Importance of domestic animals for space colonization

[biologic]

I agree with RoseEmbolism - I think the important question here is 'why ARE we sending humans away from earth?' To which I'd like to raise a point no-one else has brought up yet, which is Escapism. That is, a scenario in which we have no choice but to escape Earth.

Like, a 'dimensional strike' type extinction event. And let's say our exploratory robots have found a planet with a compatible 'Earth' biosphere.

Our world would need to change to survive in a space colony. I don't know how, only that we can't just scoop out handfuls of whatever we feel most useful - it'd be like performing every organ transplant at once. Everything on Earth is interconnected - humans included.

So, in the Ark scenario, I would say: two of everything, please! If the survival of the human race is our priority (even over ecocide - sorry 'Earth B') then as much of 'Earth A' as possible needs to come with us.

But resources being finite... over everything else, I would start with the bees. And I would leave the billionaires behind!

 

[chornedsnorkack]

When animals are carried long distance by train, they have to stop regularly and let them out, so they don't suffer from not having room to move around, or from the jostling of the train cars, or a number of similar concerns. Exactly how long they can go without this break varies by creature, from some that are so delicate that we don't really have the ability to keep them in captivity at all to some that are pretty dang resilient.

I don't know most of the details, so I went poking around, and found this page: A Guide to Transporting Cattle Safely | USA Truckload Shipping

It would like to sell the viewer a $60 ebook, which I don't feel like, so I'm just going by the overview on the page itself. For cows, there's a 28-hour limit, which includes loading an unloading time. The rest period must then be at least five hours. This isn't the recommended time, this is the legal maximum in the US. Basically, if you have cows in something that's too stressful for much longer than that, they'll suffer badly. Given that a lot of these cows are destined for slaughter after the trip, I'm not sure this maximum is long-term good, either.

Since we can't very well stop a spaceship to let a cow off for a while, the only real alternative is giving them something they can feel reasonably unstressed in. At the least, you're going to need to provide a good pasture-equivalent and room to roam around and similar concerns.

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Cattle are routinely transported by ships, which takes several weeks now - and they survive and breed after arrival. First Fleet to Australia carried both cattle (2 bulls and 7 cows) and horses, who survived 2 and a half months on sailing ships (depart Cape Town November 12th, unload Sydney Cove from January 26th).

As for objective of colonization vs. resources:

If the resources we are finding on other planets are bulky, low value high volume resources, we can save on transportation costs by transporting consumers to resources because the consumers are the less bulky stuff to transport.

If the resources we are finding are low volume, high value ones then the workers working in place to extract them will be needing low value, high volume resources to be functional in place. Therefore we can save on transportation costs by producing these low value, high volume resources in place.

For example, producing spice on a dryish planet. If all food must be imported, a live worker needs about 300 kg food per year and a minimum of 1200 kg or so water per year - just for drinking and cooking, skipping basically all washing as unaffordable luxury. Over a 40 year useful life of a worker between 20 and 60, it makes 60 000 kg imports, while the body of the worker was just 70 kg. Obviously you could save a lot of transport cost if the water could be produced locally... and another huge lot if the food could be produced locally.

 

[Memphet'ran]

If you want to talk about a more hard SF colony set-up, the Atomic Rockets CELSS page has some limited discussion of raising food animals in closed habitat space colonies. It doesn't go into it in much detail, but the impression I get is they'd probably be mostly raising poultry, seafood, and possibly insects.

 

[Avernus]

If you want to talk about a more hard SF colony set-up, the Atomic Rockets CELSS page has some limited discussion of raising food animals in closed habitat space colonies. It doesn't go into it in much detail, but the impression I get is they'd probably be mostly raising poultry, seafood, and possibly insects.

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On the other hand if you have a closed habitat space colony, that implies that you have a great deal of support for high technology equipment (otherwise you couldn't maintain the place), which eliminates much of the reason to use animals at all. The advantage of animals is that they are self-replicating and self maintaining, and don't require a high-technology support structure. A habitat almost certainly could just grow meat in a vat, given how much progress in that direction we've already made in real life; so they'd have no need for food animals.

Using domestic animals for space colonies makes the most sense when you either have the classic sci-fi scenario of a small limited-technology colony on a world with a human-compatible biosphere to settle on, or can modify the animals and/or colonists to make up the difference. A horse isn't as good as a truck for most situations, but it's better than a truck with no fuel or parts to keep it going. And vat grown meat is likely better than raising a cow to eat; but not if you have fields for the cow to graze but no vats.

 

[Rajvik_wolfboy]

@Avernus
And i say this with all due respect, when i want a steak, or pork chops, i don't want to be handed a pile of bean curd in the generic shape of the same and told that it is that, i want the actual meat. which means actually raising and butchering animals, period end of sentence. for all that people claim that the tofu equivalents taste the same and that people can't tell the difference, i call bullshit, because i can.

 

[Miath]

He's not saying tofu, though. He's saying vat-meat, which is cow grown in a petri dish as opposed to in a field.

 

[Avernus]

He's not saying tofu, though. He's saying vat-meat, which is cow grown in a petri dish as opposed to in a field.

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This, exactly. We can't quite do it correctly/economically yet, but it's clearly a technology that will mature well before we are going to be building any giant space colonies.