I can see places like Grover's Corners and 36 Atalante employing this on a very large scale. Especially with big rocks like Atalante... you can pock-mark the surface with 1km diameter farm domes and have year-round harvests. I wonder how much food that would be...
Area of a 1km circle is roughly 785m^2... I'm going to estimate that each of these globes is about 6m in diameter, so that would put each one at about 28m^2... Surprise, surprise, 28 goes into 785 slightly more than 28 times... Going strictly by the system used in The Globe (which supposedly yields 400kg in vegetables and 100kg in fish per year) that would be a whopping fourteen metric tons of food per year! From a 1km diameter dome!
Now imagine if 36 Atalante (or some other suitably large enough asteroid) had 20 such domes... 280 metric tons per year.
Okay, so this sounds great, but is it really? Let's find out. I had to futz around a bit with this one, because the only solid figures I had was the annual weight of food an American consumes, daily calorie intake of an American, and the average worldwide daily calorie intake per person. Based on that, I figure that the average person needs about .75 metric tons per year for a healthy diet.
Thus, with 20 of these farm domes, 36 Atalante can be self-supporting for up to 210 people.
Personally, I think we can get more out of it, but I have no idea how to get that figure. Also, pretty sure that using large-scale domes we can also do orchards and stuff like that.
Area of a 1km circle is roughly 785m^2... I'm going to estimate that each of these globes is about 6m in diameter, so that would put each one at about 28m^2... Surprise, surprise, 28 goes into 785 slightly more than 28 times... Going strictly by the system used in The Globe (which supposedly yields 400kg in vegetables and 100kg in fish per year) that would be a whopping fourteen metric tons of food per year! From a 1km diameter dome!
Now imagine if 36 Atalante (or some other suitably large enough asteroid) had 20 such domes... 280 metric tons per year.
Okay, so this sounds great, but is it really? Let's find out. I had to futz around a bit with this one, because the only solid figures I had was the annual weight of food an American consumes, daily calorie intake of an American, and the average worldwide daily calorie intake per person. Based on that, I figure that the average person needs about .75 metric tons per year for a healthy diet.
Thus, with 20 of these farm domes, 36 Atalante can be self-supporting for up to 210 people.
Personally, I think we can get more out of it, but I have no idea how to get that figure. Also, pretty sure that using large-scale domes we can also do orchards and stuff like that.