Re: Yeast question

"Shawn Wilson"
So you have a spaceship, and you need to feed the crew of about 200. Figure
4 pounds (?) of food per person per day, that's 800 pounds per day.

You have specially engineered yeast (or something similar ) that can be
processed into something resembling most of your basic ingredients- flour,
sugar, potatoes, meat, etc. Different strains of yeast for each. And of
course you feed the yeast your processed waste products.

But, how fast does yeast grow? Assuming plausible biological limits (no
magically efficient anything) how much of a base stock do you need so that
you can skim off 800 pounds per day without depleting it?

In a moderately warm environment, yeast will double every eight hours
or so - that is my experience with san francisco sourdough. I have
read reports of far faster doubling times, but that is roughly how
fast my yeast doubled.

Yeast, however, eats complex foods - eats the kind of foods that we
eat, which is not much use for your purpose. Presumably you want
something that eats hydrogen, ammonia, and CO2 - archae bacteria
reengineered to be tastier and more nutritious. Normally archae
bacteria taste vile.

Most archae bacteria have fairly slow doubling times, and some of
them, the ones that live in deep hot rock, in large part on hydrogen
and CO2, have immensely slow doubling times.

Some, however, have doubling times of forty minutes or so. (They need
temperatures of around one hundred degrees Centigrade, and feed gases
at many times atmospheric pressure. So if you want to skim off 800
pounds a day from something, you are only going to need twenty two
pounds, contained in something that looks like a large pressure
cooker.



--
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We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
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http://www.jim.com/ James A. Donald
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