Where do worlds with poor atmosphere get their food, water and air?

M

mb345345

Banded Mongoose
On a world with little atmosphere, how does the population survive? I'm thinking about TL8, nearish our own TL

1. food. Would they use hydroponics, maybe indoor farms? Fungus farms? Nutrient vats? I'm thinking a majority of the domes would be taken up with food production maybe. Possibly fish on a wet world?

2. Water. Maybe drill down for water? Or ship in ice from elsewhere in the system? Could be especially challenging on fluid worlds, or dry worlds. At least desalination is possible with seas. I wondered if water might be traded between wet worlds and dry

3. Air. Where would this come from? Perhaps electrolysis to get oxygen from water? What about exotic atmospheres, or corrosive? Or worlds with no water?

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I'm not turning up any hits from searches. I'm really curious about these things as, like the Expanse, I can see these becoming big political hot potatoes on a planet, with plenty of opportunities for conflict and adventure
 
Depends on details usually not mentioned.

Off planet support, planetside industrial base, orbital colonies.

In deep valleys, would air pressure be sufficient for some form of atmosphere, could you roof them over, or just start tunnelling into mountains and establishing airlocks at the entrances.

Maybe you can harvest the atmosphere for water.

Maybe there are organisms that need little water or oxygen to grow, and of course, biodomes that can be used to regenerate oxygen.
 
Bespoke TL8 or Third Imperium setting TL8?
Not that it matters much.

Sealed environmentally controlled vertical farms. Nutrients extracted from minerals using cheap fusion energy.
 
Remember that a world is rarely the only one in system. There will be ice balls, even if they are in the outer system. Chondrites can be broken down for carbon and nitrogen. Ice balls can be mined for water, O2 and H2.
The stat is only for the main world in a system.
 
mb345345 said:
On a world with little atmosphere, how does the population survive? I'm thinking about TL8, nearish our own TL

1. food. Would they use hydroponics, maybe indoor farms? Fungus farms? Nutrient vats? I'm thinking a majority of the domes would be taken up with food production maybe. Possibly fish on a wet world?

2. Water. Maybe drill down for water? Or ship in ice from elsewhere in the system? Could be especially challenging on fluid worlds, or dry worlds. At least desalination is possible with seas. I wondered if water might be traded between wet worlds and dry

3. Air. Where would this come from? Perhaps electrolysis to get oxygen from water? What about exotic atmospheres, or corrosive? Or worlds with no water?

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I'm not turning up any hits from searches. I'm really curious about these things as, like the Expanse, I can see these becoming big political hot potatoes on a planet, with plenty of opportunities for conflict and adventure
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The same way the Lunar Colony will survive in the next couple of decades. Mine what you can. Ship the rest from Earth. And recycle like crazy.

The biggest problem is that these worlds are fragile. If a society crashes on Earth, there will be survivors. If a society crashes on the Moon, there will be husks.
 
fvcoulter said:
The biggest problem is that these worlds are fragile. If a society crashes on Earth, there will be survivors. If a society crashes on the Moon, there will be husks.
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That's the Long Night and whatever you call that 70ish years to The New Era for you: Lots of dead worlds with broken-down domes and bodies in tunnels.

For a functioning interstellar society, there's also a difference between the actual listed tech level and the 'Novelty Tech Level' - what can reasonably be found as an imported item somewhere on the world, like a nicer fusion reactor or better vacc suits for those who can pay the premium. And then there are Prototypes and Early Prototypes - big clunky versions of tech that would not even survive the Short Night without an infinite supply of duct tape.
 
A world with a solid TL8 has grav technology and fusion and a lot more:

Basic fusion,
Basic power cell
Mobile computer,
Basic robot brains
Basic fabs,
Orbital factories
Basic clones,
Early cybernetics,
gene editing
Arcologies,
Orbital spin cities
Autonomous
Car, Walker
Autonomous
Ship
Autonomous
Plane,
Hypersonic Jet,
Air/Raft,
Early Grav
Stun Weapons
Precision Weapons
 
mb345345 said:
On a world with little atmosphere, how does the population survive? I'm thinking about TL8, nearish our own TL

1. food. Would they use hydroponics, maybe indoor farms? Fungus farms? Nutrient vats? I'm thinking a majority of the domes would be taken up with food production maybe. Possibly fish on a wet world?

2. Water. Maybe drill down for water? Or ship in ice from elsewhere in the system? Could be especially challenging on fluid worlds, or dry worlds. At least desalination is possible with seas. I wondered if water might be traded between wet worlds and dry

3. Air. Where would this come from? Perhaps electrolysis to get oxygen from water? What about exotic atmospheres, or corrosive? Or worlds with no water?

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I'm not turning up any hits from searches. I'm really curious about these things as, like the Expanse, I can see these becoming big political hot potatoes on a planet, with plenty of opportunities for conflict and adventure
Click to expand...
To the OP:
The Imperium has mastered the art and science of hostile world colonization. This is one of the unsung but vital technologies that made the Imperium possible.
Large greenhouse farms, vertical gardening, and aquaculture farms help a world's [probably draconian] recycling customs freshen atmospheric systems as well as adding fresh food to a diet of fairly plain plant based rations and soy-based carniculture vats.
Atmosphere recycling is a major component and CT's The Traveller Adventure has one world with a corrosive atmosphere taxing everyone [including visitors] with an 'air tax' to pay for the systems.
Water can be harvested from ice asteroids and 'gray water' can be distilled from most atmospheres with a liquid component.
And, to be completely honest about, there's a Hell of a lot of 'handwaving' in it. We just accept that there are technologies we're unaware of that take care of the bulk of this.

Once a world gets about 100 million or so inhabitants it becomes almost impossible to feed that population from offworld. Firstly it's almost prohibitively expensive. Now, we're not talking about luxury foods here. We're talking about the equivalent of shipping holds full of rice and barley aboard multi-thousand-ton freighters from an agricultural world to a 40K Hive world there. These are large bulk, low value cargoes that would barely pay for the operating expenses of the ship hauling it, much less paying the farmers who grew it.

So we just presume that Charted Space has 'figured it out somehow'. IMTU, I assume that there are huge greenhouse farms, carniculture vats, and recycling systems that would employ as much as a third of the population of a world that has no atmosphere and no ice to mine.
 
thanks for all the responses. I think there are quite a few other factors at play like, is there any water? is the population low or high? even a small colony would probably have a fusion reactor or two at that level I guess, but they would also need the engineers to maintain them, and parts (or fabricators) to repair them. cheap fusion solves a lot of problems around air I think, although it might be nice to have some forest biodomes for air alongside your veg farm biodomes, just in case the fusion reactor breaks down :)
 
There will be hydrogen and oxygen available in the minerals of the planet.
Use fusion powered electrolysis to extract them (note you will also get a lot of other very useful elements)

Feed them into a fuel cell and you get a bit of energy back and you get pure water.

Once you have made the water you can start up a water cycle in your environmentally controlled habitats.
 
Somebody said:
Why ship bulk cargo in FTL craft? The population will still be there a couple of decades from now so launch them at STL speeds and let them coast to a catcher in the target system
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Because food rots... By the time the grain got to the destination world, the hold would be full of dead rotted plant material, a hold full of ergot and mold. Sending frozen food would get you a hold full of freezer burn as well.
And what would happen to the receiving world if some economic rival intercepts two or five of those STL transports in order to foment an artificial famine in order to destabilize their economy? Sure it's a crime, but you'd have a hell of time proving it.
Add to this that a society with multiple hundreds of millions of people will have several cultures and each has different food preferences. It would follow that shipping food in ration form would only ease the problem, not solve it. If you've ever eaten military rations, ask yourself this: Would you rather have an MRE [or your local equivilvent] or fresh home-cooked food? A diet of solely pre-pack foods isn't good for you, as any doctor, dietician or shugili worth their shingle will tell you. There are nutrients best gotten from fresh foods that are difficult to reproduce in pre-pack form, otherwise everyone on present-day Earth would subsist on nothing but vitamin pills with some lettuce, cabbage or kale for roughage.

Perhaps other bulk cargoes might be shipped STL, depending on the sophistication of the economy IYTU. Things like metals, chemicals, and other non-perishable goods could be. But something as vital as food? Nah, I can't see that happening.
 
Shipping bulk food products in freighters is entirely possible and economic. You'll want BIG freighters ideally, because crew requirements and crew costs don't increase proportionate to cargo tonnage - if it is just empty tonnage. As long as you can move the product, you'd want million ton freighters for it, with their own dedicated refueling facilities, as paying 500 a ton for fuel doesn't make sense. They'd also need their own docks and loading and unloading would be a big costs if not made as efficient as possible. Fuel and capital costs - i.e. the investment in the ship and docks- would be the main costs. The ships would be giant cargo holds, with a significant amount of fuel, a few % J and M drive, and a tiny area for crew. Giant hoses would move the cargo from warehousing into the ships and back. If you have a big ag world near a high-pop world with conditions not amenable to food production, something like this is certain to happen, and to be an important part of how the high-pop world eats - big companies would see the opportunity and make the needed investments. Because blockades can happen, the high-pop world might have some local food production and preserved stores on hand, but this probably isn't economic, but rather for security, and would need to be a government policy, or maybe among preppers.

It's also entirely possible to ship STL freeze dried food. The reason it wouldn't work would actually be that the value of your cargo in transit would be a capital investment that you could be earning returns on, but are not because it is floating through deep space. If you send it in a week instead of 40 years or whatever, you get those profits in just one week and can reinvest that money right away for immediate returns. If you send it STL, it is sitting in transit and you have to wait 40 years to reinvest it. At 2% return, your money will double in 35 years, but it won't if it is sitting in a spaceship in interstellar space. The cost of putting a jump drive on is nothing next to that.
 
ottarrus said:
Perhaps other bulk cargoes might be shipped STL, depending on the sophistication of the economy IYTU. Things like metals, chemicals, and other non-perishable goods could be. But something as vital as food? Nah, I can't see that happening.
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And even then, deciding today what will be needed thirty years from now is likely to end in tears.
 
Sigtrygg said:
There will be hydrogen and oxygen available in the minerals of the planet.
Use fusion powered electrolysis to extract them (note you will also get a lot of other very useful elements)

Feed them into a fuel cell and you get a bit of energy back and you get pure water.
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I think you're right, I'm not sure there are many alternatives to this for air, or even water. But it would need to be done on an industrial scale with a population of even a few hundred, let alone thousands. Not sure how they'll get on with this on Mars. So I guess the first thing colonists drop on a planet is a massive electrolysis plant.
 
mb345345 said:
On a world with little atmosphere, how does the population survive? I'm thinking about TL8, nearish our own TL

1. food. Would they use hydroponics, maybe indoor farms? Fungus farms? Nutrient vats? I'm thinking a majority of the domes would be taken up with food production maybe. Possibly fish on a wet world?

2. Water. Maybe drill down for water? Or ship in ice from elsewhere in the system? Could be especially challenging on fluid worlds, or dry worlds. At least desalination is possible with seas. I wondered if water might be traded between wet worlds and dry

3. Air. Where would this come from? Perhaps electrolysis to get oxygen from water? What about exotic atmospheres, or corrosive? Or worlds with no water?

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I'm not turning up any hits from searches. I'm really curious about these things as, like the Expanse, I can see these becoming big political hot potatoes on a planet, with plenty of opportunities for conflict and adventure
Click to expand...
A number of things would affect this. Keep in mind that a TL8 world in Traveller isn't going to be the same as TL8 Earth. All the knowledge through TL15 is available to them - but they don't necessarily have all the materials to produce it locally (and in some cases the necessary raw materials).

For food that TL8 world may have imported TL10/12 tech to produce their own food. It might be necessary to import parts from time to time, or perhaps they have the ability to cobble them up using their own local sources. Could be any/all of the things you mentioned as well as some more exotic things - maybe they produce a yeast or some other bio form that they can then convert to useful nutrients. Soylent Green was for the masses, but other forms of Soylent for the rich existed that tasted better. While I'm not saying they are eating people, the idea that basic foodstuffs are sufficient, if not necessarily the tastiest, can allow worlds to bypass normal growing methods. Things like vertical farms for some foodstuffs are also possible. You could even have orbital farms (gravitics also sidesteps the difficulty of getting to orbit) for some things. It's going to be specific to that world's history and the resourcefulness of the GM who is creating it.

Water is pretty easy. If it's not available locally it's (generally) available somewhere in the system. And for worlds with low water rates recycling is going to be the name of the game. With good recycling tech you have very little loss, which is easily made up through artificial means or through more basic regular means like drilling/desalination/pulling it from some other local source like polar ice caps or other forms of water locked up in the planet. Both Luna and Mars are proving to have unexpected ice reserves now (as examples of low atmo planets having water sources)

Air is the same way. Recycling is the way to go, and getting more locally is pretty much the same. Plus, if there are any gas giants in the system both air and water can be obtained there in various formats (either in pure or broken down from other gases). You could combine large argo domes to produce food and purify your air (though space and costs have to be thought about). IF you can get enough open space and provide the necessary soil, water and light, you could have indoor forests and farms - but how much it costs to create that is key. Maybe large underground caverns... maybe using nukes or some other forms of explosive to blast them to start.

So there are a lot of technical ways - but nobody can really tell you how "practical" they are going to be simply because we have no way of knowing costs associated with them. Plus throw in the total unknowns of life support tech/sciences in the 52nd century. Humans can be awful weird and resourceful, so just about anything is possible. Don't limit yourself to just the practical.
 
With plants for vegetables, the plant waste feeds insects, the insects feed fish and chickens, the chickens lay eggs, the fish and eggs provide protein and animal fat. This gets you to a complete and balanced diet at a modest tech level even in an enclosed environment, albeit one with space dedicated to plants and aquaculture.

The only limitation is economical compared to alternatives, and that's more a GM decision. If protein vats are cheap, reliable and healthy, that's what the masses are going to get. Or cut out the last step and the proles eat vegetables and insects. But I can see the full suite for smaller populations or smaller/more distributed settlement patterns. Might be a higher percent of the population in "farming" than we have today, but someone already mentioned that.
 
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