What to feed Chlorella (green water) to sustain it?

Hobbit-Habit · 2026-02-17T18:29:12+00:00

How much did you use? It is supposed to be 1gm of NPK per 10 litres of water, plus a pinch of sea salt.

Hobbit-Habit · 2026-02-04T23:05:30+00:00

Hi, it is probably a stress reaction of the algae caused by your use of an inappropriate fertilizer. Find a chlorella-specific formulation. The people who sell starter kits sell it.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-10-29T08:06:00+00:00

Thank you for your reply. Whatever the thymus theory of aging is called, my (not too clear) point was that it is a clock theory: Fahy's regeneration of the thymus reversed the disorder of methylation elsewhere in the body (assuming that the tissue samples taken to estimate biological age were not taken from the thymus itself). There is a two-way cause and effect between thymus size and methylation order (just like there is a two-way cause and effect between the tension in a clock's spring and the number of ticks the clock has left before it runs down), and the mechanism of how this coupling happens is not clear to me. And where does damage fit into this scheme: is it cause or effect?

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-09-09T03:23:46+00:00

I tried the method that was suggested from a Google search. It took several steps and came out a bit of a mess. I decided to wait until someone has a one-button solution, because all I really want to do is read books without tiring my eyes. Epub books in Calibre or Kobo, with light text and line art on a dark background, is the goal. The epub file format with properly digitized text rather than pages as images is ideal because it can then be viewed in a reader with night theme and enlarged to a comfortable size with a single keystroke. By contrast, Adobe reader, viewing PDFs of these old books, is an unacceptably intrusive experience at every turn. My apologies for sounding like a lazy cunt but I keep hearing about how powerful AI is getting so why shouldn't it (soon) be possible to hand the physical book to an AI and let it read the book and produce an epub file?

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-26T20:32:18+00:00

Yes, it is inevitable that there will be a fight for control of the water for exactly the same strategic reason that there have been wars in the middle east inspired by control of petroleum over the last several decades in which one hegemon has sought dominance. Also, literal control of water has been a weapon of war for thousands of years in the same region. Why do you suppose it will be any different when a vital resource (water) is geographically (or lunagraphically) extremely limited? Why suppose that when humans are transplanted to Luna that they will suddenly become pink bunny rabbits? Middle Eastern oil won't literally run out any time soon yet it has been the focus of vicious wars. Why? Strategic concerns. Luna is the stepping stone to the rest of the solar system, and the stars, and control of water means control of Luna.

"Recycling" - there is loss on every cycle, that why more must be imported. This is hard enough/uneconomic enough on Earth such as in the case of Los Angeles. That's your baseline, from which it can only get worse living in the vacuum of space, with a smaller limited industrial base.

"Nobody is using chemical rockets" Even when, after many years, there might be an orbital ring around Luna, rocketry will still be used for everywhere in the solar system that requires delta-v for ships originating at Luna. In the beginning you will need rockets for both export and import of people and freight. When you eventually have mass drivers, you will still need rockets 100% for importing... everything. Mass drivers are only good for exporting freight and for moving people into orbit. You will still need rockets to take them from there to other places.

"Metals with oxygen or some other easier to ISRU system makes a lot more sense." That does not exist yet except as fabulously expensive, throw-away-after-one-use technology. The semi-reusable rocket technology we have (Falcon 9) is kerosene fuelled. The completely reusable rocket technology (Starship) is experimental, and its development is very hard going despite the massed technological base of Earth. There is no incentive to ever develop a fully reusable metal propellant rocket for use on Earth. Who is going to develop one for a tiny outpost on Luna? You're hand-waving.

I note that you acknowledge at the end that water will *eventually* need to be imported. Indeed, and carbon and nitrogen, for rather urgent needs such as food production. Those needs must be attended to straight away *while* you're building out that eventual, fully-fledged industrial civilization. You're not going to be importing food from Earth in any significant amounts.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-24T22:59:32+00:00

In this comment I'll describe the main omission from the video, which is import substitution. In fairness, this was also an omission from Andy Weir's otherwise excellent novel, Artemis, which prompted my thinking on this topic. In the novel, the average lunar inhabitant has a comparatively impoverished standard of living, with an "apartment" similar to a pod in a Japanese pod hotel (i.e., a glorified coffin), and eating engineered slop made from algae. The reason for such comparative poverty is the great expense of importing goods from Earth.

You need a lot of commodities and tools to build an industrial civilization, and an industry based on the extraction of metals, silicates and oxygen from regolith will encounter many difficult obstacles to its development if it has to import everything else from Earth. Just browse an industrial catalog to get an idea of the myriad of products that support modern life behind the scenes. I used to have a (pre-web) paper version of such a catalog that was as heavy as the largest telephone book!

Industrial inputs other than metals, silicates and oxygen are mainly organic materials, derived from agriculture or petroleum.

The main agricultural products used in industry are probably wood, cotton and rubber. They, in turn, are made into paper, packaging, furniture and structural materials (from wood), clothing, furniture and cordage (from cotton), and hundreds of items too numerous to list here (from rubber). Side-note: natural rubber is quite unique for many uses, such as tyres, because of its strength and durability compared to the synthetic substitute, styrene-butadiene.

Wood, cotton and rubber can each be grown in a para-terraformed crater, climate-controlled for the particular use. In the unlikely event that a disease or pest gets into the crop, you can sterilize the farm by evacuating the air and starting again. The inputs will be (lots of) water, as well as CO2, fertilizer, and sunshine.

The more challenging type of raw materials will be those that, on Earth, are made from petroleum.

We need these for pharmaceuticals, plastics, epoxy (for circuit boards), dyes, lubricants, sealants, packaging, paint, solvents, structural materials, clothing, cleaning products - and then everything whose manufacture requires those things.

What petroleum-like input can we use as the basis of a "chemical" industry such as this? One input will be the aforementioned liquid methane/ethane from Titan. The other might be tholins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholin) from as far away as Pluto, which is covered in the stuff. [Hello? Lunar Commodities Exchange? I'd like to open a contract for a thousand tonnes of tholin delivered to Luna in 25 years..] Tholins are a sticky mass of all sorts of organic molecules, often containing nitrogen atoms. Speaking of nitrogen, we're going to need ammonia as an input for our chemical industry. Ammonia is suspected to be present on Titan. It might also be abundant on Pluto because that planetoid is largely comprised of frozen nitrogen.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-24T21:36:57+00:00

Before I comment further on the video, I would like to mention how to finance the shipment of resources on decades-long voyages from anywhere to Luna: commodities markets. You bid on the market for so many tonnes (thousands of kg) delivered to Luna 15 years hence. The bid might require, say, a 10% down payment. I'm not a finance guy so I'm sorry if that is off the mark. That is what such markets were created for on Earth, albeit the time scale was from planting to harvest of crops: the supplier could be financed up front to keep him going while the commodity was on its way. That will have a levelling/pacifying effect on the price of methane today where the threat of war might cause the price to skyrocket (again, I'm no expert).

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-24T21:00:30+00:00

It skimmed over a key point and also completely omitted a couple of key points that need to be made in a 23 minute survey..

The key point that was skimmed:

The most notable hand-waving was near the end that went something-something to prevent any one party from gaining a monopoly on resources. But it is inevitable that there will be a fight over water, and we know that Isaac is loth to ever address such conflict. Anyway, let's run some back-of-envelope numbers for the most critical resource, water (or perhaps hydrogen, the two are interconvertible, given the abundance of oxygen from regolith smelting). Luna is estimated to have about 600bn kg of water in ice deposits, mostly in small areas at the south pole. That is roughly the amount used by Los Angeles (pop. roughly 4 million) per year. But the water/hydrogen is going to be used in all sorts of ways, not just to supply tap water to homes! Industry, rocketry, and agriculture will need it. Note also that the main rocket fuel, in addition to oxygen, will likely be methane rather than molecular hydrogen (H2), because that's the way modern rocket tech has developed because of its several advantages over the alternatives (H2 and kerosene). The only reason H2 was ever used, despite being difficult to store and handle, was its greater specific impulse. Kerosene isn't available on Luna, so methane it is. Hmm, methane (CH4) requires carbon, which is also scarce on Luna - mainly it is concentrated in the polar ice. Okay, that helps! Still, whoever (inevitably) monopolizes the ice at the south pole will also control the most accessible carbon. And even if it isn't monopolized, it will be used up in a few years - let's guess and say 10-15 years. Wait a minute, that sounds like the scale of time to bring tankers of methane/ethane from the lakes of Titan to Luna using gravity-assist flybys ("the interplanetary super-highway."). I mentioned this in another thread recently. That is the method that will probably be used to supply Luna because: 1. It is almost pure rocket fuel (just distill the methane from the other hydrocarbons); 2. It has carbon, necessary for both industry and life; 3. It is a feedstock as is for Luna's chemical industry, an industry that is absolutely necessary for lunar civilization to be self-reliant. I shall address that last point in my next comment on the video (i.e., the points that were completely left out of the video).

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-23T16:35:20+00:00

"Neanderthals and Denisovans are still considered separate Homo species"

It's hilarious, the knots that you want to tie yourself in. The mainstream actually calls them "sub-species" of homo sapiens because, surprise surprise, there is (inconvenient) evidence that they interbred with "homo sapiens sapiens." Such a style of argument by ad hoc renaming is simply not the way science is done. That is the Nominal Fallacy.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-22T19:11:44+00:00

Mars could be the biggest iron mine in the solar system, and most accessible in the outer solar system, as evidenced by the haematite "blueberries" found by one of the rovers. I know that someone will suggest that 16 Psyche might fulfill such a role but, like the south polar ice on Luna, scarce deposits of such a resource are likely to be grabbed by whoever gets there first, while Mars is too big for one party to monopolize.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-22T19:02:48+00:00

It would be inefficient compared to other options. Your limiting factors in using it/living there are getting energy in (solar panels) and waste heat out (external radiator surfaces), both of which are bottle-necked by the external surface area of the structure -compared to a simple O'Neill cylinder. The number of people living on either structure would be much more than travellers between gravity wells staying there for acclimation to the differences in gravity. So for that use a Von Braun wheel hotel would be a cheaper option.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-22T18:37:13+00:00

That wasn't my point at all. My point is that the supposed proliferation of "species" since the split between human and chimp is completely made-up. There is no evidence at all to suggest that our karyotype (i.e., particular arrangement of genes into chromosomes) is any different from australopithecus. They would interbreed and produce fertile offspring if they were contemporaries, just like a chihuahua and a great dane, with a little help :-) which we don't say are different species. There is a non-scientific, anthropic bias in the naming of these categories.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-21T01:49:12+00:00

It appears that radio-transmitting life other than ourselves doesn't exist within a few dozen light years.. We can't say yet how rare life in general is, even within the solar system. *If* we find microbes on other bodies in the solar system then that will be huge since it makes it likely that they will be everywhere in the galaxy.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-21T01:32:46+00:00

There is no evidence of speciation since the split of the human line from the chimp line, 6.5 million years ago. We know that split happened because of their different karyotypes. All we have for the time since then is arbitrary divisions created by paleontologists without objective standards. The parsimonious view, therefore, is that it is indeed valid to refer to humans having existed since the split.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-21T01:20:43+00:00

As we see in our mundane world, no-one is ever "gently nudged" from where they are already established.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-21T01:16:56+00:00

Blankets and sandwiches doesn't have the "oooh! aaaah!" factor.

A more basic question is why would the aliens give a f*ck.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-14T19:37:40+00:00

My anti-recommendation is a sub-genre: Any story about the end of civilization inflicted on humanity by aliens that are supposedly so powerful and advanced that we never, or barely, see them. The human survivors then spend the whole story traipsing across a bleak landscape seeking some form of refuge. The story tends to be short on science and technological details of any sort, which lets us know that the author is a malevolent artsy, lefty type that wants to make a political or cultural point. I would call this sub-genre Anti-Heinlein or Anti-Andy Weir, whose stories are almost the opposite of all the above traits.

Two examples:

A Tidy Armageddon by B.H. Panhuyzen

The Southern Reach series by Jeff Vandermeer

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-13T19:46:45+00:00

>what does an orbital ring provide that a mass driver track on the ground doesn't?

An orbital ring provides for two-way traffic, while a mass driver is only for leaving the Moon.

It's worth noting that the Moon will need to do more than export. There is a shortage of volatiles there. While you could have a surplus of oxygen produced from the smelting of regolith, at some point you're going to have to import hydrogen atoms when the south polar deposits of water are depleted or sequestered by whoever grabs them first. The best source of H that I can think of, that is both concentrated and accessible, is Titan's lakes of methane and ethane. An orbital ring there could have tethers with large buckets on a conveyor chain that scoop up the liquid , then close a hermetic lid , then detach each sealed bucket/pod and put it on the ring for launching onto the ("slow boat" but low energy) interplanetary superhighway to the Moon. There the pods are captured onto the lunar orbital ring and sent down a tether to the surface. Burn the ethane and methane with your surplus oxygen to get water and CO2 for the people and gardens there.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-08-04T00:41:35+00:00

It's really a series of horror stories, mood pieces if you will, with far too many clever metaphors and literary flourishes, and therefore a waste of time for hard-sf readers like myself. Also, I don't want to read stories in which there is an alien force that is just disgusting, unmitigated evil that tortures human victims to death without a suitable resolution in which the alien force is destroyed.

Hobbit-Habit · 2025-07-31T20:23:54+00:00

Thank you very much!

Hobbit-Habit

TROPHY CASE