We keep saying it like it’s simple. We’re going to live in a barrel.
A cylinder, turning in the dark, somewhere between here and wherever we’re going. It spins because spin is the only gravity we know how to manufacture. Stand on the inside of that wall and the floor pushes up against your feet the way the Earth does, and your bones don’t know the difference. That’s the trick. That’s the whole trick.
But gravity is the easy part. Spin is just engineering.
The hard part is that the barrel is sealed. Whatever goes in with you is what you’ve got. Every breath you take, somebody has to make. Every drop of water you drink, you’ve already drunk before. Every calorie has to be grown in a room you built, in soil you carried up out of a gravity well, or dug out of a rock and taught to be soil.
On Earth, the planet does all of this for free and never sends a bill. In the barrel, there’s no planet. There’s just the machinery, and the people who keep it running.
This department is about that machinery.
And the machinery isn’t all pumps and valves. Some of it is alive.
Look at what’s already being tried down here. Straight hydroponics — roots in nutrient solution, no soil at all, fast and clean but wholly dependent on a chemical supply chain. Aeroponics, where roots hang in the air and get misted, using a fraction of the water. Aquaponics, which closes the loop with fish: their water feeds the plants, the plants hand it back clean, and insects can be folded in to eat the scrap and feed the fish. Then the other direction entirely — real soil, built from rock dust and worms and compost, slow to establish but forgiving in a way a nutrient pump never is. And further out, the vat: mushrooms, algae, single-cell protein, bacteria fed on nothing but carbon dioxide and electricity.
Each one trades something. Hydroponics buys speed and pays in fragility. Soil buys resilience and pays in mass, and mass is the one thing you cannot cheat when you’re lifting it out of a gravity well. Fish buy you protein and cost you water volume and a whole second ecosystem to keep from crashing.
Nobody knows yet which mix belongs in the barrel. That’s the argument.
That’s the standard the barrel holds us to. Every system in here gets examined the same way — air, water, food, waste, heat, radiation, medicine, and the harder question of what it does to a person’s mind to live inside a machine. We’ll lay the options side by side, argue them out, and keep going until we’ve settled on what we think is best.
None of this gets solved by one person on a commute in Alaska.
That’s the honest position of this magazine. We’re not here to hand down answers from a height. We’re here to work the problem in the open — lay out what’s been tried, argue the trade-offs, get it wrong in public, and get corrected. And we’ll only get there together, pulling on one rope, aimed at one thing.
Elon Musk said something once that’s stayed with me. There are a great many problems on this Earth, and a great many of them are miserable. But life cannot be nothing but solving one miserable problem after another. Do only that and you never get ahead of it — you just keep tending the mess and calling it progress.
At some point you have to lift your eyes. You have to want something.
We are not interested in being told what the future looks like. We intend to define it. And the way we define it is by sitting down and solving the plain, unglamorous questions that stand between us and living out there. How do you make air. How do you make dirt. How do you feed a person for twenty years in a sealed can. Answer those, and the future stops being somebody else’s forecast and starts being something we built.
So read these pieces and push back. If you’ve grown something under lights, run a pump, kept a system alive that wanted to die, you know something we don’t — say so. Send us the correction. Send us the article you think we’re missing.
Become a founding member, and you’re not a subscriber. You’re a contributor to the work.
Join us. There’s a lot to figure out.
Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
-
Life Support Systems
Watney Was Lucky
The potatoes kept him alive for a year and a half. In a place nobody is coming to, that same plan takes your fat, your soil, and eventually you. What a crop list has to pay for, and why it is the hardest page in the manifest.
Read →
-
Life Support Systems
Heirloom, or Nothing
An editorial position, stated up front: no modified seed goes into the habitat. Here is the best case against that, and why I still hold it.
Read →
-
Life Support Systems
Two of Everything, and a Quarantine
Noah did not have to worry about what was living in the gut of the goat. We do. Which animals earn a berth in a sealed world, what each one costs, and the stowaways that beat the last crew that tried this.
Read →
-
Life Support Systems
The Gas Nobody Budgets For
Everybody has a plan for oxygen. Nobody has one for the four-fifths of every breath that does nothing at all — and you cannot live without it.
Read →
-
Life Support Systems
Light Is the Throttle
What a mine in Idaho and a garden in Alaska taught us about growing things fast — and what continuous daylight does to a plant that never gets to sleep
Read →
-
Life Support Systems
Top of the Loop, Bottom of the Loop
The two animals nobody budgets for, and what happened the last time we forgot them
Read →
-
Life Support Systems
Life in the Barrel
O’Neill gave us the barrel in 1976 and got very little of it wrong. What he did not finish was the inside — and the standard the inside has to meet isn’t twenty years. It’s forever.
Read →