I ran a similar experiment at home, albeit with a fern rather than potatoes and without simulating martian light.
My fern started to perish (and it was a well established plant). The biggest problem I'm facing at the moment is that Mars is extremely nitrogen deficient.
It seems that this short story was originally published in an old science fiction magazine (that my local library doesn't stock). Was wondering if it also made its way into a compilation of some sort. Google hasn't turned up anything for me yet.
Can you imagine if someone told Asimov that his story "Buy Jupiter" would be mistaken for a "link" to buy a copy of his work, by someone reading on an international network of computers that have access to all of the information in the world - and were so overrun with advertising that his own title was mistaken for one. Given "Buy Jupiter's" plot summary - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Jupiter [1] - this is extremely apropos!! Some things never change :)
[1] WHICH I'M LINKING ON A FREAKING ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA THAT CONTAINS IN EVERY LANGUAGE ALL OF THE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD (WIKIPEDIA).
It'd be interesting to measure the gas composition inside the chamber --- although I suspect the bodging together a gas spectrometer is going to be a bit problematic.
This all at at one atmosphere, though, isn't it? I see you have a vacuum pump, but that enclosure doesn't look like it'd be safe to evacuate. I'd like to try low pressures. Intuitively I'd expect hard-skinned plants like cactuses to cope better --- but intuition is frequently wrong. Another interesting thing to try would be to use one atmosphere of absolute pressure but have accurate partial pressures of carbon dioxide and nitrogen to simulate the Martian atmosphere...
Yeah one atmosphere, but with the same atmospheric mix as what is on Mars. I was trying to simulate compressing the Martian atmosphere into a pressurised and thermally insulated greenhouse.
My enclosure is only good down to about 0.8 atmospheres, below that the big rubber seal around the door starts to leak. The vacuum pump is used when mixing the atmospheric composition.
Figure the first martian plants would live in a pressurised, insulated greenhouse. There are some neat passively heated designs around.
I think my next experiments will be with legumes trying to fix nitrogen and improve the soil. The way I see it, pressure, warmth and light are all problems for which we have existing solutions. The real question is can we get stuff to grow without importing tons of fertiliser?
Using a well established plant might be worse than using a young one. They grow into the situation they find and adapt. If your plant is used to standard house plant conditions it might be harder compared to one used to bad soil and little water. But probably you already took that into consideration?
It doesn't look like they have much storage at the top of the system. An easier approach might be to dynamically control the flow through the system, restricting it during low load and returning more water to the stream as 'environmental flows' to keep it healthy.
Thank you! Your hard work, and desire to be recognised for your efforts rather than your gender will make it just that little bit easier for my daughter to follow in your footsteps (if technology is her chosen vocation).
Yes, thankfully it will also make it easier for many underprivileged male and female children to participate in tech and be recognized for their efforts.
An important thing to note here is that "I had it easy" is a different story from "all of us guys had it easy". How easy you had it is a general consequence of your socioeconomic background, among which gender is a factor. Do you know for a fact that the guy on the other side of the class who worked three other jobs to put himself through the CS program also had an extremely smooth path through college because he was male?
About a month ago I installed OSQA and 'shapado' -- http://shapado.com/ QSQA appeared much more rounded compared with shapado, and behaved much more like StackOverflow. Only problem I have had with QSQA is that changing the theme / template could be easier.
Oh, and by default the admin page of QSQA had a strange almost intelligible layout. However this is a mode that can be turned off... Once you find the option.
QSQA also has a neat 'community bootstrap' mode that lowers the required reputation for many actions, linking URL's down votes, etc.
Askbot http://askbot.org is a very easy to install app - installation uses standard Python methods and there is even a configuration script that will help you deploy it (and all dependencies are satisfied automatically too).
In comparison, Askbot is faster than both Shapado and OSQA and can be with ease deployed along with other Django applications.
Of all open source Q&A forums as far as I know, Askbot is the only one to have any significant number of unit tests.
Like OSQA, Askbot is backed by a company, now based in Chile and this year it is supported by StartUp Chile business incubator!
I agree in most of them, except for:
- The order seems confusing
- Hiding the free plan. Yesterday there was a dropbox article in TC, where the CEO tells the story (well, in slides) of dropbox marketing, and how hiding the free plan was making them loose lots of users (who can beacame paid users and/or recommend your service).
Provides developers with a huge head start on narrowing down and pinpointing the root cause of a problem rather than just the symptom, NPE or whatever.
You should probably tie software versions (of the app being instrumented) into your tracking and reporting as well, so if errors are still being thrown, that's because the user's on 2.0 and the bug is fixed in 2.0.1
My fern started to perish (and it was a well established plant). The biggest problem I'm facing at the moment is that Mars is extremely nitrogen deficient.
https://reprage.com/post/marsarium-9
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colonizemars/comments/5vi52v/inspir...