Science Fiction-esque Ideas Which May Just Become Reality: Rocky Meals for Sustenance

By Helena Chen

To create a civilization on another planet, the first step is to arrive at a possibly habitable planet. As basic necessities, the humans on board the spacecrafts would require sustenance: food and water. However, in the vast expanse of space, while travelling preferably at near light speed, there are no plots of land outside of the rockets. While it is plausible to create onboard farms, those may be unable to supply everyone with the limited space onboard. Therefore, we would need to look outwards, and to our luck there would be plenty of enough nutrition gainable from the asteroids (which are planetesimals, rocky leftovers from planetary formation) floating in space to create potentially edible meals.

In the study published by The International Journal of Astrobiology, it was suggested that the same asteroids, findable as far as Jupiter’s orbital tracks, could be used to create a variety of foods while traveling. While the idea of humans chomping on rocks is comical, the food will in reality look nothing like its asteroid parent. It would have instead been broken down by using both chemical and physical processes, then have the resulting organic components be fed to bacteria, creating a collection of microbes (organisms of microscopic size) known as “biomass”. Even if rocks do not seem edible at first glance, they could actually become a sustainable energy source. To put figures into perspective, using the minimum extractable calorie value from the small asteroid Bennu to make into food, 5.762108 cal (Pilles et al.), and using the maximum amount of calories an astronaut would burn in a day, 3000 cal (Julien), this one asteroid could power an astronaut for roughly 192066 years. If a human’s predicted lifespan is 73 years on land (macrotrends), this amount could sustain roughly 2613 people!

While it may not be within our lifetime to go on an intergalactic adventure, we in this generation can still taste-test the food of the potential future as a new option for nutrition. Luckily for us, we will not be confined to edible biomass as long as we still have access to a habitable planet, having an enormous range of food to choose from when compared to future adventurers. Even if this method of creating nutrition is doable in theory, there still needs to be tests run to ensure the safety of the meals, with the improvement of taste and visual appeal still having to be researched when the safety has been confirmed. Nevertheless, this new method of creating food while in space proves to be a fresh way of finding a sustainable food source for intergalactic adventurers, helping our science fiction worlds of travel become future realities.

Works Cited

BBC. “Would you eat Asteroids for tea?” BBC, 7 October 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/c3e9dy0np8yo. Accessed 10 November 2024.

Julien. “Astronaut food.” ESA's blogs, European Space Agency, 18 August 2022, https://blogs.esa.int/orion/2022/08/18/astronaut-food/. Accessed 10 November 2024.

macrotrends. “World Life Expectancy 1950-2024 | MacroTrends.” Macrotrends, 2024, https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/life-expectancy. Accessed 10 November 2024.

Pilles, Eric, et al. “How we can mine asteroids for space food.” Cambridge University Press, University of Cambridge, 3 October 2024, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/how-we-can-mine-asteroids-for-space-food/9EF3C4FA6F32368D09994EB7910C7035#article. Accessed 10 November 2024.

Scoles, Sarah. “The Food of Space Travel Could Be Based on Rocks.” The New York Times, 8 October 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/science/asteroids-food-space.html. Accessed 15 November 2024.

NASA. Asteroid Bennu: The NASA asteroid threat is about 500m in diameter. Express Newspapers, www.express.co.uk/news/science/935170/nasa-asteroid-bennu-scientists-warn-threat. Accessed Dec. 2024.

Isstgeschichte. Comet Asteroid Meteoroid Meteor Meteorite Canvas Print. Redbubble, www.redbubble.com/i/canvas-print/Comet-Asteroid-Meteoroid-Meteor-Meteorite-by-isstgeschichte/43850669.5Y5V7. Accessed Dec. 2024.