[pugworthy]

This seems like the ultimate in ultra-processed / factory food.

Kind of interesting to read the comments on the other recent post on ultra-processed foods (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246739) and consider the arguments made against there and whether they would apply here.

[anon84873628]

That article states that we don't conclusively know how much the "processing" itself leads to bad health outcomes, versus the nutrient content / hyper-palatability / etc.

But in any case, the situation in space is going to be very different. You'll be eating a highly tuned macro & micro nutrient profile down to the individual calorie. There is no room for junk food or mindless eating. So most of today's problems with processed food will be irrelevant.

Whatever contribution the "processing" plays will eventually be isolated and mitigated with yet further inventions. Yes it's the pinnacle of the scientific reductionism hubris that many people find objectionable.

[adastra22]

You would likely use this “food” to feed more traditional agriculture for human consumption. A better way of positioning it is processing the content of abiotic asteroids into a biological system capable of providing nourishment to astronauts and space colonists.

[roughly]

The article says the cost of feeding one astronaut for one year is around 5,000-160,000 tons of ore per year. My understanding is the rule of thumb is about an order of magnitude nutritional drop off each step - that is, to produce 100cal of meat requires 1000cal of plant food. Bumping those yield estimates, especially the pessimistic end, up by another factor of 10 is just a phenomenal amount of material to process for one person for one year.

[Teever]

That's just the mass you need to extract the resources that make up the food that one person consumes in a year. Assuming you don't just space the human waste and instead reuse it you'll be accumulating material that can make up the biomass that will comprise a large and intricate food web that will eventually make up the biomes of large O'Neill cylinder stations.

[pavel_lishin]

I didn't read the paper in depth, just skimmed it, but it seems like their assumption is that the astronauts will be eating some sort of microbe slurry; so I think that the cost includes only that, not using microbes to feed higher-order life or growing plants.

[roughly]

Agree, but the post I was responding to was suggesting it be used as an agricultural feedstock to feed things the astronauts eat - that’s where my order-of-magnitude calculation came from.

[adastra22]

Biomass is recycled. You would only need the replacement rate for losses, which would be nonzero not negligible, but much smaller.