In “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars,” I wrote about how the moon has the space for farms and processing
plants to grow and process food for orbital hotels and condominiums as well as
for crewed missions throughout the solar system. One issue, however, would be meat. Meat is muscle, and in a lower gravity, you
don’t use your muscles that much. Lunar
chickens would be scrawny. The solution,
I figured, would be the rotating space stations you see in science fiction. These would be in lunar orbit – to be close
to their feed sources on the moon and the processing plants there – and would
have Earth normal gravity. They would be
giant chicken farms, but for PR purposes, they would be free-range chickens.
One
thing that would stop the need for these giant chicken farms in lunar orbit
would be synthetic meat, or meat grown in a lab. When I wrote The Moon Before Mars, I assumed
that synthetic meat would be a part of space diets, but there would be people
who preferred the real thing. However, I
now think that synthetic meat will become acceptable sooner than our ability to
build giant, rotating space stations for chickens.
So
what’s the point of this post? Well, one
of the ways I’m trying to build up support for returning to the moon is writing
stories set there, for example, my collection “A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories.” When I came up with the idea of chicken farms in lunar orbit, I
figured that was a great setting for a story.
But what story could I do there?
At some point, I had let my imagination wonder, and I came up with an
idea for a future dating app. So I
eventually put the two together and came up with a story about a kid growing up
on this chicken farm orbiting the moon – run by about twenty people, half of
whom are his family – as he works on finding a girlfriend.
So I
had this idea for a story – number 1,206 on my list of stories I need to write
– set on this space station full of chickens.
And then I realized that this space station full of chickens, while not
impossible, is a very unlikely future.
Is there anything similar I could do to keep the story alive? How about an orbital aviary?
An
orbital aviary could be in lunar orbit, but would be more likely to just be in
Earth orbit. It would probably start as
a single rotating station, but then more would be stacked together to provide
different environments, from tropical, to desert, to artic. And they would be full of birds. Well, birds as well as trees, grasses,
insects, mice, fish, whatever. Unlike
the chicken farms that would import food, the orbital aviary would try to be
self-sufficient.
So
what would be the point? A lot of people
talk about terraforming Mars as if it’s something we actually know how to do
and have practical experience with. Trying
to create and maintain a self-sufficient ecosystem containing several hundred
species of plants and animals would be a colossal challenge. And you could fit a few hundred birds – of one
species or several – in one rocket launch, as compared to one or two baby
elephants.
Critically
endangered species could get a safe place to hopefully bounce back. It would be like breeding them in captivity,
just a bigger captivity with fewer, or even no predators, and the only humans around
would be staff, scientists, and bird watchers.
There
is also the possibility of bringing back some extinct species. With the right preserved specimen and the
right technical wizardry, we could bring back the passenger pigeon. But would we just release it in the wild here
on Earth?
