Growing Rana Station's agriculture

What's Bred in the Bone, Cover art © 2019 by
  Jody A. Lee

Rana Station's agriculture is a big part of my vision for the primary backdrop of my characters' lives. If you've read my first novel, What's Bred in the Bone, you've possibly gotten an inkling that very little arable soil inside the tori of my characters' habitat space station home lies fallow. Even small spaces are nearly all devoted to growing food.

I've blogged in the past about how humans will feed themselves and provide enough protein to live permanently in space. I've long been an interested follower of efforts to grow food crops on the International Space Station, as well as intensive gardening efforts here on earth.

Gardening sisters

Last week, my sister G. S. Norwood wrote on The Weird Blog about the joy, beauty, and health benefits of her gardening projects. Having grown up under the same influences, I've long been a gardener, too.

But while G. specializes in flowers, I've always been more of a fruits and veggies woman, myself. Having grown up in the '60s and '70s, I was always half-convinced I'd better hone my skills at organic gardening, in case I survived the coming nuclear armageddon, and needed to feed myself and others afterwards (unlike a prepper, I figured learning how to can the food I grow would feed me longer than squirreling away canned foods like Spam and beans).

I'd worked most of the summer of 1974 to buy that bicycle. I posed for it (with G.'s dog Finnian) in my garden. (photo probably taken by G. or our mother, to send to my then-boyfriend, now-husband, who was working in Colorado).

Eventually, worries about nuclear Armageddon receded as a real possibility in my maturing brain. But I still followed organic gardening methods. They appealed to my evolving environmentally-friendly consciousness.

More recently, in a concession to knee injuries, I've taken up container gardening. This has led to some interesting experiences--and inspired more ideas to use for Rana Station's agriculture.

New in 2019: I added a cedar planter to my patio container garden, seen here dominated by lettuce and marigolds. (photo by Jan S. Gephardt)

My thought-experiment world

These influences all combined in my world-building efforts on Rana Station. Years of watching how our world and its societies work, years of teaching, and years of gardening have given me some strong opinions. How better (or more sfnal!) to explore their possibilities and shortfalls than to test them out in a "thought-experiment" world?

In my concept, Rana Station's agriculture is not only necessary for their own consumption. It's also a key export that is vital to their economy. A problem every space-based habitat faces is how to feed its inhabitants. The more I looked at the possibilities, the clearer it became to me that the early NASA developers were not gardeners or farmers.

A year or so after my garden photo with Finnian and the bike, this was NASA's idea of farming on a space colony. Note the stark division between agricultural and residential areas. (detail of uncredited NASA photo found on Socks Studio.)

What if a gardener from farm country did take a whack at figuring out how to feed the 8.4 million humans and 2.4 million ozzirikkians I wanted on Rana? What would such an effort take?

Thinking outside of strict divisions

First, I eliminated the strange division between "agricultural" and "residential" areas that seemed endemic in many of the space colony concepts (Designed by men who never got food anywhere but a grocery store?).

"Salad wall" and raised bed give good examples of food grown intensively in a small amount of space. (Photo courtesy of QuickCrop).

There's no rule that swaths of land on a space station has to be devoted to grass (how unproductive!), or that residents can't live in a garden. Why not grow "veggie walls" in commercial buildings? Why not cultivate vine crops that hang from baskets or planter boxes on the residence towers' balconies?

Then I conceived my living area not as a broad, relatively flat plain, but more like the agricultural terraces of Yemen, Asia, and the Incas. I envisioned a convex/concave profile of the Ranan hillsides would maximize arable surface area.

Rice terraces of Longsheng (Longji) in China (Photo by Anna Frodesiak - Own work, Public Domain)

This also creates an endless, undulating river valley that accommodates natural patterns of water flow. Yes, they still have to dredge parts of it occasionally. But they'll have prepared for it.

Rana Station's agriculture and its economy

In my universe, Rana Stationers have made a name for themselves as an interstellar farmers market of the first order. Not being required to haul their fresh produce up from a planetary gravity well, they have a pricing and freshness advantage to offer the interstellar transports that stop over at the station to restock between transits through the local jump point.

Fresh produce from the Fresh and Local Farmers Market, near Arizona State University (photo courtesy of Facebook/Fresh and Local at ASU, via Phoenix New Times)

I think it's likely space environments will be dominated by utilitarian freeze-dried, frozen, and reconstituted foods in the form of microgravity-friendly ration bars, packets, or bulbs. In light of that, what sybaritic joy might fresh produce offer? I can imagine captains who plot their course through the Chayko System's jump point specifically to access the fruits of Rana Station's agriculture.

Taken in the Food Tasting lab in building 17: Bags of International Space Station food and utensils on tray, 2003. (Photo courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons).

Visions to come

I'm currently working with illustrators, and also on my own artwork, to come up with better ways to envision the station. I plan to share those efforts in future blog posts, and once I get my newsletter off the ground, they'll also show up there on occasion. I hope you'll join my explorations.

IMAGE CREDITS

What's Bred in the Bone cover art © 2019 by Jody A. Lee. The 1974 photo of me was probably taken by G. or our mother, to show off the bike to my then-boyfriend, now-husband. I took the photo of my most recent container-gardening addition. 

Many thanks to Socks Studio for the uncredited NASA photo of agriculture on a space colony; to QuickCrop, for the intensive planting photo; to Anna Frodesiak - Own work, Public Domain for the rice terraces photo; to the Phoenix New Times for the farmers market photo; and to NASA and Wikimedia Commonsfor the ISS food photo. I appreciate you all!

Welcome to Rana Station

Where did Rana Station Come From?

The first of the XK9 "Bones" Trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone, is now available on Amazon as a paperback or in Kindle format. It explores ideas I've been developing for a long time.

Its setting, Rana Station, is almost a character in its own right. That's partially because of the culture, partially because of the communities, and partially because of the incessant need to grow food everywhere possible.

I chose the classic Stanford Torus as the basis for my design, but--like many sf authors--I've adapted it.

The Stanford Torus space habitat design: In this 1975 painting by Don Davis, we see the single stationary mirror that would capture solar energy and reflect light to the secondary mirrors around the single torus.

For one thing, there isn't a single torus on Rana, but rather a series of eight tori, counter-rotating for better balance and stability, and linked by a long central "Hub," kind of like an axle linking the eight habitat wheels. For another, the tori are bigger, based on tech first extrapolated for a Bishop Ring.

I have tried numerous times and in numerous ways to visualize for myself how Rana would look on approach. The best way I've managed so far to approximate an exterior view is a "quick & dirty" extrapolation in Adobe Illustrator, using a PNG of a bicycle wheel with a transparent background.

It's still not right, because it doesn't recreate the space docks and the manufacturing structures. but if you think of the spokes as symbolic of all the elevators from various parts of the 1-G habitat to the Hub, it does give a general idea of what the "wheels" would kinda look like.

Admittedly, both quick and dirty, but it gives a general feel. The smaller wheels represent the ozzirikkians' habitat wheels. Never met an ozzirikkian? You can change that! Read the book! You'll meet several.

If you think this "wheel" structure looks familiar, that's because it does. Ever since the Stanford Torus was introduced, it's seemed to many the most earth-like, understandable, and workable of the space-colony habitat designs . . . at least, as far as movies and TV go.

Interior concept art for the Elysium space station shows a much less steep-sided valley than I imagined for Rana Station's habitat wheels. But it gives a glimpse of the inside of a wheel structure.

We aren't likely to be able to provide "artificial gravity" that works like magnetism and switches on or off, at least, not by using any laws of physics that we currently know. Therefore, the gravitation needs to be provided by centrifugal force, created by building rotating megastructures in space.

I've created several posts about space station designs that I considered and studied in the course of my "Space Station DIY" series, when I was trying to figure out what kind of space station design I would use for the setting.

I considered  space stations/colonies in general, Dyson structures, Bernal spheres, and O'Neill Cylinders. But the torus seemed to me the most likely to provide a reliable 1-G environment that was comprehensible to terrestrial human brains.  I liked it better, and I got to be the decider because it's my story.

I'm planning future posts about aspects of life inside those wheels, including a look at some of the maps and 3D elevations I've been creating as paper sculpture, to help me more realistically understand, develop and describe the settings inside this world I'm creating. Stay tuned.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Wikipedia for a good file of the painting by Don Davis  - NASA Ames Research Center (ID AC76-0525), of the original Stanford Torus, which is now in the Public Domain.
To my chagrin, I can't relocate the source of the PNG image I used to create my "quick & dirty" Rana Station visualization.  I apologize! 
Thanks also are due to Geeks of Doom, who provided the Elysium concept art. 

Why does the Earth so often have to die?

How many times and in how many different ways have we destroyed the earth?

One common scenario envisions an asteroid impact. 

The "we" in that sentence refers to science fiction writers. Yet again the other day, a friend read a book description out loud, and the rest of us could almost guess how each phrase would go before she said it. A "dying Earth" (COD not specified in this blurb) has been fled by the "last remnants of the human race" who are, of course, "desperate [for] a new home among the stars."

It doesn't matter which specific book she was reading about. It's a trope so common I'd say it's a cliché at this point.

A visualization of the destruction of Earth through war, courtesy of the Hellcat Fandom Wiki.

Is killing the Earth really necessary?

We're always screwing up the Earth in science fiction.

We over-pollute it, overpopulate it, blow it up (or aliens blow it up for us), fill it with fascists who drive us out, fill it with Zombies who drive us out, fill it with invading aliens who drive us out, we pave it, we run out of food, we run out of . . . you know the scenarios.

All are pessimistic views of our future, and the underlying idea is twofold: killing our mother is inevitable, and we'll find refuge in the stars. Somehow, somewhere.

Widespread environmental destruction is a very real danger, dramatized in this amazing photo of an out-gassing dump in Myanmar. Photo: Nyaung U/United Nations Development Programme 

I'd like to argue that neither is likely, but there's the oil lobby (to refute the first half). We've so far avoided the nuclear holocaust that haunted my childhood during the Cold War, but climate change might just do the job--for humans, anyway.

I imagine that even if we humans kill ourselves, the planet will do what it's always done: grow new things that are better-adapted to the new climate reality. Just look at the woods around Chernobyl.

Here's a modification of a Google Street View by Einar Öberg, exploring the idea of how familiar places might change
"after people." It was inspired by the 2009 History Channel project by that name.

And how 'bout that home among the stars?

As I've outlined in earlier posts, space is a really hard place to live, much less be fruitful and multiply. Microgravity makes everything harder, distances are, well, astronomical, and providing what humans need to survive is hideously expensive, at least right now.

So let's soft-pedal the destruction of earth already, people! We still have no good place to go!

We're very far, still, from creating a space habitat that can safely house space-dwelling families and provide for their childrearing needs.

Anyone who looks at a photo of the ISS can see we aren't currently able to create a viable long-term habitat in space. Who are we kidding, here?

Personally, I'd rather explore the ideas of the Solarpunk movement, which focuses on sustainable scenarios in science fiction. And yes, this means I'll talk more about it in future posts.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Universe Today for the asteroid-impact visualization of Earth's demise; to the Hellcat Fandom Wiki, for the visualization of war on Earth; to the United Nations Development Programme for the otherworldly dump photo; to Einar Öberg  on Geek.com, for the visualization of "earth without people" via Google Street View; and to the Patheos blog "Evangelical" for the Interstellar screen shot.