Growing chickpeas on the moon

8:09bugs? This podcast. And if you've been listening or watching, or if you're a new listener, or a new watcher, we're grateful for you joining us today to learn more about the universe around us. A like, a comment, a share, a follow on any of the platforms helps us reach more curious people and helps us continue to do this podcast and deliver the best science podcast on the planet, in our opinion. Every week, day in and day out. And we're going to now transition into our second story, which is about growing chickpeas on the moon. Now, we are from California, but this story comes out of Texas. Mhm. Not only just out of Texas, but from

8:50researchers at UT at Austin and Texas A&M, published in Scientific Reports, where they demonstrated that uh they can successfully grow and produce seeds in soil that is very similar to the soil that we know exists on the moon. And if we ever want to expand the human experience beyond our local Gaia on planet Earth, being able to do agriculture in space is valuable. And it seems like we may have an interesting finding in this recent paper. Yes. Um trying to establish a permanent presence on the moon will require probably, you

9:31know, doing some form of agriculture there. Light is pretty easy to come by, but soil is pretty hard to come by because moon regolith, which is the name for lunar soil, is very very different from Earth soil. Earth soil has an entire ecosystem inside, right? There's bacteria, there's fungi, there's all sorts of creatures living in there. And so, soil is not just like a bunch of like, you know, small particles of rock, which effectively is what the in you know, the a biological part of soil is. You need a lot of these helper agricultural necessities to actually create an

10:12environment to grow crops. In The Martian with Matt Damon, right, he grew potatoes, I think, but he supplemented it with his own poop. Right? This is trying to get that dream a reality. Without the poop or with the >> Without the poop. In this case, it's not human poop. They're actually going for um worm poop. Ah, I see. Okay. So, what they're saying is we can take lunar regolith, which is this super, you know, kind of dry, dead substance. We can supplement that with both fungi, which are going to help the plants,

10:52and also poop from worms, where the worms eat like sort of biological matter and trash and other kinds of stuff that comes out of the human presence there, right? Cuz we're going to have a lot of like biological waste. >> Mhm. The worms can subsist on that, create organic material, we supplement that organic material into dead lunar regolith, and then we grow chickpeas, and it actually worked. That's incredible. >> Yeah, and one one thing that they actually did test was without the fungus, the plants did not produce any seeds. So, it's really important that we have the fungus, and we have this

11:32biodegradable waste that comes from the worms. So, part of the idea here is is like we know we can't we can't grow in a completely dead substrate. Uh we do need some biological ingredients >> Yes. mixed in to make the recipe work. Yeah, and they simulated the lunar regolith because obviously you can't like get the little bit of lunar soil that NASA brought back from its space missions. And now other people have also brought back with their non-human space missions there. But I mean lunar soil is very hard to come by, okay? I don't think you're going to convince anyone, "Hey, I want to grow chickpeas in your

12:12lunar soil." Right? That's going to completely contaminate lunar soil. So, they simulated lunar soil, and then they made sure that that sort of composition closely reflected the stuff that actually came back. And then they, you know, did this experiment with creating better soil with worm compost and fungi.