Sorry this didn't go up at 8am, I was busy enjoying the nice weather and getting an adequate amount of sleep.
Transcript
Anonymous asked: Rasheed, what are the staple crops grown on dirtball?
We mostly provide a rotating mix of fresh vegetables, herbs, and protein for residents, not staple carbohydrates. Most of the carbs here are shelf stable shipments, like spira products, pulses, and grains.
Inset panel:
- SPIRA: processed white algae flour
- PULSES
- GRAINS
We have the production capacity for it, though, as an emergency protocol. If we all get stranded here everyone’s diet would become mostly green spiru and dry beans. More fun than starving, I guess…
Inset panel:
- GREEN SPIRA: unprocessed algae flour
49 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 13”
0xabad1dea
just occurred to me that Rasheed wears a rain-and-sun protection hat like you’d need working in a field all day on Earth, but surely that’s not a big problem on Dirtball. Probably a habit drilled in at agricultural school
fen
it’s fashion
jaggedjottings
I’m pretty sure Rasheed was one of my housemates when I lived in a student cooperative in Berkeley. Super chill dude.
Ruby
Look at all those beans
Arcstone
Hey George Harrison, why did you change your name to Rasheed?
arf
Actually, precision fermentation should be a tried and true technology by this era, so Rasheev could provide Talita (and the rest of the crew) with obligate proteins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LnWFCaPiw4
Varyon
It wouldn’t work for Talita – Terran proteins are at best indigestible and likely dangerous to her. Bacteria-analogues from the centaur homeworld could potentially be genegineered to work, but you’re talking about likely needing decades to do the necessary research. We’ve also seen that many aliens (particularly the avians, who IIRC have a controlling interest in Dirtball) have some degree of opposition to genetic engineering and so may be opposed to the idea (precision fermentation isn’t really an option without genemod bacteria). I think precision fermentation also relies on economies of scale to work well, so with a small colony like Dirtball you may not be large enough for it to actually be more efficient than just growing your food. There’s also the fact you already need plenty of plants (for the mental health of the workers, converting CO2 back into O2, etc), so might as well use ones that produce edible parts. Heck, maybe it turns out precision fermentation doesn’t actually work for this the way we’re thinking. Not likely, sure, but it’s a possibility.
That said, precision fermentation does indeed sound like a promising option.
tyrone
Yeah….confined inside a semi-shutdown Spacehabitat with a giant Persistent Carnivore amongst all those juicy little monkeys and Chickens…..thats gonna end well once the bellies start rumbling.
Joey
Are you… implying that Talita would eat her coworkers in a crisis situation? Her coworkers who would give her almost no meaningful nutrition and would also poison her, which she clearly knows? Even when survival cannibalism does happen in real life (using ‘cannibalism’ here to mean ‘eating sophonts’ because it gets at the moral discomfort better than ‘eating your own species’ does), people don’t just lunge at each other teeth-first. They make decisions, prioritise who or what goes first. I can’t see Talita being different just because she needs more meat in her diet.
(Please let me know if I’m misinterpreting you)
Peanut butter
They seem to have some trees on ball so I wonder if any of them are fruit trees? I don’t think I could live without fruit
JoB
… wasn’t it said that most of the “trees” in the habitat hail from the *avian* tree of life, and technically aren’t even plants to boot … ?
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(I suppose that if you want large-ish Terran plants to grow on Dirtball, you’d have to start by bringing in a couple dozen tons of Terran *soil* for them to take root in in the first place, so …)
Peanut Butter
We know they have some soil because the Chabbits are fed clippings from the park section of the habitat bubble. Plus, on pages where we can see the vegetation, the plants in the avian half look very different than the ones in the human half.
JoB
[checks double page 32/33]
… correct … *and* there actually is a massive *wall* separating the two regions where they touch (behind the medical offices), which must’ve been added when Ixion brought in humans, like the (much lower) wall between the avian and human ag units. Makes me wonder about *Talitas* “separate septic” + ag, as I can’t see *more* walls. Or are the fences around her dry storage the poor Ixion’s equivalent for that … ?
Apollo235
Oh god, the mention of emergency protocols makes me worry. Talita would just be screwed wouldn’t she? I bet even the Invert-Ag setup wont last long without shipments from the Homeplanet
JoB
> the mention of emergency protocols makes me worry
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They’re a habitat in a solar system that apparently doesn’t have *any* pre-existing ecosphere, or even *atmosphere*, to fall back to in case that it gets cut off. (Which *can* happen, thanks to failing wormhole gateways, as we learned on page 32.) I’m sure they rehearse emergency procedures for breakfast, and use a special alphabet because they’d hate to stop at “plan Z”. 😉 In other words, business as usual – for deep space.
zaratustra
Her food comes from a food printer, which is described as edible but extremely boring on the long term. Not sure Jay has gone into the deeper workings of food-printing anywhere.
Varyon
IIRC, she was originally reliant on the boring-and-bland food printer, but since then has been able to set up a little farming operation breeding bugs from her homeworld as food (presumably the bugs have to make do with food from the printer), which she has stated taste a lot better. She’s arguably more self-sufficient than the rest of the inhabitants of Dirtball, as she doesn’t need to import any foodstuffs (but then she largely doesn’t have that option – she noted getting food from her homeworld, like the smoked meat she was gifted back at the party, tends to be prohibitively expensive).
bitty
pointing and waving at rasheed who looks just like my partner!!! >w<
arf
I’m sure Talita could learn to appreciate ‘vegetarian’ in a pinch… some, at least.
Fortunately, it needn’t come to that, as I’ve noted above. Besides, this isn’t that sort of comic.
Adrienne
The rude interns are really there as an emergency food source
Paroxysmall
Since Talita can’t eat them I guess they’d go to the other humans. Everyone’s hypotheticals should’ve been about Gillie, another microaggression and her killer feline instincts will kick in!
Spinland
Talita being an obligate carnivore, her dietary needs in a crisis would rely on other means, yes?
TheMushroomInside
So long as she has feed material that her printer can use, this is derived typically by grinding up “Hay” from the centaur home world as its a cheap long lasting source of base nutrients which can reconstructed into something resembling food and unlike Star trek food printers, these can only make highly processed facsimiles instead of actual food or consumables like 500 CIGARETTES. For her entire life Talita has been eating printer sausage/bones supplemented with vitamins and the occasional treat of real centaur cuisine shipped directly from the centaur home world but even these are just mostly smoked meats plus all of it regardless must be sourced direclty from the centaur homeworld as they dont have largescale food production offplanet making Talita’s basic food needs expensive and just barely satisfied, On dustball she has access to a “invertebrate” farm which produces 3 different edible life stages that feed on the (hay), substantially increasing the amount of variety in Talita’s diet when paired with what she normally eats, as a hyper carnivore she doesn’t even need to cook and is seen consuming an invertebrate larva straight from a bag from the fridge like cold baloney. I would assume that on dustbowl there is an allocated amount of resources dedicated for emergency use for all sophonts involved which helps secure food in time of resource crisis, likely there is a stockpile of pelletized homeworld “hay” that is reserved for food printer stock only, since the hay has to be sourced directly from the centaur homeworld most of the time, there is real potential issue with food supply
the Inmara
Yes.
Also because she can’t eat any food or organic matter derived from Earth life. The chemical composition of Earth life is incompatible with her, and has chemical compounds that can be poisonous or allergenic to Centaurs.
Same with the Avians and Bugferrets. Each sophont species that comes from a different planet and its different tree of life basically have to take care of their own dietary needs.
malmo
Does he wear a sunhat for fashion or is it actually needed to protect against the lighting?
Aidan
That would entirely depend on how powerful their UV lamps are. If they’re imitating a sun of even comparable output to what we get on earth, a sun hat might be advised when working on the farm. if not so, humans probably would want to wear less covering as to try and absorb as much UV for that vitamin D production
JoB
Rasheeds cap does *not* have the neck cover on pages 27 and 112, when we actually see him working in ag. Also, I’m not aware that Terran plants have a specific need for UV-*C*, which is the part of the spectrum we particularly need to protect our skin from, so I’d wonder why the entirely artificial illumination on Dirtball would go the *several* extra miles to provide it.
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… which is to say, I’m stumped why he’d have a *practical need* to (suddenly) wear that, too …
Vinemaple
Perhaps Rasheed has pale eyes or just doesn’t like the glare of the sunlamps, and wears his favorite sunhat to reduce it. Since he chooses to wear glasses (a man after my own heart!), his options for sunglasses on Dirtball may not include 3D-printed clip-overs, or maybe he doesn’t like them. Not sure about the neck cover. Maybe the sunlamps create an annoying amount of radiant heat?
Adrienne
At least they wouldn’t be ingesting chiefly mouthwash 😏
hessian
looks like dirtball is infinitely more professional and prepared for the event of a stranding/”crash” than pony express XD
TotallySomebody
I’m going to cry 😭
Paroxysmall
I keep thinking about Talita having Daisuke as an intern…
Bree
They don’t grow potatoes??? But they grow so easy and if you miss one during harvest you just end up with more potato, and they’re such a versatile carb
Tumorhead
it’s not that potatoes are easy. but they don’t need to use resources to grow carbs. they’re doing a farming method that maximizes use of a very small amount of space – get the bulk calories shipped in and grow your nutrients and flavor. Greens and herbs for instance have lots of nutrition, are hard to preserve, do poorly in shipping, but are very easy to grow. so they’re a no-brainer choice if you have a little bit of space to grow something.
Jay Eaton
Sadly, root vegetables are fussy to grow with hydroponics and they don’t have a lot of dirt! They produce some potato crops, but lack the amount of surface area that would make them an efficient staple.
BobisOnlyBob
The great nomenclature irony of dirtball… lack of dirt.
JoB
The production of local criminal dirtbags is ramping up splendidly, I hear … 😛
HAL9000
mark watney would be disappointed in Dirtball’s potato capacity smh my head
Planetfall
Whatch talkin about? He’d love it! Twards the end he was thinking about when he’d get back to earth he’d move to the opposite side of the world from Idaho, he hated potatoes that much.
D
I’ve seen some solid potato and sweet potato production in aeropaunics, which would use way less water also.
Adrienne
👀 Someone hook Dirtball up with some hydroponics!
Adrienne
I mean. Aeroponics. Smh
Bree
Ohhhh hydroponics
Curona
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but couldn’t they essentially make their own dirt using composted agricultural leftovers?
Feather
It still doesn’t really make sense on the scale they’re working on. It’s similar to how growing herbs on your windowsill is useful and tasty, but growing potatoes on your windowsill is just kind of silly – I can grow enough basil to add extra flavor to every pasta sauce I cook in less space than it would take to grow one meal’s worth of potatoes.
evileeyore
They’re on a planetoid called ‘Dirtball” and they haven’t figures out how to make soil? 😉
(Soil is dead simple to make, it is a process, but as long as you have Earth bacteria, fecal waste, plant matter, and a ‘dirt’ substrate, you can make soil – and the worms are only needed if the substrate is harsher than sand, so like ‘moon regolith’ or ‘volcanic ash’. And heck, you can still striaght out grow in moons dust or ash, you just have to add the nutrients…
The real problems are regolith toxicity and space. If space is a premium, potatoes might just be skipped, and metal toxicity might take time to process out of Dirtball’s ‘dirt’.)
Jay Eaton
Soil takes up more space and is much heavier and harder to tower-stack than alternative forms of farming. Why process the heavy metals and sharp edges off several tons of regolith when you can just hook up the plant beds to the aquatics farm and use the fish waste to grow crops directly
Vinemaple
They should be calling the planet “Regolithball,” technically.
Bright
Allegedly that tomato/potato hybrid plant does really well with hydroponics, but we’re talking hobbyists. I don’t think anyone’s attempted to grow the things in the mass scale hydroponic farm setups. Might actually be worth looking into.