Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu

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Growing Food

1:35You mean I can grow my own food and not have to go to the store? Yeah, make the best of your backyard. Can I do it in the moon? I don't believe Fresh Direct goes there. Coming up, all the things you can do to grow food in your backyard on Star Talk Special Edition.

1:53Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins right now.

2:06This is Star Talk Special Edition. Which of course means I got Gary O'Reilly. I know. Chucky baby. Hey man. How you doing? I'm doing great. Lord Chuck Nice. Lord Chuck Nice. All right. That's right.

Special Edition Intro

2:17We got a special edition here. What do we got? This is on the future of growing food. I like it. Ooh. Because I like food. It keeps me alive. So, see, I would say it's the future of growing vegetables because you're not growing a cow. Well, not right now. We're not growing right now. We're not growing a cow. There might be a cow plant. Maybe we will be planting cows one day. Genetically modified. Okay. Genetically. So that you can grow them in a pot. That's right. I would love it.

2:47Go water the cow.

At-Home Farming

2:49So, Gary, take us into this. What do you have? All right. Let me just stop laughing. Right. At-home farming or homesteading has seen an uptick in popularity in the past few years, which begs the question, where can we grow plants? Is there a limit to where we can? We'll get into fake light versus real light. Soil science and the science of why our guest, who you'll introduce shortly, can grow a whole farm in his backyard. God, how big is he's down? And with some of us can hardly keep a cactus alive.

3:21This guy's growing a farm in his backyard. Amazing. Where does the future of farming and sustainability actually take us? I'm ready to get all in this because I think about this topic all the time. All right. Because when I go to Mars- Yes. You don't want to eat poop potatoes? You want something more than poop potatoes when you go to Mars? Yeah, I think we can be a little more innovative than that. We can be a little more innovative. Yeah. So we've got gardening YouTuber extraordinaire, Kevin Espiritu. Kevin, welcome to StarTalk.

3:52What is up, gentlemen? Glad to be here. All right. You're calling in from where? Where are you? I'm in San Diego, California. Oh, wow. The gardening world is called Zone 10B, and I'll get to that in a second, but it's a great climate for growing. Oh, it's a great climate for everything. Yes. Okay. Zone 10B. I miss San Diego, man. Isn't there a movie called Zone 10B, or was that the- District 11? District 11. Yeah. Thank you for helping me. I don't think there's much growing plonks in District 11. Great movie, too. Is Zone 10B next to District 11? I don't know.

4:22I don't know. So, but first, how big is your backyard? Yeah. The backyard I'm growing in now, it's about a third of an acre lot. Oh, my gosh! It's not the back 40. No. A third of an acre. Yeah. We've never got that 40 acres, by the way. Oh, thank you. Just trying to let you know. Okay, John. I'm still waiting on mine.

4:43Okay. Well, he's working out the third of an acre here. But I'm delighted to learn that, because that means it's hope for people who don't have large real estate that's out there. And you can have a garden anywhere, man. Yeah, because when I think of farming, I think of huge fields, you know, factory farming, agrib, you know, big aggregate business.

Gardening Experience

5:03Yeah. So, tell us, where do you come to this with what you do when you're back one-third? And let me tell you, people, when you hear Kevin answer, Kevin does not look like he grows anything. He actually looks like he grows weed, to be honest. Like, marijuana. That's what, like, in a closet. Yeah, he's got the gimme hat and the unshaved face. Yeah, yeah, he's got the beard. I mean, he looks like a totally, like, laid-back, chilled dude. And he's the guy in the corner that says, I need some weed. Right, yeah, exactly. Give me dime-backed. Is he still there?

5:35All I'm going to say, guys, is I've grown a lot of plants. I'll just put it that way. Oh!

5:41A little secret for you guys. And there's a reason why marijuana is called weed. Okay. All right. So, just give us an overview of what you got going in the back one-third. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it didn't start out that way. I started growing in an apartment. Then I moved to, like, a small, kind of, front yard lot, like, 15 by 30 feet. Interesting. I grew enough in that space to poorly survive off for about a month. But we could talk about that in a bit. I do, yeah. Yeah, now I'm on a third of an acre. And because we have a YouTube channel and we grow a lot of different crops,

6:13we're not necessarily growing it like an urban farm might. But we definitely could. Like, there's enough space there to grow hundreds and hundreds of pounds of produce per year. And if you're living there with yourself and a partner or something, that's enough produce to live off of. But I've got, let's see, 30 fruit trees. Did you say 30 fruit trees? Yeah. Yeah, 30 different fruit trees. Excellent. About half of them are citrus because it's San Diego and, you know, you can pull citrus off there. And then I've got maybe, like, 40 or 50 different annual crops that I'm growing depending on the season.

6:45Remind me, annual, you have to replant every year. Annuals, yeah, they're going to live and die in a single spring to fall sort of cycle. Whereas perennials come back every year. Gotcha. Perennials are going to come back every year. And then, you know, you get into some, like, weird sort of situations where there's, like, a self-sowing annual, like chamomile. That'll produce its seed at the end of the season. It's going to drop, go dormant, it'll come back. Still an annual, still lives and dies. Not when Monsanto finds out. No. No, that's very true. Monsanto is now Bayer, just so you know.

7:15Oh, really? Bayer bought Monsanto, yeah. Okay, continue, please. Yeah, so the whole project was, like, this idea of how far can you take being so-called self-sufficient on, like, a standard urban lot. So I've got chickens on the property, I've got rainwater capture, I've got graywater conversions. Nice. So taking, like, shower and laundry water and actually using that on the property. In the apocalypse, what's your address so we can all move in with you? It's redacted. I hid it from Google Maps. No one can see it. Yeah, when the grid goes down, the water goes down, everything goes down.

7:48When infrastructure fails completely, everybody's going to Kevin's house. I got you guys, I got you guys.

Graywater System

7:54All right.

Graywater System

7:54So let me ask you about the graywater because that's interesting. Isn't graywater contaminated and what exactly do you use it for? It is, like, semi-contaminated, hence the gray. Because, like, if you were going to use sink water, which is considered black water, you wouldn't use that. You're not really allowed to. Okay. So what I did is for my indoor shower and an outdoor shower that I have, I have a valve that I can turn. It's like a three-way valve. So I can either shunt the water to the city or I can go into, in my case, my orchard is where I send it because fruit trees need a lot of water.

8:25The only thing you have to do is change the detergents that you're using. So you can't use standard detergents. That was my concern is, you know, I'm not sure if, and I want, you know, tied tangerines. No. Wait, wait. So you're saying sink water is called black water? Yeah, because I think it's just because of the different things that end up going down the sink ends up being not something. Oh, sorry. The water that comes out of the sink. Out of the sink, yes. I thought you were talking about the water that goes in the sink and black water.

8:56Not the faucet. Not the stuff you drink. Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it. Okay, where's rainwater off your roof? What's that? Rainwater off your roof, I think it's just captured rainwater. That's captured rainwater. The beauty of that is like the house I bought, it's like a thousand square feet. It's not big. So the roof is a thousand square feet. And I believe it's like an inch of water on a thousand square foot roof is 600 gallons. Yeah. Which is a crazy amount when you think about it because an inch isn't that much rain. And so what I did is I built a system to pull that water off the roof, filter it, because you're going to get like particulate matter.

9:26You're going to get leaves and stuff like that. Leaves and crap. Yeah, so it'll filter it. And then it goes under the ground to a huge cistern in my backyard. Okay, so you have a cistern. And because the other way you can do it is a bladder. There are some people that use like, it's just a flat, looks like a hot water bottle. And then the captured rainwater ends up going into that and then they somehow pump it out to whatever they have to use. Yeah, yeah. You can do it that way or you can do like rain barrels off of certain areas. Like I've got a shed that isn't connected to that roof system. So I've got a rain barrel on that shed.

9:57Very nice. That's cool, man. And you said you could send water back to the city. Do they pay you for that water? You can't send water back to the city. What I mean by that is like, let's say my laundry machine, which has a gray water system on it, if I'm running, let's say a load of laundry that requires a detergent that I don't really want in the ground, then I'll just turn the valve and it'll send that water output to the city and stuff. Oh, that's what I thought you meant. To the rest of the filthy animals. We don't know any better. It goes into the gutter of the city. Okay, got it, got it.

10:28Now I think I'm up with all your lingo there. So let me ask you a conservation question. Are you seeing, because some people just don't give a damn, let's be honest. They just don't care, all right? Are you, but everybody cares about their money, all right? Are you seeing any significant savings in doing all of this? In water? So I did the math. I have it on our second YouTube channel where I kind of chronicled it over the years. I put a bunch of solar on the roof. That has ended up being a good investment. That's paid itself off over the last like five years or so. The water, water ends up being so inexpensive that putting in, let's say, a $2,000 cistern,

11:06you will not pay that off for a very long time. So it's more of like a security or sustainability move that you're actually paying for rather than like saving money. And just to understand, your solar panels, when it's raining, are not gathering sunlight, but they are directing water that falls upon them into your gutters so that you can collect it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Just to be clear. Interesting, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, people, just if you don't mind, if you'll indulge me, solar energy is the cheapest energy on the planet. Don't let anybody tell you differently.

11:37There is nothing cheaper than solar energy. Just wanted to say that, you know, just in case somebody out there might want to drill, baby, drill. Okay. You know, that's all. Okay. Kevin, are you finding people are following your lead with this sort of project? Because it's not so much the financial investment, which we've kind of touched on, but people may not understand just how easy or how complicated it can be to install this sort of facility. Yeah. I mean, I think showing it from the perspective of me who, like I was saying, prior to buying

12:08the house, I had a 15 by 30 square foot garden in my urban yard in San Diego. So when I bought the house, I was learning everything about owning a house at the same time as I was putting out all the videos. And so I think just learning in public, which is always what I've done on the channel, has inspired people like, it's really not that hard. It seems overwhelming. It's really not that bad. You could start small. Obviously, I went extreme. Our channel is called Epic Gardening after all. But, you know, condensing that back down to like a simple barrel or, you know, a little cistern here or there. People have, I mean, I've gotten tons and tons of pictures of people doing it.

12:40And by the way, let me just reaffirm what you just said. If you learn along with your viewers, that's a bond that is forever. Because you're like garden buds at that point. Yeah. I mean, I don't have like a formal training in gardening. I just, I got into it because I was addicted to playing video games and I wanted to get off the computer. Okay. And so once I got into it. It made your mama kick you out of the basement. Let's be honest. Just tell us. Come on, Neil. Shut up. I told you that in confidence, Neil. You have to stop.

13:10Oh, I'm sorry. You said it offline and now it just came out. But that's great. I mean, the fact is that, so, okay, here we go, guys. So I'm an avid gardener. I love it. It doesn't show. I know it does not. It does not. You would never look at me and think this guy gardens. But, and I don't plant vegetables. My mother had an awesome vegetable garden growing up, but she also had a rose garden as well, which roses, F them, they suck because I tried to plant one and they hate me.

13:43But anyway, gardening is probably one of the most relaxing, rewarding endeavors that anyone can partake at, period. I don't know why I'm saying this. You're happy now, aren't you? I just, this is the first time I've ever told anybody I love gardening. Chuck, I'm here for this, man. I'm here for your choice. This is the first time I've ever done it. So, Kevin, are you old school? Drill a hole, plant a seed, water something, walk away, come back, rinse, repeat? Or are we into some very more modern techniques?

14:15Are you inventing new methods, tools, and tactics? I wouldn't say, I wouldn't be as bold as to say I've invented anything all that crazy in the gardening world. Definitely some weird tactics. Like, we put a video up a couple days ago about growing zucchini vertically, which is a curcubit squash-style plant, so it wants to kind of sprawl out, which can be annoying. And then there's this whole meme in the gardening world of leave a squash on your neighbor's, like, doorstep day. Because by the end of summer, you just get so many squash that you're sick of them. Okay, so you're not being kind. You're being, take my shit, I wouldn't have eaten anyway.

14:45Absolutely. 100%, yeah. Because squash is like a weed, too. Yeah, you get it, Chuck, right? Like, as a gardener, you're like, okay, I have way too many squash. I don't need these. But if you go to someone who doesn't garden and you give it to them, you look like this saint, you know? Oh, they grew this for me. And you're like, this is just my... Yeah, and really it's your trash. It's your garden trash. Squash is garden trash. And he's given out the squash and not the oranges from his orange tree. Oh, yeah, well. No one's taking my citrus, baby. No, I mean, I think, you know, when I started gardening, I didn't even have the 15 by 30 spot that I was telling you guys about.

15:18I had, I was living in a condo townhouse with a north-facing balcony. There was no light whatsoever. All right, well, talk about that, man. Because honestly, I'm going to say for a lot of people listening to us, you know, our concentrations are in cities, big audiences. I mean, that I've never done as much as I love gardening. It sounds like more of a pain than anything to have a box garden on a balcony. What did you grow and how did you maintain it? I mean, I really didn't even have much of a balcony to get light.

15:49And so I was Googling around back then. This was like maybe 13 years ago. I was like, well, how do you grow plants without light from the sun? And the answer was hydroponics. And I, being like a kid who grew up with an obsession of like growing crystals and all sorts of different science things, I was like, okay, let's go ahead and do it. And so I did it with my brother. And I got a five-gallon bucket, filled that bucket with water. I put something called an air stone in, kind of like the thing you'd see in an aquarium that's oxygenating the water. I put some nutrients in that water and I put a grow light on top of it.

16:20And I grew probably the world's worst tasting cucumbers of all time. And I fed them to my brother and he said he almost threw up. But I got hooked on, you know, that aspect of like watching a plant grow and cultivating it. Well, tell me more about hydroponics. Yeah. And what works in hydroponics. And what strain of marijuana is best to grow hydroponically? Now I know why you've got a love for gardening. Well, I got these hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farming, just these things people are doing with plants.

16:52And now we're here at my office at Hayden Planetarium. We're in Manhattan. There are buildings in midtown Manhattan where plants are growing on the wall. And then others, the people are growing on their roof. Nice. So, it's like, is earth not good enough for you? Are these solutions to problems that people had encountered? I think yes and no. I think if you go to hydroponics and aeroponics, those first two, hydro, of course, meaning water, aero meaning air. Ponic's coming from a ponos, which means work. So, these are methods of growing where either the water or air does the work instead of what?

17:26Instead of soil, right? Which is where pretty much every plant is. Neither of them have soil. There you go. Neither of these are soil-based plants. Ways to grow. And so, it's kind of weird because if you think about it, you think, of course, a plant needs soil to grow. And I might even argue as a gardener, that is kind of true. I do prefer it. But what a plant really needs is what's in the soil or what the soil is providing. And the soil is almost a medium for oxygen, water, and nutrients. And so, when you're growing in a hydroponic environment like my cucumbers, well, there's no soil.

18:00So, the plant, you start a seed in like a little growing medium. In this case, it was something like called rock wool, kind of like spun molten rock in like this little fibrous cube. You put a cucumber seed in that. It grows up. The plant, you know, the tissue grows up. But the roots grow down. And those roots grow down and hit the water. That water does have to be oxygenated, which is crazy because you think, well, you know, plants are taking in CO2 and releasing oxygen, right? Roots, though, respire. They're not photosynthesizing. So, the roots are breathing.

18:31So, the roots actually need oxygen. Otherwise, they'll just, they'll simply drown in the water. You can drown them in soil. You can drown them in hydroponics. And then, of course, the plant needs nutrients, which would have been in the soil. So, you have to add these synthetic nutrients in a hydroponic environment. And so, the roots, like in a hydroponic environment, you open that five-gallon bucket up and you just see these perfect white roots kind of sprawling out in an almost unnatural way because they're not fighting against anything. They're not kind of crawling through the soil. And they look amazing. Like, there's a whole thing in hydroponics of, like, showing your roots and, like, people will show pictures of them, all this kind of stuff.

19:05Who's got the most beautiful roots? Yeah. Totally, yeah. But the crazy part is it grows, plants grown hydroponically tend to grow faster. And they tend to have roughly the same kind of macronutrient profile, like, if you were to eat that food. But the flavor is kind of up for debate. I think, to me, at least, the flavor does feel, like, a little bit flatter. Kevin, it seems to me that if you have some control over what's feeding the plant, then there's no end of ways you can manipulate that to create whatever flavor profile you might want in a food and possibly even patent that.

19:41Nice. How does this work with air? Because with a fluid such as water, I can see you can dissolve something in it. New nutrients can hang out. But air, how does it pull nutrients out of the air in aeroponics? Yeah, in aeroponics, I messed around with this, I would say, a little bit back in the early days of starting up at gardening. The whole logic behind the aeroponic method is, well, the plant roots don't really need to be bathed in water. They're, you know, in soil, they're not bathed in water. And, of course, you have to oxygenate that water with one of these air stones kind of pumping the dissolved oxygen level up.

20:16So why don't we just separate the water from the system? Imagine that same five-gallon bucket. And we'll actually bring in sprayers that will spray or mist in, like, a nebulized sort of level, like, very small droplets of nutrient-rich water. And we just will – they'll mostly be sitting in air most of the time. So it's not that there's not water used. It's just that the roots aren't sitting in water. And I don't know off the top of my head, like, is that more efficient than hydroponics or not? Are you nebulizing the leaves as well as the roots or just the roots? I think most people would just do the roots.

20:47But then there's this whole concept of, like, what's called foliar feeding or feeding the leaves, where some things are uptaken by the leaves and used in certain ways. But, of course, the roots are, like, the most common way that things are being uptaken. Doesn't nebulizer sound like some weapon on Star Trek? I love it. Yep. I will nebulize you.

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24:44Let's go back. You mentioned the zucchini and the vertical farming. Is that just another way of saying this is a space saver? Because we've got the old traditional, it's flat land, it's acreage. This now we can stack and stack and stack and stack. And you don't have anywhere near the real estate that you would otherwise have. 100%. Yeah. I mean, the zucchini method I was using was just in soil, like with a little steak growing it up. But you're totally right. Like some of the... So instead of like, imagine you have your soil like this.

25:15That's one plane. Yeah, it's just one plane that you can grow on. And of course, when you're out in the Midwest farming soy, that's fine. Like you can just do that forever. But in Manhattan or in Brooklyn, if you're trying to grow, I don't know, a very high-end basil or something like that, that'd be really inefficient use of probably the most expensive real estate on earth, right? And so what they'll do is they'll create... Usually it's like a hydroponic or aeroponic type system because then they don't have to deal with the soil. And they'll create like little channels or little grids or some sort of way of growing it. And then they'll just stack those on top of one another.

25:46The problem then becomes the light. Like you're blocking off... How to get light in there. How to get light in there. Yeah, exactly. What about yields? Because do you get the same amount of yield from the same amount of space vertically than you do horizontally? Or does it change? Well, you'd get more yield on like a per square foot basis because you've got the Z dimension, right? Or the Y dimension now that you're dealing with. We'll take the Z. Z is good. Yeah, we took the Z. Z is better. X, Y, Z goes straight up. We're good. Z is up. Okay, great. We good. And then, you know, you've also got like the density at which you can plant.

26:19So like if you were... I'll just go back to my house, for example. Let's say I'm growing peaches and citrus in my yard. If I'm a commercial peach grower, I'm growing those trees out to like 15 feet wide, 15 feet tall, basically expressing their full genetic potential. So I can only space these trees maybe like 15 feet apart or so. But here in my yard, I've got my trees like four or five feet apart and I'm doing a little more active pruning, a little more active management. And so my yield per square foot probably beats out the orchard, but it's just a trade-off,

26:51you know? Yeah. Chuck, the way you posed the question, I think you meant what's the yield per plant? Yes. But that's not the metric of measure here. Right. It's what's the yield per square foot. Right. And that makes sense. And that wins. No, that wins. All the time. If you add a dimension to something, you win. You're always going to win. You win. I mean, it's not like they wouldn't try to squeeze out more yield per plant too. Like let's say hydroponics is going to get you a little more efficient growing. Like that's also going to happen. But they're, I mean, you're talking like pretty raised within margins, I would imagine, on some of those setups. Like I know that these companies have raised like a bunch of money, you know?

27:21So they're going to do everything they can. Is this more intensive in terms of your management or anyone's management if you're vertically farming? For sure. Yeah. I mean, dramatically. Because otherwise you're just letting Mother Nature do her thing and you can sit back and go read a book or whatever it is. Yeah, totally. I mean, I always like to say like, well, people will say, I grew this or I can't grow this. And the way I think about it, at least, is the truth is no one's really ever grown a plant. Like as a gardener, what you're really doing is you're putting a plant in the environment in which it knows how to grow best.

27:53And so you're not growing it. Of course, it's growing itself. You just have to kind of cultivate that right environment. So in soil, yeah, it's a lot easier. Right. So looking at the nutrients, the one thing we always think of is going to need some sunlight or light. You mentioned in your balcony, you had your own little grow lamp. Why is it that you've got some plants that will flourish with less and some just won't flourish unless they have 12 hours a day? Yeah, this one is kind of interesting. So take like an eggplant. That's like a classic summer crop.

28:24It loves a lot of sun. And then take something like maybe spinach, which it's a leafy green. It grows low to the ground. If you were to give it a lot of sun, it might actually, the leaves might actually bleach and get damaged. Yeah. And you think about it, it's like, well, they're both photosynthesizing. So wouldn't more light just equal better growth across the spectrum? Naively, that's exactly what I would think. Right. And that's, I think really, that's what I would think too. But when you think about it, like all these plants that we grow in a traditional garden, like even take a salsa garden, which we think of as a group of plants that make sense together.

28:59Like you got your jalapenos, you got your tomatoes, you got your peppers, your onions, whatever. From an evolutionary perspective, though, these plants did not just like grow up as a salsa garden somewhere in the world. You know, we sort of cherry pick them from around the world in all these different environments where they adapted to. But you have to grow tortilla chips too. Do you have a tortilla chip? Well, you can just grit that corn, baby. Just grow that corn, you know? No, I want it to come out as chips. Right. I want it to come out as chips. We might need to go into GMOs for that. Little triangle leaves. Little triangular leaves that you can just pull off. Become chips. All right.

29:29So if you think about that, like take that spinach. I don't know where it's endemic to, but regardless, wherever it evolved, it was low in the canopy. It was low in the entire sort of hierarchy of the plants around it, right? So it was basically fighting for photons to photosynthesize with. Whereas like a nice tall like banana plant or something like that that's growing in the tropics, it has no problem with that. So of course it can tolerate more. And what ends up happening with like a shade plant that gets too much sun, if you put it in the wrong spot, is what once was good, the light, actually starts producing, I forgot

30:04what it is in the plant, but basically it starts producing too much of a certain compound that starts damaging the plant's ability to photosynthesize. Yeah. So basically too much of a good thing. So what you're saying is if the plant wanted to survive but didn't have much light, it evolves to use that much light. Right. And if then it has less or more light than what it evolved to have, that can't be good for the plant because it didn't evolve that way. Absolutely. And you see that even in some flowering plants, not even for consumption, but when you plant certain flowering plants that need what they'll say partial shade, that's where it grows

30:36best. I've seen them say that. They'll say the partial shade. Yeah. And the reason is you end up kind of frying the plant if it's in the sun all day long. Mm-hmm. You know, so, yeah. So tell me, with the switch over to LED lights, has this changed the response of the plants to the light? Because the sun, at least what the sun gives off that gets through our atmosphere, includes some infrared, some ultraviolet, and the pure LED lighting systems we have today, you have the blue, you have the green, you have the red, the RGB.

31:09RGB, yeah. But it's not giving you infrared, and it's not giving you ultraviolet, whereas the sun has some of that reaching Earth's surface. So are there plants that will not do as well under your LED grow lights than they would out under the authentic sunlight? I mean, I wouldn't go as far to make a bold claim to say, like, all of them would do better under normal sunlight, but I kind of do think that's the case, because there are studies that prove not only do plants use far red, so, like, above the 700 nanometer range.

31:41Just to be clear, the 700 nanometers is like the accepted edge of the visible spectrum where we would identify it as red light. Okay. And you can have light energy beyond that, and we call it infrared, but your eye can't see it. You can't see it. Right. But, of course, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, they have different sensors than we do. Yeah. So we should not be defining what they care about and what they want. Don't tell me what I can see and what I can't see. I'm a plant.

32:09Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right. Like, the first sort of LEDs that came out back when I was growing cucumbers, Chuck, back in my old place, they came out and they were called, like, blurple lights, blue, purple, red, because basically, whoever was designing them back then was like, well, plants mostly use light between 400 and 700 nanometers, kind of like the visible spectrum. So they'll use blue light for vegetative growth. They'll use red light to signal flowering and stuff like that. So whoever was designing the lights back then was like, well, let's just give them exactly

32:40these ranges, like 450 nanometers or, you know, 660 nanometers, whatever it is. And then these days, lights that are coming out, LED or otherwise, are trying to express, like, put out more of that spectrum because it's been proven, like you said, Neil, like, they're using light in the far red spectrum. They're using, they're even using green light, which we didn't know for like a century. Because, you know, you always hear like, well, plants are green because they reflect green. And it's not entirely true. Yeah, just to put some punctuation on that. So if we see a plant and it's green, it means it's sending green light back to you.

33:16Back. And it's not using the green light. Right. By and large. Okay. Right? Which is a fascinating, we think green as nature, green is the color it's rejecting. Yeah. Right? So what you're saying is not all plants are rejecting all green. Not all plants are rejecting all green. So if you take red and blue, just colloquially, those ranges, I think the plant is using somewhere between like 91% and 95%, depending on which color it is. Green, you would think like, well, it's reflecting green. So it's using like 0% or maybe 10%. It's still absorbing in the range of like 70% to 80% of green light.

33:49Are we talking mood lighting here for plants? Pretty much. Pretty much. Because we hear about plant stress. Are we now creating the right kind of light bath for specific plants? Are we at that point now? Yes. Yes. Should we also allow them to have a little Marvin Gaye while we're at it? Play him a little music, man. Why not? Oh, now I know if he talks to his plants. Now I need to know if he talks to his plants. You know, I get it all the time. Like, do you talk to them? Do you name them? Do you? I don't. I'm a little bit brutal to them sometimes.

34:22All right. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to eat them, there's no sense in like, you know, getting to know them. Serenading them. Right. Yeah. So are you saying or implying that even though plants are green, they're not reflecting back all the green that they're receiving. They're keeping some of it. Yeah. I mean, that whole leaves, like normal plant leaves are absorbing maybe about 80% of green light or so. So they're reflecting back a 20, which is pretty much what we're seeing. But the way it ended up working in the study that kind of turned everyone on their head

34:55and realizing that we actually do use green light with plants is that it's penetrating deeper into the canopy. So like the red and the blue light is getting used up first, absorbed at a really high efficiency. The green light gets deeper into the leaf, gets lower into the canopy. So it is being used. It's just that it's not being used as efficiently. Okay. Okay. All right. Again, plants just doing the best they can in this situation. They can do with what they got. Do with what you got. Plants are like black people. I don't have no money, but we're going to make the rent, baby. Don't you worry about it.

35:28All right. We hear about plants being able to adapt and survive in extreme conditions. I suppose it wouldn't be the same unless we asked you about growing plants in space and the extremes of the environments that would be encountered. And before you answer that, can I tell you, when I was in high school, I grew a plant upside down. It was Australian.

35:55Because I said to myself, well, does it really know which way gravity is? Mm-hmm. And does it really know which way the light is in advance? Because if I take a plant, turn it upside down, hold it with saran wrap, the soil so it doesn't come out. And I have all my light at the bottom. Did you put the light source from behind? From beneath. That's correct. So the plant, it kept trying to go up, but the light kept it coming down. So it didn't grow in a straight way. It was like confused. Right. On its way in. What plant was it? Do you remember?

36:26I have to look, I'm sure I kept the notes. And then were you growing it in like a chamber where the only light source was below it? It was the only light source. It was a box. It was a box. Oh, that is interesting. Because I'd grown peas upside down and I grew tomatoes upside down. The same thing happened, but my experiment was not one in which there was a controlled light source at the bottom. So it was just outside. And so it, but it did basically, gravity was pulling it down and then it kept pulling itself back up towards the stronger light source. It was almost this weird stair-stepping type effect. Yes. Nice. Yes.

36:56That's basically the results I got. And I got an A plus on it too. Oh, very nice. Yeah. So did you mark your own word? No, just to be clear, in high school, you normally take biology and chemistry and physics. Right. But in my high school, I took physics first. Okay. And then I took chemistry and I took biology as a senior with all of these freshmen. Right. So I was like the oldest kid in the biology class. Neil deGrasse Tyson, biology bully. All right, Kevin, we're going to throw you into space.

37:27Let's go back to space. Yeah, metaphorically. Are we going to just take what we do here on Earth and just say, yeah, we can do that in space? Or are we going to have to think a lot differently? Because Kevin, you know, we speak of the lunar surface. It's not soil. No. It's what the geologists call regolith, which is powderized rock created by micrometeorites that on Earth would be what? Burnt up in the atmosphere. Exactly, as a shooting star. Right. No such thing on the moon. Oh, right.

37:58They hit and they pulverize the rock. And it's been doing that for a billion years. So all you have on the moon is rock soil. And as I understand- Rock soil. I'm sorry. So as I've come to understand it, the good Earth is rich in microbes that the plant needs. So how are you going to grow something where you don't have the microbes or the fertilizer? What are you going to do? I mean, I honestly think you just can't.

38:29Like, you're right. Bummer, dude. Okay, we're stuck on Earth here. Go on. Regolith. Like, that's basically dirt, right? And the difference between dirt and soil is dirt plus the life that you talked about. The microbes, the fungi, the bacteria. The microbes, right. And so if you can't do that on the moon, well, first of all, there's no oxygen. There's no atmosphere, right? You'd have to figure that out, too. Well, if we're growing plants here on Earth- That's a side detail. I think we buried the lead here, guys. So if you're growing plants without soil here on Earth, we just replicate that kind of practice.

39:03I think you'd have to grow them hydroponically or aeroponically in, like, a pressurized chamber. And I think you'd have to use artificial light. Because what's the moon's, like, night cycle? We just got light. No problem with light. Oh, moon, sorry. Moon has a moon-thly cycle. So a day on the moon lasts a month. Yeah, so then you're in trouble because plants evolve for a 24-hour light cycle, right? And so you would need to supplement with light. They wouldn't survive for, what, like 14 days of darkness? Yeah, so 14 days in darkness.

39:34Right. Okay, so you'd have to, like, phase that somehow. Yeah. Well, just bring grow lamps. I mean, come on. I think you just got to bring grow lamps. You do that. Well, that's what they do in every sci-fi film. It's the, you know, the horticultural deck. Okay, yes! They all have the horticultural deck. Thank you. But aren't we going to just take genetically modified plant material with us? Yeah, why not? That has been built, constructed to grow in extremities, to maybe deal with moonth. I've learned a new word today. Well, that's where the word moonth comes from, the moonth.

40:05But let me tighten that question. So, as far as I know, plants like carbon dioxide. So, if we're on the moon, and we're all exhaling carbon dioxide, why don't we just capture that and stick it in the- The chamber where it holds the plant. Where it holds the plant. Do we exhale enough carbon dioxide to serve plants? And then it's a cycle of life. We exhale, they absorb our CO2, they give us the oxygen. Can that be sustained? In fact, let me ask another way. How much plant life do you need to satisfy your daily ingestion of oxygen?

40:39That is such a good question. I wish I knew this. We want to know that, right? I wish I knew. I don't know it. But I think there is, there's definitely an amount that, like, on a per-person basis- Is it one tree per person? That's a lot of, because a lot of trees on earth. I just learned there are three trillion trees on earth. Oh, my God. I said, I don't believe that. I ran some math on it. Yeah. I was like, yeah. Three trillion? Yeah. Not for long. That's right. We'll be cutting them down. You know what else you could do on the moon?

41:09I just thought about it, is you could go aquaponics. So we talked about hydroponics and aeroponics. We didn't talk about aquaponics yet. All right. Which basically is, because you remember, in hydroponics, aeroponics, you don't have the soil, so you don't have the nutrients, right? Do you need to input those nutrients synthetically? If you go aquaponics, though, you have fish in that water medium. Those fish excrete ammonia, that converts to nitrites and nitrates, which is used as nitrogen by the plant. So basically, the fish become the fertilizer. So on the moon, you could feed the fish. The fish excrete. They feed the plants.

41:40And you can eat the plants and the fish. Wait. So the aqua refers to what in that context? Good question. I think just... Just the water. Yeah, but you just said hydroponics. The hydro referred to the water. That's probably why they made it aqua, because they're like, you know, Aquaman talks to fish. Okay. I think that's actually scientifically why. Aquaman solved the data. That's the idea. Okay. So that's interesting. So you bring some fish with you. No, you've really got the circle of... The circle of... Thank you. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. I don't think NASA's thought about that. No, it's a pretty cool idea. I wonder, however...

42:12Water and weight. Everything is about weight. Wait. Has a fish ever been brought to space? Do you guys know? I don't know, and I'd hate to be that fish, because fish align themselves vertically, because they're skinny and long, vertically, because they know which way gravity is. Yes. In zero G... Oh, you're going to mess with that fish. That fish is going to be totally... Oh, man. It's hard enough when you pull them out of the water, and they have to explain what happened back to their friends. That's why they all look surprised. With their eyes all fixed. You ain't never seen a fish that doesn't look surprised. It's like, what?

42:46So now you take a fish, not only out of water, you put them back in water in zero G, they'll be flopping. They wouldn't know which way they're up. There is no up. They wouldn't know which way is up. So that's why they don't know which way is up. But what you could do, this is all kind of pointless conversation, because sci-fi people have figured this out forever. Right. You just rotate the spaceship. Rotate the spaceship. There's your gravity. There's your gravity. There's gravity. Right. Okay. Okay. That's that. So Kevin, if they use your recipe for cucumbers on the moon, is there going to be a mutiny

43:19on the first moon colony? I'll cut you off right there. Yes. It's going to be terrible. Because you're making nasty cucumbers. Can you imagine? I mean, I grew the worst cucumbers of maybe anyone's ever grown. They were yellow. They were deformed. Like, they had all these deficiencies. I still ate it, but, you know, it was bad. I mean, are we going to have to just, if we're interstellar travel, just come to the conclusion that, you know, flavors of something in the past? No, you get a flavor capsule. Flavor is just chemistry. Thank you. Yeah. It's just a flavor thing attaching to your taste buds.

43:51Who cares what's delivering the flavor? So basically, flavors become a condiment. Yes. Oh, flavor as a condiment. Yeah. All right. Put some more flavor on it. Yeah. Maybe you just grow, like, the most efficient vegetable you can grow and just flavor capsule it with, like, grow potatoes and just flavor capsule it. Oh, no. That's true. We're back to the potatoes. Land and poop potatoes always comes back to poop potatoes. So before, I want to take this into a sustainability question. Oh, yeah. And maybe the transition to that is, tell me about the plot of land that you experimented

44:22on where you fed yourself for 30 days and that was all the food you ate. So did you get your protein? Did you lose weight?