It is a very exciting time indeed.

But getting to space is not enough to actually live there. If you can't recycle your air, if you can't create food in situ, you won't stay there long.

The Deep Space Food Challenge is essentially an RFP, an attempt to get the best proposal -- for a technology that will feed a group of four for three years. One of the goals is a Mars mission. This is about three and a half thousand meals.

Yes, this is "only" about a ton of food. Now imagine Elon Musk's project of putting a million people on Mars. Good luck flying all the food in with rockets, or building enormous glass houses to grow corn for a million people. Oh, building -- did you read the recent article where they propose to use astronaut blood to make concrete on Mars? "Rosy" future, eh? Instead we could just produce those same proteins in bacteria or algae in industrial qualities.

A lot of the biotech already either exists productively, or is being worked on right now. As I mentioned, we make insulin via Escherichia Coli bacteria. You can feed those for ever... or you can go to the same length to develop a strain of electrobacteria as we did with Escherichia Coli, and use that to manufacture anything you want from recycled air and electricity. Down here it hardly matters, there is always some agricultural waste that you can dump in there. Up on Mars, that will look very different.

Of course I might be wrong -- but this is the path of the least resistance, and humans, like electrons, are good at taking those.