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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it would be possible for e.g. asteroid material to work as an indirect source of nutrition? I.e. carry a specialized yeast on board that can "eat" the asteroid, and, sort of like sourdough, use the yeast's excess growth as food for humans... Sounds nasty now that I say it out loud haha.

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We're the scary aliens other ETI's make sci-fi horror movies about.

"...and they wield GREY GOO that turns *everything* it touches into nutrients they lap up in their flappy appendages..."

We always have been

I could have done just fine without learning about "grey goo" today thank you very much.

“They’re Made out of Meat” https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg

This is very close to the subject of the article. In the following quotation, "consortia" means (I think) globs of algae:

> After comparing the experimental pyrolysis breakdown products, which were able to be converted to biomass using a consortia, it was hypothesized that equivalent chemicals found on asteroids could also be converted to biomass with the same nutritional content as the pyrolyzed products. This study is a mathematical exercise that explores the potential food yield that could be produced from these methodologies.

Ah, thanks. Exposing my non-academic reading comprehension ;)

Yes: "A group of symbiotic microbes" - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consortium#English

I wanted to paste the very same paragraph and bring up my own dream (for which I hope someone is working hard).

I am a Trekkie. I dream of the day that (in the future, unfortunately far beyond my lifespan) someone will create a Replicator[0] and people will be able to order a burger with a side of fries, a large soda drink to wash it down, and it will be full of vitamins and useful nutrients (minus the garbage/sugar) (or any food from any culture on the planet what will give them the flavor but not the diarrhea)("I wonder how a cockroach tastes").

[0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Replicator

Problem is that the vast majority of material is metal, so your digester needs a way to saturate the metal to reach the CHON, and and then extract the digester. Is that really better than extracting the CHON directly and then processing it?

that depends so much on the kind of asteroid i thought.

Carbonaceous Chondrite asteroids have carbon in the form of coal but also carbonate rocks as well as moderate amounts of water as well as stony minerals (silicon, aluminum) as well as iron.

> a specialized yeast on board that can "eat" the asteroid

that's my 'retirement project'

https://www.the-odin.com/bacterial-crispr-and-fluorescent-ye...

That's the actual plan. It's not explsined in the introduction, but in the middle of the article they explain that they will food bacterias with the proceced material, and later people will eat the bacteria.

Starmite!

Minemite

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