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Keycon is Winnipeg's annual science fiction and fantasy convention. Rob Dyck, president of Mars Society Winnipeg, has given a presentation about real space exploration every year since 2002. In 2008 the Mars Society Winnipeg, with help from the Manitoba Planetarium, the Muddy Waters Computer Society, and some members of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (Winnipeg), hosted a convention hospitality suite at Keycon. This highlighted what the Mars Society is all about, one settlement plan for Mars, and raised awareness of the Mars Society. The suite was very popular; there have been requests for us to do it again. Do we want to do so this year?
To do this we require members to volunteer in the suite. This may be difficult since some of our members are also members of the Star Trek Winnipeg fan club, and they're hosting a consuite as well. We will have to pay for the hotel room for the entire weekend, as well as providing free food and beverages that will be given out. Mars Society Winnipeg doesn't have any club money so members will have to chip-in. A donations jar in the room does collect some money, but only a fraction of the cost. Most importantly we need volunteers to man the room.
Since a consuite is expected to give out food and beverages to attract convention attendees, we provided things that would be available on Mars. Assuming we had the first permanent human settlement on Mars, what food would be available? A greenhouse can grow food, but animals consume several pounds of fodder (animal feed) for each pound of meet, milk, or eggs. And animals require additional oxygen and water recycling, sewage treatment; they need a hard walled habitat that they can't peck or dig through. In general animals need a lot of care, so the first human settlement will have a vegan diet. This isn't for any philosophical reason, but just because it's practical. We cooked everything ourselves, and provided recipes for those who want to make those dishes at home. We even included a recipe to make handmade soap. Of course every recipe had a prominent Mars Society logo, and we also had handouts about the Winnipeg chapter and Mars Society membership forms.
Since chilli is a common food available in a consuite, we offered vegan chilli. The recipe was mostly red kidney beans, since chilli isn't chilli without it, but added black beans since they are second to only soybeans in protein and produce less flatulence than other beans. We added veggie ground round from the grocery store, made primarily from soybean. The result was a very good chilli. All ingredients were documented, what plants we have to grow in the greenhouse, and what steps required to process them. Our own Lindsay Price made red wine from a commercial wine kit. Since this is home made wine, it is definitely something we could make on Mars. Grapes can grow in a greenhouse. Lindsay provided excellent labels on his bottles: grown on the slopes of Pavonis Mons; a volcano near the equator of Mars. We have great members who can research this stuff. Lyndie Bright brought an excellent brand of grenadine, which required documentation how to make it. It turns out grenadine hasn't been made with real pomegranates for a very long time. It's made with sugar syrup, commercially produced citric acid, artificial flavour, and red current juice. Cheap brands don't even use real red currents, but the quality brands do. Red currents are tart, very high in vitamin C, and are native to Manitoba so thrive in a colder climate; very appropriate for a Winnipeg consuite. And Rob Dyck used them for a new flavour for potato chips: red current and vinegar. Some commercial brands of potato chip are lime and vinegar, lime is a tart fruit, so we can use red currents instead. Again red: very Mars.
Pea starch is advertised as producing highly consistent gels; Ok so what can we gel? We got silicone 2-bite muffin moulds, and baked fruit juice with pea starch. That's it, just juice and starch. I takes a couple minutes in the microwave, and you get gummy candies. No preservatives or artificial anything, just starch and fruit juice. Because there's no preservatives, they do have to be kept in a fridge until ready to serve. We can grow fruit in the greenhouse, so practical for Mars. Once we have an unlimited supply of starch, and growing yeast onboard, how many minutes before someone sets up a still? Distilled liquor made from fermented starchy food is called vodka. The Russians love their vodka; any international mission with Russian cosmonauts will have vodka. So of course we have to serve vodka in the consuite. Besides, it's an excellent excuse to serve liquor, a great way to bring in convention attendees. Liquor laws do not allow us to make any distilled liquor, we have to buy it. I looked for imported Russian potato vodka because that should be closest to vodka made from pure starch. All Russian vodka available here is from grain, and premium brands are rather expensive. So we brought a couple bottles of imported Polish potato vodka.
Hibernation We can discuss all these things with our guests at the consuite. Do the members want to do it again this year? |
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Last time we dressed the room up with pictures of the Mars Homestead Project. This was an effort based out of MIT to design the first permanent human settlement on Mars. We also had some images of Mars Direct, a plan devised by Dr. Robert Zubrin for a science mission, the first human landing on Mars.
Menu:
Rob Dyck talked about how life support systems work, and how to provide multiple redundancies on Mars. He took the opportunity to talk about his idea for a life support system: growing chloroplasts in-vitro to recycle CO2 and water into oxygen and carbohydrate. Pea plants are the easiest to harvest chloroplasts from, and peas produce pea starch, so this system would have produce plenty of pea starch. So what do we do with pea starch? He devised a simple dish similar to the Hawaiian food poi, with the consistency of pudding, using bread yeast to convert some of the starch to protein so it's healthy, and cooked in a microwave oven. It tastes and smells like freshly baked bread; not surprising since it uses bread yeast. The process doesn't require a greenhouse, it's actually simple enough for a spacecraft.
We bought a bag of pea starch from a mill that makes it in Portage la Prairie, a few kilometres drive from Winnipeg. The smallest bag they had was 50 pounds, so we still have lots of starch left over.