaforming, indeed: Answers In Genes - Permaculture on Mars
-Shane

I think O'Neill cylinders offer the best protection and advantage to long term travel. Safety redundancy would demand a fleet of such craft travel together. This presents an opportunity for each vessel to offer a separate and distinct biosphere. Along with food production, a spacefaring/colonizing community would benefit from as wide a gene pool as possible. Permaculture offers solutions to the needs of the community in terms of food production, nutrient and waste management, yield and genetic diversity.

I loved the O'Neill Cylinders when I first read The High Frontier. Lots of quaint stuff in there, such as getting about inside the habitats using vehicles powered by internal combustion engines! O'Neill seriously underestimated the cost of making these things, as well as the degree of radiation protection required, but the ideas remain outstanding, and I think something along those lines will be achievable and indeed desirable - eventually. There is no question - we will have to adopt permaculture principles as we colonise space - at least until we get to a comfortable enough stage where we can just expand at will and trash the entire cosmos before going extinct...

At present I think we find it difficult to imagine the sheer level of resource that is out there, and the potential for intelligently using that resource to protect and improve our tiny home planet. So I think space exploration is a key Permaculture thing (*gets flame-proof coat on*), and it's one of the reasons I wrote the song in my sig...

Thanks for sharing. Interesting article. Those Cylinders are bigger than what I was imagining, but they are a very good idea.

I don't know where your 'final frontier' is, what I strongly suspect is that our 'last chance' is here on Earth and nowhere else.

Why would anyone who is interested in permaculture and thinks permaculture want to be on a spaceship or on Mars or anywhere other than on Earth?

How can you 'do' permaculture in an environment where almost nothing is available locally that can sustain human life and you would have to bring in everything (building materials, fuel, technology,...) from far, far away?

Where have the permaculture ethics gone? Especially 'earth care'?

Where have all the permaculture principles gone? 'working with nature, not against it'?

... I warmly recommend Richard Heinberg's book The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies

Levente Andras wrote:I don't know where your 'final frontier' is, what I strongly suspect is that our 'last chance' is here on Earth and nowhere else.

Why would anyone who is interested in permaculture and thinks permaculture want to be on a spaceship or on Mars or anywhere other than on Earth?

How can you 'do' permaculture in an environment where almost nothing is available locally that can sustain human life and you would have to bring in everything (building materials, fuel, technology,...) from far, far away?

Where have the permaculture ethics gone? Especially 'earth care'?

Where have all the permaculture principles gone? 'working with nature, not against it'?
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I think it's clear that diversity and adaptation are survival traits -- I would like to think humans can keep some level of survival for a very long time!
The Earth is a vessel going through space using solar energy inputs to sustain life. I think the fundamentals here come down to how much we can shrink this design into a human created vessel that also sustains life (for some useful amount of time..) We are designers - we can do that! But it's naive to think it will be done in one grand experiment like a lot of scifi books present -- it will be a crafted sequence of trials, buth successful and not...

Eric Thompson wrote:

I think it's clear that diversity and adaptation are survival traits -- I would like to think humans can keep some level of survival for a very long time!
The Earth is a vessel going through space using solar energy inputs to sustain life. I think the fundamentals here come down to how much we can shrink this design into a human created vessel that also sustains life (for some useful amount of time..) We are designers - we can do that! But it's naive to think it will be done in one grand experiment like a lot of scifi books present -- it will be a crafted sequence of trials, buth successful and not...

Trying to break away from Planet Earth is the most wasteful and inefficient way of 'surviving'. So you will forgive me for being sceptical of anyone claiming that colonising Outer Space is for the survival (or the bettering) of the Human Race - I mean, people like you and me. I don't believe that. Space travel is a drain on material resources that would be better spent on other, more 'earthly' projects. Hence not compatible with Permaculture ethics and principles.

If all the energy we spend exploring space for another place to destroy were spent on making sure this planet could continue to sustain generation after generation of well nourished healthy human most of our problems would have been solved already. Stop looking up to the sky for the answer, start looking around you!

in other words. Folks, this aint normal.