agricultural planets?

[IgnusDei]

in sci-fi worlds, like in 40k or in a game of master of orion, there's always these "agro worlds" that produce an incredible surplus of food and ship it to planets that cannot sustain plantlife very well. the shipment is sent, the products are consumed, and that's all there should be to it, right?

but wait, wouldn't that drain agroworlds of the necessary minerals necessary to grow plants? and such make it all the more barren as it keeps exporting food out? how would that problem be solved, if it's a problem at all?

discuss!

[General Nuke Em]

Maybe they ship the crap that people produce after consuming the food from the agro-world back to the agro-world to be used as fertilizer? I'm sure that the "industrial hive worlds" would manufacture fertilizer and such that gets shipped right back out to the agro-world.

By the same token, why hasn't our world been turned into a desolate wasteland? We've only been farming for more than the past 5000 years.

[HunterX]

They use a very old and simple technique. Crop rotation.

[Shin]

Herr General, the point is that the offword shipment of materials may impact the balance in the agricultural worlds.

It's a trivial point to make that the best way to ensure that agricultural worlds keep producing, well, agriculturally is to try and maintain a closed nitrogen cycle (or whatever cycle the plants thrive on).

Ignus: the solution to the problems is for the aggricultural worlds to import the equivalent materials that they export in more useful format. Such as fertilizer derived from the waste products generated by cunsumption of produce, mineral supplements, and other commodities.

I think the entire concept of agricultural worlds may be impractical though. Specializing planets for food production may be a waste of the surface area and environment. I think it's much better to have the planet surfaces entirely for habitation. Food production is probably something better to do in structures orbiting the planets. The opposite alternative, to dewll in orbit with food on the ground, will be much more costlier.

Maybe.

[Moe]

I've always found the concepts of "farm planets" or even worse, "factory planets", bloody ridiculous. Planets are big. Sure you can turn one into Kansas, but even Kansas has a bunch of cities, eh? And of course if you really have FTL travel and whatnot it would make sense to have some planets produce and export a food surplus, but I really can't see why you would need to designate a planet as a "farm planet".

Shin: it'd probably be cheaper to grow stuff on the bottom of the ocean. Much more space available (unless you want to clutter up the orbit with bloody gigantic farm platforms), and you already have water nearby.

[General Nuke Em]

Herr Shin, me nein German, as you can tell from my butchering of the language.

Just for arguments sake, why would off-world shipments impact the balance of the agro-world? If a civilization is advanced enough to even have the capability to make an agro-world and to ship products back and forth via ftl travel, whats keeping them from sending just the right things to said agro-world to maintain its balance?

[Mac_Bug]

they would have this big dyson sphere and they would have endless energy therefore if they need any material they'll just use a nanoforge so stop dreaming about outer space farmgirls

[KON Air]

Common Sci-Fi Farm Planet;
Product;
Produces food that is considered luxury or semi-luxury (or unique), since the magical "food dispensers" produce food. Space Pirates say "Yarr, I hate that goo" while Space Ninjas say "That has every thing I need".
Why;
Because planet has been first colonized by a Mega Corp. then when the profits fall they left.

W40k Agri planets;
1.Planet is feeding entire solar system since someone on Terra decided to make rest of the planets Forgeworld and Hive Worlds*.
2.Planet is Agri planet because nobody cared about its progress since Crusade.
3.Planet is not an Agri planet there is a Tyranid infestation, and they are making the planet look like an Agri planet.
4.Planet is not an Agri planet, all those green fields you see from orbit are accually Orks.

*Dude, Hive world is one gaint city, if it is not one giant city it giant cities diveded by deadly wastelands (radiation, chemical wastes, mutants etc.)

[Moe]

Mon general: nothing, but it may be easier to not have dedicated farmworld then so you don't have to ship millions of tons of grain and fertilizer back and forth.

[Handarazuur]

I picture hydroponic skyscrapers powered by massive arrays of solar panels. Automated, compact, and they produce oxygen as well.

[Retroboy]

My thoughts: if a civilization ever got so advanced that they could make the removal and transportation of extremely bulky crops from a planetary surface economically viable, they would also be able to very cheaply provide inexpensive fertilizers for these crops, simply by "mining" sources of phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium. It's rare that science advances in only one direction.

I find a generated ability of a manufactured superplant to create edible and nutritious biomass to be a much more likely source of food for a high-population world than a dedicated orbital farm or agriworld. Examples: kudzu salad, protein-manufacturing dandelions, maple trees that continually manufacture sap for syrup all year, mega-earthworms, coral that captures potassium and phosphorus from the sea for fertilizer, and so on. These things are just a gene-tweak away.

Gravity wells are a much bigger problem than crop maintenance or production.

-- Retro

[Tiresias]

I think we can blame Star Wars for the "Desert planets", "Swamp planets" and "city planets"

as if planets wouldn't vary like Earth :/

[Handarazuur]

Don't forget the Snow Planet, Wisconsin V!

[Nurizeko]

but wait, wouldn't that drain agroworlds of the necessary minerals necessary to grow plants? and such make it all the more barren as it keeps exporting food out? how would that problem be solved, if it's a problem at all?

Well they say that with comets and meteorites and lots of space junk falling to earth in the tons every year, i think that in the lnog run shipping crops offworld doesnt really dent the overal mass of the planet.

and as suggested fertilizers and what-not are probably shipped from agriculturally poor worlds back to the agro world.

they would have this big dyson sphere...

I dont get dyson spheres, i mean, apart from the imposibility of finding enough metal to make a solid sphere encasing a star, isnt that kinda encasing going to cause the build-up of something like radiation or heat or something?.

I think the reason we survive on earth so well is that its surface area is so small, but a dyson sphere might absorb way too much bad juju.
Ah well, if we have the technology to make a dyson sphere with a habitable inner surface, and can find the resources to create it, i guess we have the technology to deal with "bad juju" lol.

[Shin]

Mon Moe, my hypothetical planet doesn't have oceans because the water would have been drained and processed to circulate throughout the habitations.

You lose! Save VS Petrification.

Anyway, underwater farms may just be as difficult to maintain as orbital ones. How would you transport sunlight underwater effectively? Elaborate mirror arrangements? Canned Sunlight Juice?

Space debris entering the atmosphere might not have the correct minerals to balance the equation of matter being exported, unless the future people start eating rocks.

I think a lot of things we take for granted become relevant once the scale becomes larger. Like, would a fully metropolitan planet end up becoming frozen because of all the light escaping into space due to energy consumption? Would we have to regularly import heat into such exothermic planets?

[Ammon Ra]

et me point out the effects of intense agriculture in spain. Apparently spain will turn into a desert within 50 years [so i've heard from documentaries] due to various causes of which climatic change and intense water usage are to blame. a large proportion of european tomatoes and fruits and other produce come from spain that has improved it's standards due to the high exports. Intense agriculture can and will affect the local environment. Right, now that i've said that, I'll say something else. comparative cost. i.e. china should make the clothes, and i suport them. Why? Because their comparative cost, their oportunity cost to make anything else is higher than other countries. Expand the concept onto a planetary scale. If plant A has lush swamp lands and lots of rain, while plant B is a drier, stonier, colder planet, i'd be willing to wager that Plant A would have a lower cost in producing foods than planet B. similarly, plant B would be better at mining and construction. Population wise, i'd wager them to be more or less equal.

As for "swamp, desert, city" planets look at Mars, a freezing Desert, with little climatic difference, Venus, covered in clouds and lots of molten metals and gases, Europa, covered in frozen liquids, and ice, Etc. They ALL look quite monotonic to me. Earth is different, it has sustained life for over 4 billion years, +/- a few dozen million years.

Taking that into account one could argue that Tatoine is a dried up, hotter variant of earth, it could simply be a colonized planet, a bit like a warm version of mars. the swamplands are just a part of a planet. we don't really know what the rest of it looks like.

As for agriculture only planets, They have to import something to survive. Only exporting is ecomonic suicide, and since they're shipping off all the planet's nutrients and food, the planet would eventually dry up. Which is why they would need a constant imput of nutrients [the remains of the food, water, etc]. And Even then, the net trade = 0 over time, so the food sent out = the resources baught back, sothere'd be little room for comodoties, other necesities. Which means that any agricultural planet would have other industies, large cities etc. A normal planet that simply has a large food surplus. That's my take on it. an agriculture-only planet seems unlikly. :) "hive cities" also seem improbable. i.e. take NY. just the city. place it on another Earth. it would die soon enough without the influx of food from places around the world. Unless of course that food is imported on huge ships on a daily basis, i really doubt that a city-planet could exist without it's own food-production facilities.

[Moe]

Well they say that with comets and meteorites and lots of space junk falling to earth in the tons every year, i think that in the lnog run shipping crops offworld doesnt really dent the overal mass of the planet.

That's not the problem. The problem is that it dents the overall nutrients of the planet. On Earth, the plants get nutrients from the ground, then animals eat those plants and eventually poop on the ground, and I'm sure there are a billion other of those circulatory processes going on as well.
If you take the food away though you permanently remove those nutrients from the ecosystem.

[Handarazuur]

And then the world looks like Arrakis, only without really cool shit like giant phallic worms and that old lady from Kindergarten Cop.

Nurizeko: Assuming we could get enough material, this option (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Swarm) seems the most likely, though considering the cowardice of space programs in general to achieve anything grandiose and bearing the slightest risk of catastrophic failure, holding your breath is probably only going to rupture your lungs.

Ammon Ra: the difference being, if you walk around or Mars or Venus or Europa without a spacesuit, you die horribly. It always made we wonder, when watching The Empire Strikes Back, where all the oxygen on Hoth was coming from. Is it just there for the hell of it? No; something needs to have produced it, and something needs to be recycling it. Otherwise, the wampas and tauntauns would have used up all the oxygen millennia ago, and died of asphyxiation.

And then there's the fact that, if a planet was capable of unsupported human colonisation (ie. no suits, no pressurised domes etc.), it would likely be in a similar position relative to its sun to Earth. Ignore for now that the likelihood of such a planet actually existing is worse than you winning the lottery ten times in a row. The planet would require an atmosphere very similar to ours, with plenty of nitrogen and oxygen. It would need to be the right temperature; too cold, and the plants freeze; too hot, and they fry. Genetic modification may prevent this, but the truth is, in that situation, you're probably planting in the wrong spot.

Temperature on Earth, specific to region, is governed by several different factors. These include distance from water, angle in relation to sun, and weather, which has its own variables. Take a coastline bordered by mountains, for example. Clouds are blown from the sea over the mountains. The change in pressure caused by their approaching the mountains causes rain, and the coastward side of the mountains is therefore very wet and suitable for a forest environment. Once the clouds get over the mountains, however, they have lost the majority of their humidity, and it consequently rains infrequently on the other side of the mountains. The mountain itself may get some runoff, but the land behind it and continuing on is going to be drier and drier, until you end up with desert. This is just one example; listing them all would be masochistic.

This is why a planet capable of supporting life cannot have a single climatic zone. Such a thing is impossible. At least Dune had an excuse (a by-product of the worms' melange production was oxygen), but the real world isn't as convenient.

-Hand

(Incidentally, Mars is not the same all around. It has ice caps.)

[EarthBorn]

I find this whole 'farm-planet' idea absolutely ridiculous.

You need a lot of Industries to power the field and besides, it is very inefficient to transport goods required for the farm planed and to export food so regularly.

[Aron_DeTomado]

In wh40k, a "farmplanet" might be simply populated by el stupidos, and then, once it was rediscovered, the Imperials thought it simpler to teach the people farming then teaching them how to build Imperator Titans.

[oneredpanther]

I don't think it's the Agroplanets that are really the concern.
Assuming that one needs an agroplanet to sustain the food requirements of an entire-city-planet (a-la Coruscant) then, in all honesty, that city-planet will probably be dead before it even gets hungry. How does it make oxygen? How does it stay cool? Agro-planets are the least of your worries.

[Scribble]

In 40k they have climate control regulators and so on. :P

But in a technologically advanced planet they could produce all the basic nutruitents they needed.

-Some kind of food algae that recieved 'power' [heat/light ect] from fusion reactors.

However that planet might have a borked ecosystem so is unable to suport 'real' agriculture.

I imagine agi-worlds dont mass produce all the food required for industrial-worlds. But rather Produce the luxory foodstuffs for them. Outdoor reared Meat, cerreals, fruit and so forth.

is that more sensible?

[Retroboy]

k it got missed, so I'll say it again.

If a civilization can afford to lift incredibly huge amounts of edible biomass out of a planetary gravity well in a cost-effective fashion, they more than likely will have invented the science to mass-produce that biomass elsewhere, and much closer to the destination, out of raw components and whatever energy is locally available, and do it for a lot cheaper too.

(Don't forget transit time too - your average red pepper isn't going to last months in transit unless you've also invented stasis fields.)

-- Retro

[Moe]

Retro, that last argument is easily defeated. Two words:
"deep freeze".
And since you're in space, you won't have to go through too much trouble to keep that stuff frozen either.

[Retroboy]

Moe, did'jever thaw out a frozen red pepper or a tomato?

Some things freeze well, others don't.

-- Retro

[Mac_Bug]

i dont see whats so bad about farm planets. Assuming that such an galactic empire would be well, galactic and majority of the planets started off being teraformed or are colonies, they would need to specialize in something. On such a grand scale the populace on any particular fringe planet may not be anywhere nearly as crowded as Earth is and they could only be considered as our equivalent of a city and its suburbs. That is not to say that the only thing that grows on planet China is Rice, but rather their major industry is the export of rice in the new galactic economy simply because conditions on the planets is so that they can grow rice better than anything else. Economics 100.

[STARSBarry]

hmm comon every one knows the answer GM, Genatic mods on plants make em into like uber plants that cant be killed take that millions of years of evolustion and just replace it with something better

[Ishaar Niirfa]

About singular environments (which is funny because earlier when I was making an argument about Kharak having to be more diverse everyone shot it down, oh well) they are fairly unrealistic but not completely. There needs to be a little variation, and yes, something that recycles oxygen but there doesn't need to actually be as much diversity as there is on Earth.

As previously mentioned take Mars or Europa. It is still believed by some (although not me) that Mars may still have microbes buried in its surface. True, this isn't much, but say you planted algae and thickened the atmosphere and you'd have a sustainable ecosystem (at least for so long as matters in a human timeframe). Europa is believed by many to have life beneath its icy surface and contains an ocean of water. So though Europa is a completely oceanic and icy world it contains life.

Star Wars and others who have used single environment planets don't usually bother to explain how it works, but that's not to say it can't work. For example, most of Coruscant is devoted to machinery that supports the planet. In orbit are giant solar mirrors which beam heat and radiation necessary to life back towards the planet and oxygen is produced mainly by artificial air recyclers (the same recyclers they use on their large starships). Can't say anything about Hoth but with Tatooine there is a suggested answer which is that it is a dried Earth. And just because it has no forests doesn't mean it doesn't somehow produce oxygen through other lifeforms such as bacteria or algae. I will concede though that most who work with LucasFilm and its subordinate branches like LucasArt, including George Lucas himself, rarely tend to clean up the messes in science they leave behind although Star Wars generally sticks to the known rules of physics better than say... Star Trek, which originally was mostly concerned with morality plays featuring technological magic (though it has veered slightly from that direction recently).

Also, George Lucas didn't "invent" or even popularise within science fiction planets with one dominant environment. Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov among others long beat him to it and probably greatly influenced Lucas' vision of Star Wars.

To those who have suggested agricultural planets can't work. First of all, all you need is a temperate planet without extreme storms and the like. Next, it should already be able to support life or be a terraformable planet with a plentiful array of minerals. Next, you make it based on trade of which it's main export is food and it's main import is technology (this is actually standard practice in sci-fi universes with agri-worlds, and one of the few messes not left uncleaned). This forms a healthy market environment and allows for the world to focus its efforts on producing food while also not being limited to tiny establishments.

A good parallel of the agri-world would be ancient Egypt, whose main export was grain and whose main import was raw materials. Rome, the obvious parallel to a city-world, was depenedent on Egyptian grain following its population boom. Egypt on the other hand wasn't dependent on Rome and though it could not produce all the raw materials it needed for its industrial purposes had a large enough reserve of its own to survive should the empire all of a sudden collapse (which it never did, when Rome fell Constantinople had already become Egypt's ruler until the Muslims conquered it centuries later).

[Mac_Bug]

I think what people are really missing the point is that in stuff like Star Wars, we're not really talking about PLANETS, we're really talking about a western movie equivalent of going from town to town

[c-web]

I'd like to see a warhamer 40k battle on a farm world

special rule for farm world
all men have to take a morale test due to crop dusting

or
special rule for fram world
all cows are counted as dangerous terrain and are randomly moved every turn :moo:

that would be sooooooooo cool :rofl:

[Trizzdog]

As said before, the planets would work like communities and trade with eachother thus replacing lost nutrients.

Or what would be more plausible is sucking the planet dry of life (ie overfarming) and leaving it to rot. Less costs that way :p

[Tails]

The solution to mushy frozen tomatoes has been found long ago. Genetic enhancement allows tomatoes and other vegetables to withstand freezing without mushing up upon thawing.

[Stripe7]

It is rediculous to have farm worlds but it is a facet of the game. Economically it would always be cheaper to build orbiting space colonies for food production than ship it in via FTL. It would be cheaper still for "industrial" planets to produce food via vats and hydroponics. The only food that would be shipped would be luxury foods like caviar, wine etc.. bulk foods would be rediculous.

[oneredpanther]

I think the point missed here is that any planet capable of generating a healthy supply of Wheat, Cereal, Meat, Fish and Vegetable palatable to Humans would infact sunstain human life also... therefore we would need a significant number of these worlds within reasonable travel time to make them worthwhile agricultural assets as opposed to wholly settled worlds.

Not in this millennium, sir.

[Ishaar Niirfa]

Not in this millennium, sir.

Err... which of the universes we've been talking about take place in this millenium?

[Tails]

It's been 5000 years and we've only been on the moon. "Millenium" is probably an understatement.

And when you factor in the occasional breakdown of society and Dark Ages, then never.