science

Is that Moonsanto’s patented corn that is genetically modified to grow in a vacuum? Maybe in the future, all the HFCS, hydrogenated soybean oil, etc. will be produced on the Moon, leaving Earth’s land for more suitable purposes like strip mining coal and data centers that manufacture AI slop.

I heard it's out of this world!

You need humus to grow hummus ;)

imagine it was way better then earth chickpeas
and it made the hummus better

I’ve also learned about it being sharp. What I haven’t heard answered is this. It’s sharp because there’s no weather to wear it down. If there were, how easily would it wear down? Does it crumble the second anything touches it? Being sharp and staying sharp are two different things. How much of a threat is this stuff, actually?

Sure, but the alternative is to stop destroying our own soils and respect our ecosystem, and humanity has proven it will take on any challenge except cleaning up after ourselves

Yah people skipping over this really don't get how hard it is to grow plants in what's basically finely ground glass. We take for granted that we have stuff on Earth called "soil" because hot damn, that shit doesn't exist anywhere else that we know of. Soil is a product of millions of years of complex interactions between plants, bacteria and water and fungus and other life forms. Everywhere else in the solar system you go, all you get is the equivalent of pulverized asphalt.

I have this idea that if aliens ever did invade because they want some resource we have, it certainly wouldn't be water or minerals, but the one thing we have here that you can't find anywhere else is fertile soil. I just don't know how exciting of a story you can weave around dirt-seeking aliens.

I don't think we're ever going to see a permanent human settlement off our world, at least not in our lifetime, but it's good to know that our granddroids have a chance. Assuming they actually need to grow plants out there.

It's coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere.

Vermicompost is something you can readily make on the moon, meaning with this it proves you can take a resource available on the moon and grow in it.

Big deal IMO.

Well. “Proves” since it’s simulated regolith, not real regolith, and it was done on earth.

Yeah, we NEED to find a way to cheat, cheating is what will let us actually do any of this.

You need far less composting agents this way, you can add a little to a lot of moon soil to make it fertile enough for growth, and then once plants get started it will work towards making even more compost/soil.

What would you propose, then?

We use organic amendments all the time when reclaiming historically mined lands that did not salvage soils.

Soils take millennia to form, and you're not going to get fertile soils without either kickstarting the process or waiting.

Another commentator points out that using arbuscular mychorrizhal fungi is also cheating. Again, how?

To have a functional soil and not regolith you need the following:

• An organic matter source - regolith lacks this
• A moisture retaining media - regolith usually has this but its ability varies widely
• Enough rooting depth for your desired plants
• A method to transform organic matter to nutrients - regolith generally lacks this

Organic matter is your pool of nutrients and microbes and fungi are what mineralize this pool into plant available forms, so saying they are cheating doesnt hold water (like a shitty regolith).

But I can grow plants in glass beads! Sure you can, but you're supplying chemical fertilizer to do it and constantly replacing that - so in this case you're the organic matter pool and the transformation vector.

@melfie@lemy.lol @cadekat@pawb.social

The article seems to imply the compost was added to both the plants with/without the fungi?

Definitely cheating in the "can we grow plants?" department, but still useful information.

That’s what you don’t get from this simulation.

My uneducated guess is that 1/6th gravity would still be a great deal more like earth than 0 gravity.

Low and zero gravity can affect how roots spread/dig and later can cause issues with how water and nutrients circulate through the stalk since they evolved to circulate with Earth level gravity. Space station experiments have proven it’s not impossible, the plants can adapt, they’re just a bit different. Trees would probably struggle, most crops would be fine. What’s really difficult is pollination. You’d probably have to hand pollinate, set up a wind system in your greenhouse, or get self-pollinaters. Bees would struggle to adapt because low gravity would mess with their flight, their dance communication, and probably their honeycomb structure and larval development.