It’s widely accepted that eating poop is radically disturbing, not to mention dangerous—for humans, at least. But you may want to set your delicious (hopefully not brown and mushy) lunch down before reading any further, because eating poop the topic du jour—especially if you plan on moving to Mars.
I assure you it's not yet some out-there, woo-woo healing technique—eating poop certainly won’t cure anything. Well, unless you do what NASA is intending.
“While this idea might sound like total crap, it's going to be an essential obstacle to overcome if we ever want to send humans as far as Mars,” reports I Fucking Love Science.
Apparently, NASA has given a $600,000 grant ($200K a year for up to three years) to researchers at Clemson University who say they are working on turning human waste back into human waste—but with a pit stop on your space plate first.
The reason, according to IFLS, is that making a move to Mars is becoming a reality. While it may not happen in our lifetime, it looks bound to happen to humans in the not-so-distant future (that is, if we don’t kill off the human race in the next decade with a rogue climate situation). And providing these space pioneers with food will be quite a challenge, particularly during the long journey from Earth. Even in zero-gravity, you still need calories and nutrients.
“There's only a limited amount of supplies that can go in a rocket to Mars, and there's already a demand for food, oxygen and rocket fuel,” reports IFLS. “It is an engineering challenge to stuff a spaceship with enough food for roughly nine months for a one-way mission (and longer if the crew plans on coming back home). However, if the crew could simply pop their poop into some sort of recycling machine, and eat the synthetic food that comes out, then this would make space travel much easier. It would reduce the amount of food needed to be taken on a voyage and maybe lengthen the time astronauts could stay in space.”
Human waste is already being used as manure to fertilize and grow crops. But still. I’d take my chances on finding a good ol’ fashioned Martian pizza joint, or maybe giving those red rocks a try before, well, eating my own shit. Kinda makes Soylent not seem so bad after all.
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