On Mar/8/2020 at 17:49, Jeff Findley wrote :
In article , says...
What a conincidence, I just stumled on this while reading some totally
unrelated stuff:
https://squarerootsgrow.com
Square Roots is an urban indoor farming company that was started by a
guy named Kimbal Musk. You might have heard about his brother Elon :-)



I thought everyone knew this? ;-)

Oh! Maybe just about everyone knew except for a few ignorants ;-)

Yeah, his brother has been promoting this tech for quite a few years
now. Paired with renewable energy, this technique allows you to grow
fresh produce using a minimal amount of land, water, and power. Perfect
for an urban setting and likely easily adapted for use on Mars.

Even though lots of artists renderings show transparent greenhouses on
Mars, it's likely more efficient to just put the "greenhouse" in a
regular, opaque, pressure vessel (could be rigid or an inflatable) and
use LED lighting. The LED lighting is easier to control the intensity,
wavelengths, and etc. than relying on outside light from a sun that's
further away and might be obscured by dust storms.

I don't think dust storms are much of a problem in this respect. Unless
what you meant is dust depositing on the window panels. Plants on Earth
can grow just fine even if some days are cloudy. Shielding against
cosmic rays might be an important issue and an opaque vessel can help in
that regard. Another point where using natural light might cause
problems on Mars is thermal control but I'm not sure about that, because
the atmosphere is so tenuous, it probably isn't all that hard to heat
the greenhouse.

But to certain members of our society, growning certain plants indoors
using efficient LED grow lights isn't anything new. ;-)

I remember seeing an add in a magazine many years ago, it was from some
company selling kits to grow plants indoor. Of course they couldn't
openly promote doing illegal things. But in the add they said that you
could recover your $8000 investment in a few months if you used it grow
"valuable plants". They didn't specify what kind of plants were so valuable.


Alain Fournier