Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu

Could you grow your own food on the moon? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down with Kevin Espiritu, the gardening YouTuber behind Epic Gardening, to dig into backyard farming, the future of sustainable food, and what it would actually take to feed yourself on Earth or anywhere else.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean I can grow my own food and not have to go to the store? Yeah, make the best of your backyard. Can I do it in the moon? I don't believe Fresh Direct goes there. Coming up, all the things you can do to grow food in your backyard on StarTalk Special Edition.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition, which of course means I got Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:36Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chucky, baby.

• 0:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, man.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing?

• 0:38Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm doing great.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lord Chuck Nice.

• 0:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Lord Chuck Nice.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 0:41Gary O'Reilly?

  That's right.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got a special edition here.

• 0:43Gary O'Reilly?

  What do we got?

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is on the future of growing food.

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I like it.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Cause I like food.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Keeps me alive.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, see, I would say this, the future of growing vegetables because you're not growing a cow. Well, not right now. We're not growing right now, we're not growing a cow. There might be a cow plant. But maybe we will be planting cows one day.

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Genetically modified.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, genetic, so that you can grow them in a pot. That's right, I would love it. Go water the cow.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, take us into this, what do you have?

• 1:16Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let me just stop laughing. Um, right, at home farming or homesteading uh, has seen an uptick in popularity in the past few years, which begs the question, where can we grow plants?

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 1:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Is there a limit to where we can? We'll get into fake light versus real light. Soil science and the science of why our guest, who you'll introduce shortly, can grow a whole farm in his backyard? How big's his yard? And with some of us can hardly keep a cactus alive, this guy's growing a farm in his backyard, amazing. Where does the future of farming and sustainability actually take us?

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm ready to get all in this, cause I think about this topic all the time.

• 1:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause when I go to Mars.

• 1:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't wanna eat poo potatoes?

• 2:03Chuck Nice?

  You want something more than poop potatoes when you go to Mars?

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think we can be a little more innovative than that. So we've got gardening YouTuber extraordinaire Kevin Espiritu. Kevin, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  What is up, gentlemen? Glad to be here.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, you're calling in from where? Where are you?

• 2:20Speaker 03

  I'm in San Diego, California, which in gardening world is called Zone 10B. And I'll get to that in a second, but it's a great climate for growing.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, it's a great climate for everything. Okay.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zone San Diego.

• 2:32Chuck Nice?

  10B. I miss San Diego, man.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't there a movie called Zone 10B? Or was that the?

• 2:37Speaker 03

  District 11?

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  District 11.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you for helping. I don't think there's much growing plant in District 11. Is Zone 10B next to District 11? I don't know. I don't know. So, but first, how big is your backyard?

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. The backyard I'm growing in now, it's about a third of an acre lot.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh! It's not the back 40?

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A third of an acre?

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we've never got that 40 acres, by the way. Just trying to let you know. I'm still waiting on mine.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, he's working his, he's working out the third of an acre here. I'm delighted to learn that because that means it's hope for people who don't have large real estate. That's out there.

• 3:18Chuck Nice?

  And you can have a garden anywhere, man.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because when I think of farming, I think of huge fields, you know, factory farming, aggregate, you know, big aggregate business. So, tell us, what, where do you come to this with what you do when you're back one-third?

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  And let me tell you, people, when you hear Kevin answer, Kevin does not look like he grows anything. He actually looks like he grows weed, to be honest, like marijuana, that's what, like in a closet.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's got the gimme hat and the unshaved face.

• 3:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he's got the beard. I mean, he looks like a totally like laid back, chill dude.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's the guy in the corner that said, I need some weed.

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me dime bags.

• 3:55Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, so.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he still there?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  All I'm gonna say, guys, is I've grown a lot of plants. I'll just put it out.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  A little secret for you guys.

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a reason why marijuana is called weed. All right. So, so just give us an overview of what you got going in the back one-third.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it didn't start out that way. I started growing in an apartment. Then I moved to like a small kind of front yard lot, like 15 by 30 feet. I grew, I grew enough in that space to poorly survive off for about a month, but we could talk about that in a bit. But now, yeah, now I'm on a third of an acre. And because we have a YouTube channel, we grow a lot of different crops. We're not necessarily growing it like an urban farm might, but we definitely could. Like, there's enough space there to grow hundreds and hundreds of pounds of produce per year. And if you're living there with yourself and a partner or something, that's, that's enough produce to live off of. But I've got, let's see, 30 fruit trees.

• 4:55Chuck Nice?

  Did you say 30 fruit trees?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, 30 different fruit trees.

• 4:58Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  About half of them are citrus, because it's San Diego and, you know, it's, you can pull citrus off there. And then I've got maybe like 40 or 50 different annual crops that I'm growing, depending on the season.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me, annual, you have to replant every year?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Annuals, yeah, they're gonna live and die in a single spring, spring to fall sort of cycle.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas perennials come back every year.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Gotcha. They're gonna come back every year. And then, you know, you get into some like weird, weird sort of situations where there's like a self-sewing annual, like chamomile. That'll, that'll produce its seed at the end of the season. It's gonna drop, go dormant, it'll come back. Still an annual, it still lives and dies.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  Not when Monsanto finds out.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Monsanto is now Bayer, just so you know.

• 5:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, continue, please.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so the whole project was like this, this idea of how far can you take being so-called self-sufficient on like a standard urban lot? So I've got chickens on the property, I've got rainwater capture, I've got gray water conversion. So taking like shower and laundry water and actually using that on the property.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the apocalypse, what's your address, so we can all move in with you?

• 6:06Speaker 03

  It's redacted. I hid it from Google Maps. No one can see it.

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, when the grid goes down, the water goes down, everything goes down.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  When, when infrastructure fails completely.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're knocking on your door.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  I got you, guys. I got you, guys.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 6:18Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you about the gray water, because that's interesting. Isn't gray water contaminated and what exactly do you use it for?

• 6:27Speaker 03

  It it is like semi-contaminated, hence the gray, because like if you were gonna use sink water, which is considered black water, you wouldn't, you wouldn't use that. You're not really allowed to.

• 6:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  So what I did is for my indoor shower and an outdoor shower that I have, I have a valve that I can turn. It's like a three-way valve. So I can either shunt the water to the city, or I can go into, in my case, my orchard is where I send it, because fruit trees need a lot of water.

• 6:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  The only thing you have to do is change the detergents that you're using.

• 6:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  You can't use standard detergents.

• 6:56Chuck Nice?

  That was my concern is, you know, I I'm not sure if, and I want, you know, tied tangerines.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you're saying sink water is called black water?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I think it's just because of the the different things that end up going down the sink ends up being not something.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry. The the water that comes out of the sink.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Out of the sink.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought I thought you were talking about the water that goes in the sink and black water.

• 7:20Chuck Nice?

  Not the faucet.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the stuff you drink. Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it. Okay, where's rainwater off your roof? What's that?

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Rainwater off your roof, I think it's just captured rainwater.

• 7:28Chuck Nice?

  That's captured rainwater.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  The beauty of that is like, the house I I bought, it's like a thousand square feet. It's not big. So the roof is a thousand square feet. And I believe it's like an inch of water on a thousand square foot roof is 600 gallons.

• 7:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Which is a crazy amount when you think about it, because an inch isn't that much rain. And so what I did is I built a system to pull that water off the roof, filter it, because you're gonna get like particulate matter, you're gonna get leaves and stuff like that.

• 7:52Chuck Nice?

  Leaves and crap.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it'll filter it, and and then it goes under the ground to a huge cistern in my backyard.

• 7:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so you have a cistern. And um, because the other way you can do it is a bladder. There are some people that use, like, it's just a flat, looks like a wa- like a hot water bottle. And then the captured rainwater ends up going into that, and then they somehow pump it out to whatever they have to use.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You can do that way, or you could do like rain barrels off of certain areas. It's like I've got a shed that isn't connected to that roof system, so I've got a rain barrel on that shed.

• 8:22Chuck Nice?

  Very nice. That's cool, man.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you said you could send water back to the city? Do they pay you for that water?

• 8:27Speaker 03

  You can't send water back to the city. Um, but what I mean by that is like, let's say my laundry machine, who, which has a gray water system on it. If I'm running, let's say, a load of laundry that requires a detergent that I don't really want in the ground, then I'll just turn the valve and it'll send that water output to the city.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's, I thought you meant-

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  To the rest of the filthy animals. They don't know any better.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It goes into the gutter of the city.

• 8:51Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, God. Now, now I think I'm up with all your, your lingo there.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you a conservation question. Are you seeing, because some people just don't give a damn, let's be honest, they just don't care. All right. Are you, but everybody cares about their money. All right. Are you seeing any significant savings in doing all of this?

• 9:10Speaker 03

  In water? So I did the math, I have it on our, our second YouTube channel where I kind of chronicled it over the years. I put a bunch of solar on the roof. That has ended up being a good investment. That's paid itself off over the last like five years or so.

• 9:22Chuck Nice?

  Very good.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  The water, water ends up being so inexpensive that putting in, let's say, a 2,000 gallon or $2,000 cistern, you will not pay that off for a very long time. So it's more of like a security or sustainability move that you're actually paying for rather than like saving money.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just so I understand, your solar panels, when it's raining, are not gathering sunlight, but they are directing water that falls upon them into your gutters so that you can collect it?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, exactly.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:54Chuck Nice?

  By the way, people, just if you don't mind, if you'll indulge me, solar energy is the cheapest energy on the planet. Don't let anybody tell you differently. There's nothing cheaper than solar energy. Just wanted to say that, you know, just in case somebody out there might want to drill, baby, drill.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:09Chuck Nice?

  You know, that's all.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Kevin, are you finding people are following your lead with this sort of project? Because it's not so much the financial investment, which we've kind of touched on, but people may not understand just how easy or how complicated it can be to, to install this sort of facility.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think showing it from the perspective of me who, like I was saying, prior to buying the house, I had a 15 by 30 square foot garden in my urban yard in San Diego. So when I bought the house, I was learning everything about owning a house at the same time as I was putting out all the videos. And so I think just learning in public, which is always what I've done on the channel, has inspired people to be like, it's really not that hard. It seems overwhelming. It's really not that bad. You can start small. Obviously, I went extreme. Our channel's called Epic Gardening after all. But, you know, condensing that back down to like a simple barrel, or, you know, a little cistern here or there, people have, I mean, I've gotten tons and tons of pictures of people doing it.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, let me just reaffirm what you just said. If you learn along with your viewers, that's a bond that is forever. Because you're like garden buds at that point.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I don't have like a formal training in gardening. I just, I got into it because I was addicted to playing video games and I wanted to get off the computer. And so, once I got into it.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your mama kicked you out of the basement.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Let's be honest, it was.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just tell us.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Come on, Neil. I told you that in confidence, Neil.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I'm sorry. You said it offline and now it just came out.

• 11:37Chuck Nice?

  But that's great. I mean, the fact is that, so, okay, here we go, guys. And so I'm an avid gardener. I love it.

• 11:47Gary O'Reilly?

  It doesn't show.

• 11:47Chuck Nice?

  I know it does not. It does not. You would never look at me and think this guy gardens. But, and I don't plant vegetables. My mother had an awesome vegetable garden growing up. But she also had a rose garden as well, which roses, F them. They suck. Because I tried to plant one and they hate me. But anyway, gardening is probably one of the most relaxing, rewarding endeavors that anyone can partake at, period. I'm, I don't know why I'm saying this.

• 12:19Gary O'Reilly?

  You're happy now, aren't you?

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  I just.

• 12:20Gary O'Reilly?

  You feel better.

• 12:21Chuck Nice?

  This is the first time I've ever told anybody I love gardening.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  I'm here for this, man. I'm here.

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  This is the first time I've ever done it.

• 12:28Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Kevin, are you old school? Drill a hole, plant a seed, water something, walk away, come back, rinse, repeat? Or are we into some very more modern techniques?

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you inventing new methods, tools, and tactics?

• 12:42Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say, I wouldn't be as bold as to say I've invented anything all that crazy in the gardening world. Definitely some weird tactics. Like, we put a video up a couple of days ago about growing zucchini vertically, which is a, it's a kirkbit squash style plant, so it wants to kind of sprawl out.

• 12:55Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Which can be annoying. And then there's this whole meme in the gardening world of, leave a squash on your neighbor's, like, doorstep day. Because by the end of summer, you just get so many squash that you're sick of them.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're not being kind, you're being, take my shit I wouldn't have eaten anyway.

• 13:09Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:11Chuck Nice?

  Cause squash is like a weed, too.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you get it, Chuck, right? Like, as a gardener, you're like, okay, I have way too many squash, I don't need these. But if you go to a garden, someone who doesn't garden, and you give it to them, you look like this saint, you know? Oh, and they grew this for me? And you're like, this is just my, this is my.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and really, it's your trash. It's your garden trash. Squash is garden trash.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's giving out the squash and not the oranges from his orange tree.

• 13:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, well.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  No one's taking my citrus, baby. No, I mean, I think, you know, when I started gardening, I didn't even have the 15 by 30 spot that I was telling you guys about. I had, I was living in a condo townhouse with a north-facing balcony. There was no light whatsoever.

• 13:48Chuck Nice?

  All right, well, talk about that, man, because honestly, I'm gonna say for a lot of people listening to us, you know, our concentrations are in cities, big audiences. I mean, that I've never done, as much as I love gardening. It sounds like more of a pain than anything to have a box garden on a balcony. What did you grow and how did you maintain it?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  I mean, I really didn't even have much of a balcony to get light. And so I was Googling around back then, this was like, maybe 13 years ago, I was like, well, how do you grow plants without light from the sun? And the answer was hydroponics. And I, being like a kid who grew up with an obsession of, like, growing crystals and all sorts of different science things, I was like, okay, let's go ahead and do it. And so I did it with my brother. And I got a five-gallon bucket, filled that bucket with water, I put something called an air stone in, kind of like the thing you'd see in a, in an aquarium that's oxygenating the water. I put some nutrients in that water, and I put a grow light on top of it, and I grew probably the world's worst tasting cucumbers of all time. And I fed them to my brother, and he said he almost threw up. But I got hooked on, you know, that, that

• 14:53Speaker 03

  aspect of, like, watching a plant grow and cultivating it.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, tell me more about hydroponics.

• 14:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what, what works in hydroponics?

• 15:01Chuck Nice?

  And what strain of marijuana is best to grow hydroponically?

• 15:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Now I know why you've got a love for gardening.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I got, I got these hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farming, just these, the things people are doing with plants. And now, and we were here at my office at Hayden Planetarium. We're in Manhattan, there are buildings in Midtown Manhattan where plants are growing on the wall. And then others, the people are growing on their roof.

• 15:27Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's like, is earth not good enough for you? Where do they, are these solutions to problems that people had encountered?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  I think yes and no. I think if you go to hydroponics and aeroponics, those first two, hydro, of course, meaning water, arrow, meaning air, ponics coming from a ponos, which means work. So these are methods of growing where either the water or air does the work. Instead of what? Instead of soil, right? Which is where

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Pretty much every, every plant is

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Neither of these are soil-based ways to grow. Um, and so if you, it's kind of, it's kind of weird because if you think about it, you think, of course, a plant needs soil to grow. And I might even argue as a gardener, that is kind of true. I do prefer it. But what, what a plant really needs is what's in the soil or what the soil is providing. And the soil is al- almost a medium for oxygen, water and nutrients.

• 16:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Uh, and so when you're growing in a hydroponic environment like my cucumbers, well, there's no soil. So the plant, you know, start a seed and like a little growing medium. In this case, it was something like called rock wool, kind of like spun molten rock and, and like this little fibrous cube. You put a cucumber seed in that, it grows up, the plant, you know, the tissue grows up, but the roots grow down. And those roots grow down and hit the water. That water does have to be oxygenated, which is crazy because you think, well, you know, plants are taking in CO2 and releasing oxygen, right? Roots though, respire, they're not photosynthesizing. So the roots are breathing. So the roots actually need Oxygen, otherwise they'll just, they'll simply drown in the water. You can drown them in soil, you can drown them in hydroponics. And then, of course, the plant needs nutrients,

• 17:04Speaker 03

  which would have been in the soil. So you have to add these synthetic nutrients in a hydroponic environment. And so the roots, in a hydroponic environment, you open that five gallon bucket up, and you just see these perfect white roots kind of sprawling out in an almost unnatural way, because they're not fighting against anything, they're not kind of crawling through the soil. And they look, they look amazing. Like, there's a whole thing in hydroponics of like, showing, showing your roots, and like, people will show pictures of them, all this kind of stuff.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's got the most beautiful root?

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally, yeah. And, but, but the crazy part is, it grows, plants grown hydroponically tend to grow faster, and they tend to have roughly the same kind of macronutrient profile, like when you were, if you were to eat that food. But the flavor is kind of up for debate. I think, to me, at least, the flavor does feel like a little bit flatter.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kevin, it seems to me that if you have some control over what's feeding the plant, then there's no end of ways you can manipulate that to create whatever flavor profile you might want in a food, and possibly even patent that.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How does this work with air? Because I, with the, with the fluids such as water, I can see you can dissolve something in it, nutrients can hang out. But air, how does it pull nutrients out of the air, in aeroponics?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  And yeah, in aeroponics, I messed around with this, I would say, a little bit, back in the early days of starting Epic Gardening. The whole logic behind the aeroponic method is, well, the plant, the plant roots don't really need to be bathed in water. They're, you know, in soil, they're not bathed in water. And of course, you have to oxygenate that water with one of these air stones, kind of pumping the dissolved oxygen level up. So why don't we just separate the water from the system? Imagine that same five gallon bucket, and we'll actually bring in sprayers that will spray or mist in like a nebulized sort of level, like very small droplets of nutrient-rich water. And we just will, they'll mostly be sitting in air most of the time. So it's not that there's not water used, it's just that the roots aren't sitting in water. And I don't know off the top of my

• 19:03Speaker 03

  head, like, is that more efficient than hydroponics or not?

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you nebulizing the leaves as well as the roots, or just the roots?

• 19:10Speaker 03

  I think most people would just do the roots, but then there's this whole concept of like, what's called foliar feeding or feeding the leaves, where some things are uptaken by the leaves and used in certain ways. But of course, the roots are like the most common way that things are being uptaken.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't nebulizer sound like some weapon on Star Trek?

• 19:27Gary O'Reilly?

  I love it.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will nebulize you.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Imagine this, an alien spacecraft lands, an alien comes out, and you are the first human it ever meets. What do you do? What do you say? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I offer a guide to how to survive that first alien contact, not only scientifically, technologically, culturally, and even socially. Not only for yourself, but in that moment, you are a representative of the entire human species. You want to leave a good impression.

• 20:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's go back. You mentioned the zucchini and I think zucchini and the vertical farming. Is that just another way of saying this is a space saver? Because we've got the old traditional, it's flat land, it's acreage. This now we can stack and stack and stack and stack and you don't have anywhere near the real estate that you would otherwise have.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, the zucchini method I was using was just in soil, like with a little steak growing it up. But you're totally right. Like some of the, so instead of like, imagine you have your soil like this, that's one.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Horizontal.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just one plane that you can grow on. And of course, when you're out in the Midwest farming soy, that's fine. Like you can just do that forever.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  But in, you know, in Manhattan or in Brooklyn, if you're trying to grow, I don't know, a very high end basil or something like that, that'd be really inefficient use of probably the most expensive real estate on earth, right? And so what they'll do is they'll create, usually it's like a hydroponic or aeroponic type system because then they don't have to deal with the soil. And they'll create like little channels or little grids or some sort of way of growing it and then they'll just stack those on top of one another.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  The problem then becomes the light, like you're blocking off.

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How to get light in there.

• 21:27Chuck Nice?

  How to get light in there.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:28Chuck Nice?

  What about yields? Because do you get the same amount of yield from the same amount of space vertically than you do horizontally? Or does it change?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Well, you'd get you'd get more yield on like a per square foot basis because you've got the Z dimension, right? Or the Y dimension now that you're dealing with.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll take the Z. Z is good.

• 21:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we take the Z.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  X, Y, Z goes straight up. We're good.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Z's up. Okay, great.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  And then, you know, you've also got like the density at which you can plant. So like, if you were, I'll just go back to my house, for example. Let's say I'm growing peaches and citrus in my yard.

• 22:01Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  If I'm a commercial peach grower, I'm growing those trees out to like 15 feet wide, 15 feet tall, basically expressing their full genetic potential. So I can only space these trees maybe like 15 feet apart or so. But here in my yard, I've got my trees like four or five feet apart and I'm doing a little more active pruning, a little more active management. And so my yield per square foot probably beats out the orchard, but it's it's just a trade off, you know?

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Chuck, the way you posed the question, I think you meant what's the yield per plant?

• 22:32Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's not the metric of measure here.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what's the yield per square foot.

• 22:36Chuck Nice?

  Right. And that makes sense.

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that wins.

• 22:38Chuck Nice?

  No, that wins.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you add a dimension to something.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, you're always gonna win.

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You win.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not not like they wouldn't try to squeeze out more yield per plant too. Like, let's say hydroponics is gonna get you a little more efficient growing. Like, that's also gonna happen. But they're, I mean, you're talking like, pretty raised within margins, I would imagine, on some of those setups. Like, I know that these companies have raised like a bunch of money, you know? So they're gonna do everything they can.

• 22:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this more intensive in terms of your management or anyone's management if you're vertically farming?

• 23:06Speaker 03

  For sure. Yeah.

• 23:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Because otherwise, you're just letting Mother Nature do her thing and you can sit back and go read a book or whatever it is.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I always like to say like, Well, people will say, I grew this, or I can't grow this. And the way I think about it, at least, is the truth is, no one's really ever grown a plant. Like, as a gardener, what you're really doing is, you're putting a plant in the environment in which it knows how to grow best. And so you're not growing it, of course, it's growing itself. You just have to kind of cultivate that right environment. So in soil, yeah, it's a lot easier.

• 23:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. So, looking at the nutrients, the one thing we always think of is going to need some sunlight, or light. You mentioned in your balcony, you had your own little grow lamp. Why is it that you've got some plants that will flourish with less? And some just won't flourish unless they have 12 hours a day?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, this one is kind of interesting. So, take like an eggplant. That's like a classic summer crop. It loves a lot of sun. And then take something like, maybe spinach, which is a leafy green. It grows low to the ground. If you were to give it a lot of sun, it might actually, the leaves might actually bleach and get damaged.

• 24:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  And you think about it, it's like, well, they're both photosynthesizing. So wouldn't more light just equal better growth across the spectrum?

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Naively, that's exactly what I would think.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Right. And that's, I think, really, that's what I would think too. But when you think about it, like, all these plants that we grow in a traditional garden, like even take a salsa garden, which we think of as a group of plants that makes sense together. Like, you got your jalapenos, you got your tomatoes, you got your peppers, your onions, whatever. From an evolutionary perspective, though, these plants did not just like grow up as a salsa garden somewhere in the world. You know, we sort of cherry pick them from around the world, in all these different environments where they adapted to.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have to grow tortilla chips, too. Do you have a tortilla chip?

• 24:51Speaker 03

  You just rip that corn, baby, just grow that corn, you know?

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I want it, I want it to come out as chips.

• 24:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Little chips.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  We might need to go into GMOs.

• 24:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Little triangle leaves.

• 25:00Chuck Nice?

  Triangle, triangular leaves that you can just pull off.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Become chips.

• 25:04Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  So, if you think about that, like, take that spinach. I don't know where that's, where it's endemic to, but regardless, wherever it evolved, it was low in the canopy. It was low in the entire sort of hierarchy of the plants around it, right? So it was basically fighting for photons to photosynthesize with. Whereas like a nice tall, like banana plant, or something like that, that's growing in the tropics, it has no problem with that. So of course, it can, it can tolerate more. And what ends up happening with like a shade plant that gets too much sun, if you put it in the wrong spot, is what once was good, the light, actually starts producing...

• 25:39Speaker 03

  I forgot what it is in the plant, but basically it starts producing too much of a certain compound that starts damaging the plant's ability to photosynthesize.

• 25:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  So basically too much of a good thing.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is if the plant wanted to survive but didn't have much light, it evolves to use that much light.

• 25:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if then it has less or more light than what it evolved to have, that can't be good for the plant.

• 26:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it didn't evolve that way.

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. And you see that even in some flowering plants, not even for consumption, but when you plant certain flowering plants that need, um, what they, they'll say, partial shade. That's where it grows best.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen them say that.

• 26:13Chuck Nice?

  They'll say the partial shade.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Chuck Nice?

  And the reason is you end up kind of frying the plant if it's in the sun all day long.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:21Chuck Nice?

  You know, so, yeah.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me, with the, switch over to LED lights, does, has this changed the response of the plants to the light? Because the sun, at least what the sun gives off that gets through our atmosphere includes some infrared, some ultraviolet, and the pure LED lighting systems we have today, you have the blue, you have the green, you have the red, the RGB.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  RGB, yeah.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not giving you infrared and it's not giving you ultraviolet. And whereas the sun has some of that reaching earth's surface. So are there plants that will not do as well under your LED grow lights than they would out under the authentic sunlight?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  I mean, I wouldn't go as far as to make a bold claim to say like, all of them would do better under normal sunlight, but I kind of do think that's the case because there are studies that prove not only do plants use far red, so like above the 700 nanometer range.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, the 700 nanometers is like the accepted edge of the visible spectrum where we would identify it as red light.

• 27:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can have light energy beyond that.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we call it infrared, but your eye can't see it.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  You can't see it.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. But, but of course, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, they have different sensors than we do.

• 27:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we should not be defining what they care about and what they want.

• 27:39Chuck Nice?

  Don't tell me what I can see and what I can't see.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 27:42Chuck Nice?

  I'm a plant!

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right. Like, the first sort of LEDs that came out back when I was growing cucumbers, Chuck, back in my old place. Yeah. They came out and they were called like blurple lights, blue, purple, red, because basically whoever was designing them back then was like, well, plants mostly use light between 400 and 700 nanometers, kind of like the visible spectrum. So they'll use blue light for vegetative growth. They'll use red light to signal flowering and stuff like that. So whoever was designing the lights back then was like, well, let's just give them exactly these ranges, like 450 nanometers or, you know, 660 nanometers, whatever it is. And then these days, lights that are coming out LED or otherwise are trying to express, like, put out more of that spectrum because

• 28:30Speaker 03

  it's been proven, like you said, Neil, like, they're using light in the far red spectrum. They're using, they're even using green light, which we didn't know for like a century. Because, you know, you always hear like, well, plants are green because they reflect green. And it's not entirely true.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just to, just to put some punctuation on that. So if we see a plant and it's green, it means it's sending green light back to you. And it's not using the green light, by and large, right? Which is a fascinating, we think green as nature, green is the color it's rejecting, right? So what you're saying is not all plants are rejecting all green.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Not all plants are rejecting all green. So if you take red and blue, just colloquially, those ranges, I think the plant is using somewhere between like 91 and 95%, depending on which, which color it is. Green, you would think like, well, it's reflecting green. So it's using like 0% or maybe 10%. It's still absorbing in the range of like 70 to 80% of green light.

• 29:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we talking mood lighting here for plants?

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 29:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Because we hear about plant stress. Are we now creating the right kind of light bath for specific plants? Are we at that point now?

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 29:39Chuck Nice?

  Should we also allow them to have a little Marvin Gaye while we're at it?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Play him a little music, man. Why not?

• 29:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, now I know if he wants, if he talks to his plant. Now I need to know if he talks to his plant.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  I don't, you know, I get it all the time. Like, do you talk to them? Do you name them? Do you, I don't. I'm a little bit brutal to them sometimes.

• 29:58Chuck Nice?

  All right. Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna eat them, there's no sense in like, you know, getting to know them.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Serenading them.

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you saying or implying that even though plants are green, they're not reflecting back all the green that they're receiving, they're keeping some of it?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean that whole leaves like normal plant leaves are absorbing maybe about eighty percent of of green light or so. So they're reflecting back a twenty, which is pretty much what we're seeing. But the the way it ended up working in the study that that kind of turned everyone on their head realizing that we actually do use green light with plants is that it's penetrating deeper into the canopy. So like the red and the blue light is getting used up first, absorbed at a really high efficiency. The green light gets deeper into the leaf, gets lower into the canopy. So it is being used. It's just that it's not being used as efficiently.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay, alright.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, plants just doing the best they can in this situation.

• 30:52Chuck Nice?

  Do with what they got.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do with what you got.

• 30:54Chuck Nice?

  Plants are like black people. I don't have no money, but we gonna make the rent, baby. Don't you worry about it.

• 31:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, we we hear about plants being able to adapt and survive in extreme conditions. I suppose it wouldn't be the same unless we asked you about growing plants in space and the extremes of the environments that would be encountered.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And before you before you answer that, can I tell you when I was in high school, I grew a plant upside down.

• 31:27Gary O'Reilly?

  It was Australian?

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I said to myself, well, does it really know which way gravity is? And does it really know which way the light is in advance? Because if I take a plant, turn it upside down, hold it with Saran Wrap, the soil, so it doesn't come out. And I have all my light at the bottom.

• 31:48Chuck Nice?

  From behind?

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From behind, that's correct. So the plant, it kept trying to go up, but the light kept it coming down. So it didn't grow in a straight way. It was like confused.

• 31:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On its way in.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  What plant was it? Do you remember?

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I I have to look. I'm sure I kept the notes.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And then were you growing it in like a chamber where the only light source was below?

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the only light source. It was a box. It was a box.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  That is interesting because I've grown peas upside down and I grew tomatoes upside down. The same thing happened, but my experiment was not one in which there was a controlled light source at the bottom. So it was just outside. And so it but it did basically, gravity was pulling it down and then it kept pulling itself back up towards the stronger light source.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It got the same results.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Stair stepping type of fact.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. That's basically the results I got. And I got an A plus on it, too. Oh, very nice. Yeah.

• 32:38Gary O'Reilly?

  So did you mark your own work?

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just to be clear, in high school, you normally take biology, then chemistry, then physics.

• 32:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in my high school, I took physics first.

• 32:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I took chemistry, and I took biology as a senior with all of these freshmen.

• 32:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was like the oldest kid in the biology class.

• 32:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, biology bully.

• 33:02Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Kevin, we're gonna throw you into space.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go back to space.

• 33:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, metaphorically. Are we gonna just take what we do here on Earth and just say, yeah, we can do that in space? Or are we gonna have to think a lot differently?

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Kevin, you know, we speak of the lunar surface, it's not soil.

• 33:17Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what the geologists call regolith, which is powdered rock.

• 33:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Created by micrometeorites that on Earth would be what?

• 33:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Burnt up in the atmosphere.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, as a shooting star.

• 33:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No such thing on, on the moon.

• 33:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, right.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They hit and they pulverize the rock. And it's been doing that for a billion years. So all you have on the moon is rock soil. And, and I, as I understand.

• 33:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Rock soil. I'm sorry.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as I've come to understand it, uh, the good earth is rich in microbes that the plant needs. So how are you gonna grow something where you don't have the microbes or the fertilizer? Uh, what are you gonna do?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  I mean, I honestly think you just can't, like, you're, you're right, I mean.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bummer, dude. Okay, we're stuck on Earth here, go on.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Regolith, like, that's basically dirt, right? And the difference between dirt and soil is dirt is soil, soil is dirt plus the life that you talked about. The microbes, the fungi, the bacteria.

• 34:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so if you can't do that on the moon, well, first of all, there, there's no oxygen, there's no atmosphere, right?

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd have to figure that out, too.

• 34:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, if we're growing plants here on Earth.

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's a side detail.

• 34:30Gary O'Reilly?

  I think we buried the lead here, guys. So if we're, if you're growing plants without soil here on Earth.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:36Gary O'Reilly?

  We just replicate that kind of practice.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  I think you'd have to grow them hydroponically or aeroponically in like a pressurized chamber. And I think you'd have to use artificial light, because what's the moon's, like, day/night cycle?

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moon's got light, we, no, no, no problem with light. Oh, moon, sorry, moon has a moonthly cycle. So a day on the moon lasts a moonth.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so then you're in trouble because plants evolve for a 24 hour light cycle, right? And so you would need to supplement with light. They can't, they wouldn't survive for what? Like 14 days of

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, 14 days in darkness.

• 35:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you have to like phase that somehow.

• 35:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just bring grow lamps.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  I think you just gotta bring grow lamps. I mean, basically just

• 35:17Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's what they do in every sci fi film. It's the, you know, the horticultural deck.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yes!

• 35:22Chuck Nice?

  They all have the horticultural deck.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. That's it.

• 35:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Aren't we going to just take genetically modified plant material with us?

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Gary O'Reilly?

  That has been built, constructed to grow in extremities to maybe deal with moons? I've learned a new word.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's where the word months comes from.

• 35:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The moons.

• 35:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let me, let me tighten that question. So I, as far as I know, plants like carbon dioxide. So if we're on the moon and we're all exhaling carbon dioxide, why don't we just capture that and stick it in the, in, in

• 35:53Chuck Nice?

  The chamber where it holds the plant.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where it holds the plant. Do we exhale enough carbon dioxide to serve plants? And then it's a, a cycle of life. We exhale, they absorb our CO2, they give us the oxygen. Can that be sustained? In fact, let me ask another way. How much plant life do you need to satisfy your daily ingestion of oxygen?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  That is such a good question. I wish I

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want to know that, right?

• 36:18Speaker 03

  I, I wish I knew. I don't know it, but I think there is, there's definitely an amount that, that like on a per person basis.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it one tree per person? That's a lot of, because a lot of trees on earth. I just learned, there are three trillion trees on earth.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, I don't believe that. I ran some math on it.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like, yeah.

• 36:35Chuck Nice?

  Three trillion?

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Chuck Nice?

  Not for long. That's right.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  We'll be cutting them down.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  You know what else you could do on, on the moon? I just thought about it, is you could go aquaponics. So we talked about hydroponics and aeroponics. We didn't talk about aquaponics yet.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Which basically is, because remember in hydroponics, aeroponics, you don't have the soil, so you don't have the nutrients, right? You need to input those nutrients synthetically. If you go aquaponics though, you, you have fish in that, that water medium. Those fish excrete ammonia that converts to nitrates and nitrates, which is used as nitrogen by the plant. So basically the fish become the fertilizer. So on the moon, you could feed the fish, the fish excrete, they feed the plants, and you can eat the plants and the fish.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, so the aqua refers to what in that context?

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Good question. I think just.

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  Just the water.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you just said hydroponics, the hydro referred to the water.

• 37:27Chuck Nice?

  That's probably why they made it aqua, because they're like, you know, Aquaman talks to fish.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  I think that's actually scientifically why.

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's the idea.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's interesting. So you bring some fish with you.

• 37:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Now you've really got the circle of.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Circle of.

• 37:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's interesting. I don't think NASA's thought about that.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  No, it's a pretty cool idea.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder, however.

• 37:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Water and weight. Everything is about.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Has a fish ever been brought to space? Do you guys know?

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, and I'd hate to be that fish. Because fish align themselves vertically, because they're skinny and long, vertically, because they know which way gravity is.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In zero G.

• 38:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you're gonna mess with that fish.

• 38:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That fish is gonna be totally.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hard enough when you pull them out of the water and they have to explain what happened back to their friends.

• 38:12Chuck Nice?

  That's why they all look surprised.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With their eyes.

• 38:15Chuck Nice?

  You ain't never seen a fish that doesn't look surprised. It's like, what?

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now you take a fish, not only out of water, you put them back in water in zero G, they'll be flopping. They wouldn't know which way.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  There is no up.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They wouldn't know which way is up.

• 38:33Chuck Nice?

  I don't know which way is up.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what you could do, this is all kind of pointless conversation. Because sci-fi people have figured this out forever.

• 38:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just rotate the spaceship.

• 38:43Chuck Nice?

  Rotate the spaceship.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  There's your gravity.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. Okay.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's that. So Kevin, if they use your recipe for cucumbers on the moon, is there gonna be a mutiny on the first moon colony?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I'll cut you off right there, yes.

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you're making nasty cucumbers.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  I mean, I grew the worst cucumbers of maybe anyone's ever grown. They were yellow, they were deformed, like they had all these deficiency. I still ate it, but, you know, it was bad.

• 39:10Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, are we gonna have to just, if we're interstellar travel, just come to the conclusion that, you know, flavors are something in the past?

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you get a flavor capsule. Flavor is just chemistry.

• 39:21Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's yeah, it's just, it's just a flavor thing attaching to your taste buds. Who, who cares what's delivering the flavor?

• 39:29Chuck Nice?

  So basically flavors become a condiment.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Oh, flavor as a condiment.

• 39:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. All right. Put some more flavor on it.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe you just grow like the most efficient vegetable you can grow and just flavor capsule it with like grow potatoes and just flavor capsule it.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no, don't. We're back to the potatoes. Potatoes always come back to poop potatoes.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so before, I want to take this into a sustainability question and maybe the transition to that is, tell me about the plot of land that you experimented on where you fed yourself for 30 days. And that was all the food you ate. So did you get your protein? Did you lose weight? Did you look pale and sickly? Did you look healthy? How much land? And what was the mixture of fruit and vegetables that was on that land?

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Okay, let me lay this out for you.

• 40:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And were you the only one consuming that food?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  I have to tell you the set of rules I gave myself to start the challenge.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  So I came up with the idea, it was like February of 2019.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it. Brilliant idea. Love it.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Right? I go, can I do this? And remember back then I was in a 15 by 30 foot gross space with like some raised beds and containers and stuff like that. So I gave myself that amount of space and then I also utilized like one of my friend's little terraces. And I say, okay, I want 30, I gave myself 90 days of lead time. So by June, I'm going to start the challenge. So I have to survive from June 1st to June 30th off of everything I can either grow, fish or forage for. Cause I knew right away, just off the quick math of like, there's no way I can get enough calories out of, out of this space. For a man of my size, I think I needed 78,000 calories for the month.

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean by fish? Use the fish as a verb. What do you mean?

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Like literally go fishing.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's allowed?

• 41:14Speaker 03

  I allowed it in the challenge.

• 41:15Chuck Nice?

  If you could fish, then.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  No, but hold on, hold on, hold on. This is why, this is why. Because, okay, name a, name a plant with a ton of protein.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know, what's interesting.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Legumes.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's interesting is that potatoes are like one fourth protein. The problem is they're a way higher percent water. So if you took the water out of potato, they have.

• 41:39Chuck Nice?

  You have a dense protein source?

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it just, potatoes are just full of water. That's the problem. But otherwise, yeah, so. Well, you look at nuts for protein. Yeah. So you didn't grow nuts. San Diego, that's a nut country, isn't it?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I mean, but I had 90 days, so I can't grow a tree from scratch, right? So it had to be produced from that moment on, right?

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. Gotcha. Gotcha.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  So, so here's where I go. I go, okay, I need 78,000 calories to live for 30 days and not lose weight. I even got a DEXA scan before just to see like what I was at, even my body comp to the point of losing muscle. And so I said, okay, well, I, I basically have to grow calories. I don't really, I can't really worry about the macronutrients of it. Protein, fat, carbs. I just need literally calories. And in 90 days, the only things you can do that are going to get you enough calories are going to be beans and potatoes. And I, so I maxed out on potatoes like crazy. I think I ended up.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The starches.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's like carbohydrate heavy.

• 42:32Chuck Nice?

  Protein too.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  But anyway, so, so I grew about 80, 100 pounds of potatoes and some amount of beans. I forgot what it was. Because the protein and fat, specifically fat, actually harder than protein to grow quickly. You think about plants with a lot of fat, you're thinking about like, there's like a coconut or an avocado or something. You can't grow those in 90 days. And so I did allow myself to fish just because I was like, I think I will seriously struggle nutritionally if I don't get enough fat. In, in San Diego, there's, and actually along the whole western coast of California, there's a fish called the grunion. And they'll do something called a grunion run. And they'll, they'll basically flop themselves like hundreds of thousands of them on the beach. And you're allowed to go harvest them with your hands. You can't use like tools. And that was happening in June. So I was like, okay, I'm going to bank on the grunion run for my fat.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What kind of dumbass species is this? To say, let me go on and flop around so people can take me, eat me. Life is too hard!

• 43:27Speaker 03

  I think it's one of those where like, there's just so many, it doesn't matter kind of approaches.

• 43:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Cause there's like tens of thousands of them.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And do they flop around only because when the tide pulls out or they just purposely do this?

• 43:39Speaker 03

  I think it's the full moons or something like that.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that would be if the tide, you get a strong tide. They beach. Okay. Maybe they beach, yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Well, what happens is the, the females come up and like dig a hole and like lay their eggs in it. And then the males come up and drop their sperm on the hole. Yeah, exactly.

• 43:54Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Always sex that is the end of a man.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  I scooped them up. So yeah, I mean, a huge, a huge part of my meals that month were what I called grunion potato pancakes, where I like mashed the potatoes and put them in a pan and like put the fish in that and then just ate that. And that's pretty much what I ate the whole month. I ended up losing 13 pounds in 30 days and nine and nine of the pounds, this is the part that made me so mad. Nine of the pounds were muscle. I just, I just ate my muscle away. Although I did make it to the end of the challenge. Basically, what I learned is that you need way more time than that. And honestly, you need like being fully self-sufficient on your own property is is sort of a fool's errand. Like, it's much better to have a community anyways. I grow this, you grow that. I go, I get my eggs from you, that kind of thing.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  I mean, that's the way it was before we had our modern day capitalist society, agrarian and trade and yeah.

• 44:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Bautista.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Hey, this is Kevin the Sommelier and I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  Are we just screwed when the apocalypse comes? We're just screwed, right?

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. What about like the victory gardens that people had in the Second World War to show your solidarity with the rationing? So in apocalyptic earth, you're one of the survivors, right?

• 45:35Speaker 03

  I would, I would make it. Yeah. I mean, I you'd, you'd put me in your apocalypse crew, I think, because I could feed you.

• 45:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Give us your address again.

• 45:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because yeah, no, I mean, the canned food can last essentially forever until at least the next civilization comes around. But.

• 45:52Chuck Nice?

  You can dry your grunnions if you have a cool damp basement and.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Just hang them out, you know?

• 45:57Chuck Nice?

  Hang them out and dry.

• 45:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in the salt. Yeah. Okay. So, so tell me about sustainability going forward. The with, with mega agri, what do you call it farming? Big ag. Big ag farming. Yeah. You know, that is the solution to our own problem, yet people are saying we shouldn't do that. It's feeding everyone. We, no longer is anyone saying, one day we'll run out of food. That, that is gone. Yeah. Whereas in our childhood, I don't know how old you are, I think we're older than you. In our childhood, that was the worry. The, the big, the big fear where the population explosion would strip us of all of food on the planet. Very Malthusian thinking at the time, but science has cured that. Right.

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can produce more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. So, how should people think about this problem? Should we cheer the fact that everyone is being fed? Or should we lament the fact of what it's doing to the environment in order to accomplish this goal? Hmm.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Man, I think it has to be a both, right? I mean, you're right, we grow, we grow corn, soy, wheat across most, most of the Midwest of the USA. California grows like 80% of the, the produce of, of the country, especially like nutrients and stuff. We grow, we grow such an incredible amount here, you know?

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kevin, my whole life I've heard about topsoil, but I don't have any understanding of it, even as a scientist. Because the seed grows up into the air, goes down with roots into the soil. Who cares about the top three or four inches?

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we should all care about the top three or four inches. The top three or four inches is basically where everything actually happens for the plant. So you're right, like the roots are down in the soil, right? And yes, sometimes those roots go pretty deep and they can mine for specific minerals or nutrients that they might need. But in contrast to like hydroponics, like we've been talking about, in the soil, there's basically what's called a soil food web. There's bacteria, there's fungi, there's insects, there's all sorts of creatures that are mobilizing the organic matter. Cause think about like a forest floor, things are going to fall from the forest, animals are going to die, insects are going to die or be consumed and, and defecate and all that kind of stuff.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  All of that material needs to be broken down to smaller and smaller particles to the point where it's effectively at the elemental level to be used by the plant roots. That's happening in a natural ecosystem by the environment in the topsoil. All of that is in that first. Three, four, six inches or something like that.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why isn't it in the six inches below that?

• 48:32Speaker 03

  I wouldn't know the exact maybe evolutionary ecosystem reason for this, but my hypothesis, I guess, would be that it's because it's efficient for the plant roots to not have to go that far to get the nutrients.

• 48:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that kind of feels right.

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That feels right. So what's happening to the topsoil?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  So we're losing it dramatically faster than we're it's being regenerated.

• 48:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Because we're the way that we farm in industrial agriculture is we're effectively, it's almost like you're growing hydroponically in the soil because you've you've now, let's say you've stripped all the topsoil, just hypothetically, right? Well, now you're growing in effectively dirt. There's not a lot of life in it. There's not a lot of nutrient content in it anymore. So what do you do? You big, huge machines come in and till in the synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that you need. So you're basically saying the dirt's now the growing medium and I'm taking these synthetics that I've maybe mined from some cave somewhere.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  And transported with fossil fuels, right?

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It includes the phosphates too and things? I mean, is that?

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it can, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so we're sort of like taxing the earth and not repaying it enough.

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  And there will be a point at which there's like you've crossed the sort of horizon of being able to do that. And then you you may actually see yields fall fall off like crazy because we're just losing it way too fast.

• 49:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you just said we can manufacture what the topsoil would have done if we till it back into the soil. So who cares at this point?

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 49:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've outsmarted nature.

• 50:00Chuck Nice?

  But no, what he's talking about is sustainability. Because what happens once you get dirt is now you must do that.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what?

• 50:07Chuck Nice?

  All the time.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what? I'll do it all the time. So what?

• 50:10Gary O'Reilly?

  But that's solving one problem to create another whole load of downstream problems.

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just solved that problem. What's the downstream problem?

• 50:16Chuck Nice?

  So the downstream problem with that is.

• 50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna let the man?

• 50:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 50:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one who has a YouTube channel on this?

• 50:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay. I was gonna go to an ecological, a climate and sustainability, but Kevin, go ahead.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Well, we'll riff off of it, Chuck. Like, I've got one for you. So California grows a ton of almonds, right? We grow most of the almonds in the country. So the way to do it efficiently in the industrial, you know, Neil method, I'm gonna call it for now.

• 50:41Chuck Nice?

  I'm just being, I'm just trying to put it out there.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 50:44Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead, go ahead.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Is, is you're gonna put only almond trees in the orchard, right? You're gonna strip away everything else. And what do almond trees need to produce the almonds? Well, they, they have a flower, that flower needs to get pollinated. How's that flower gonna get pollinated? By the bees that are native to that area typically? Well, there are no bees anymore because there's no other crop in that area that the bees would naturally forage from. So what has to happen as a result? This is just one example of a second order effect. There's a whole industry now called managed bee pollination where people will produce bees, put them in hives, drive them around the country.

• 51:17Chuck Nice?

  And allow them to pollinate.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 51:20Chuck Nice?

  But the bees are no longer naturally there because what you did was the other flora, you eliminated.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Okay, I get it.

• 51:27Chuck Nice?

  And that's what keeps the bees in the place.

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, so it created an industry. You know, have bee will travel.

• 51:32Chuck Nice?

  Have bee will travel.

• 51:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's all.

• 51:33Chuck Nice?

  So here's another. But wait, but here's another reason why. Because when those chemicals go in, a lot of times, they run off as well. So what you get is farm runoff of all of these chemicals that you put in. And everything's a chemical, so you know what I mean.

• 51:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Of course. Where's it gonna go?

• 51:52Chuck Nice?

  When I say chemicals, I mean, that stuff, the stuff that's needed. And what that does, it goes into our water systems, it goes into our groundwater. I mean, you know, it's not.

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because now I filter the water, so then it's back to the river. So now what?

• 52:05Chuck Nice?

  But now we've got another industry, right?

• 52:07Gary O'Reilly?

  So now you've put another industry in there. This, this goes into groundwater, it goes into the rivers, the rivers will go into the sea.

• 52:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:13Gary O'Reilly?

  And then we're just moving stuff into the ocean.

• 52:15Chuck Nice?

  We have a mouse problem. That's okay, let's get some hawks. All right, now we've got it.

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got too many hawks.

• 52:20Chuck Nice?

  Let's get the snakes. All right, well, now we need mongooses.

• 52:26Chuck Nice?

  Like, it never ends.

• 52:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  It never ends, and then in the end, you end up like manually reinventing what nature already was doing. It is the way that I think about it, you know?

• 52:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and how do we? Wait, wait, wait, we have to, that's a profound thing. Could you just say that again?

• 52:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, okay.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, sure. So if you try to solve every problem that you created from these large scale agricultural systems, you end up basically just recreating what nature already was doing.

• 52:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 52:54Chuck Nice?

  That's a great, that's a great way to put at it, to look at it.

• 52:57Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, you, you go around in a circle and come back to the point you originally were to realize you had it good, and then you just.

• 53:04Chuck Nice?

  Kind of like the war in Iran.

• 53:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what did they do before we did this commercial farming, which is commercial agro? Did they just rotate fields and not use them? And then you come back to them and, you know?

• 53:20Chuck Nice?

  Totally.

• 53:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  I mean, in the past, I guess you're kind of right, Neil. Like 100 years ago, you would have spent part of your actual life producing the food.

• 53:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  Right? Let alone, let alone buying it. But, you know, in the past, we, we used effectively like regenerative agriculture principles where you're not taking more from the land than you are putting back into it. Which right now, what we are doing, and when you, when I say taking more, putting back, what are these things that we're taking and putting? It's, it's the nutrient inputs, it's the, the topsoil loss, it's the organic matter that you're taking. Cause if you think about like a garden, you're growing, let's say you grow a plot of corn. That corn, when you harvest it out, you're taking mass from the system. You're taking it out. And yeah, some of that is being generated by, you know, photosynthesis and, and carbon that's being sort of sequestered from the, the, the air. But still.

• 54:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the CO2 in the air.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  From the CO2 in the air, yeah. But what people will do these days or stuff that, stuff that like we'll do in our, in our backyard or will promote is, is regenerative practices where you are adding back as, as much as you are. And, and yeah, maybe you are leaving something for a crop called a cover crop, which you're basically just growing to generate biomass that you will cut and leave in place.

• 54:32Chuck Nice?

  Leave in place.

• 54:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 54:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So with corn, lately I've noticed, by the way, I was astonished, forgive me for even being so ignorant, that every stalk of corn makes only one ear of corn. That felt so wrong to me.

• 54:46Chuck Nice?

  I didn't believe it until he made me go look at a stalk.

• 54:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't believe it?

• 54:51Chuck Nice?

  I did not believe it. We were driving down the road.

• 54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A whole thing.

• 54:55Chuck Nice?

  And it's near your house.

• 54:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Chuck Nice?

  Where all that corn grows. And he goes like this, you know, each one of those stalks is only one piece of corn? I was like, no, that's not true.

• 55:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one thing. Okay. So now what I've seen them doing is you harvest up the ear of corn and the rest of the stalk gets sort of mulched back into the field. Because all of that came out of the field at some level, right?

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, I mean, I think corn is an interesting one because corn is one of the crops, of course, that we've we've modified, right? So most most of the corn that you're seeing like in those fields is like a single ear hybrid corn variety that that is only going to produce one per stock. There are corn that produces more than one.

• 55:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like two.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Like two, you know, like two, you know? But yeah, like people will do that. I mean, we'll do that. Sometimes you'll cover crop and you'll you'll let like barley or rye or oats or something like that, or some sort of legume, because legumes do something called nitrogen fixation, where not only will they take CO2, like every plant will from the air, they'll fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.

• 55:53Chuck Nice?

  Into the soil.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Which is great. And so you grow something like that.

• 55:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called nitrogen fixation.

• 55:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they're like a pump.

• 55:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because the the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen.

• 56:02Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 56:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we got the nitrogen. And so it takes that and puts it back into the soil, which serves as in some way as a fertilizer.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, nitrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are the three major elements that plants need to grow, nitrogen being probably the most needed. And and so.

• 56:19Chuck Nice?

  I love that. I never heard that term cover crop, but it makes sense.

• 56:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Makes complete sense.

• 56:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Kevin, I mean, back way back, you know, when the agricultural revolution took hold, they would leave a field fallow to let it rest.

• 56:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that. We don't hear about that anymore.

• 56:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Right? And I'm I'm going to get to that follow up question. Then that, when you say cover crop, would that be you'd plant that crop in that field? And then that would then become absorbed back into the soil. You wouldn't harvest it.

• 56:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wouldn't harvest it.

• 56:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Are people out there still practicing these old, old traditional farming methods? Or is that just gone? Just give it chemicals and let's let's let's grow everything?

• 56:55Speaker 03

  The group that's doing it the most are these urban farming folks, who are farming on maybe maybe a third of an acre like me, although I'm not traditionally farming.

• 57:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Sure.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  I've got a I've got a buddy here in San Diego. He farms on an acre. I think he makes about 150 grand a year selling his produce at market. He he loves that lifestyle.

• 57:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give us his address, too.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got you. When you ever come down, we'll do a whole tour.

• 57:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  But he'll do he'll do a lot of that stuff, Gary. He'll he'll run his chickens through, which of course they're going to be eating, they're going to be eating insects, right? They're going to be taking a little bit of forage here and there. What are they doing? They're making droppings. Those droppings are extremely high in nitrogen, right? So you're using animals. People will do something called like, I think, silvo pasture, where they'll run like pigs through forests. There's like all these weird combinations people are coming up with to try to get.

• 57:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Sympathetic. And a symbiotic relationship between maybe animals, the plants and growing other crops around other crops.

• 57:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, what's that called? Um, nature?

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's where I get to. I go, nature's kind of doing it already, but you can come up with like really creative techniques, like running the chickens through the field, right? Instead of solving the problem that you created by creating this problem, by creating that problem, you know?

• 58:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Jonathan Swift, who's famous for authoring Gulliver's Travels. Oh. Okay, one of Gulliver's Travels, this 1726, I think it was, one of his visits was to the Legato Academy.

• 58:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 58:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which was a, a, a academy where there's scientists doing completely batshit crazy things. Okay. And, but one of them was, you read their experiment, it sounded kind of like, but then you think about it, it's like, no. So one of them was, they didn't want to have to till the soil. So they said, let's bury apples in the soil and then send pigs out onto the soil. They'll sniff, find the apples, dig up the apples, poop, and they'll keep doing this. And that way they can till the soil and fertilize the soil at the same time. Okay.

• 58:59Chuck Nice?

  And how'd that work out?

• 59:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It didn't.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  How about that?

• 59:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were already tilling the soils to dig up the soil to plant the apple.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See? So it's, at first, it sounds clever at first.

• 59:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 59:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not. So you were saying, try to double dewy on the, on the chickens. If they just poop on the top, does that get down into the soil or does that get washed away?

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Well, they'll scratch through. So like, you know, my, my hens will, they'll come out in the garden and they'll scratch through like three, four inches deep sometimes, hunting for little bugs and grubs. And so, yeah, it's, it's not like the most efficient.

• 59:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My hens, you heard that? These are my hens. My hens.

• 59:32Chuck Nice?

  Well, they are.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  I know. Thank you. Yeah. Don't come up my hens, Neil. You've come to my address for some produce, you're not getting my hens.

• 59:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you do you name your hens and then slaughter them and eat them?

• 59:44Speaker 03

  I don't eat them. If I ate them, I probably wouldn't name them, which probably sounds irrational, but

• 59:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's what we're just checking here.

• 59:51Gary O'Reilly?

  They do give eggs, though, right?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, cool.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, obviously, not everyone has a plot of land to grow food. But everyone who pays rent has some household square footage. And in principle, can buy a grow light for not much money. So how much of a difference can everyone growing something to eat make in this world?

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  It's such a good question. I mean, you brought up Victory Gardens earlier. I think back in those times, we produced something like fifteen to twenty percent of our produce as a nation from the Victory Garden movement. But that took like a world war to galvanize everyone to do, you know, so like, what would it take? I'm not really sure. If everyone did it, what do I think would happen to the food system? I mean, it would meaningfully change, but then you've got to remember, like, what are most of the crops being produced in America? It's like soy, corn, and wheat. Even though, like, those aren't probably going to be grown a ton, even for if, if like, tens of millions of people started home gardening. They'd probably be hitting the tomatoes, the basil, the this, the that.

• 1:00:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  I would say what you'd see the biggest impact is, is probably like, the entire culture's attitude toward sustainability and food systems would change for the better in a meaningful way. I don't necessarily know you'd like solve the topsoil crisis by doing that.

• 1:01:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it could, it could create a sea change in how people think about the environment that could have other beneficial decision-making consequences in people's lives.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Completely. I mean, before I started gardening, I, like I said, I was like addicted to playing video games. You know, I didn't know anything about this. Now, I have changed my entire life and habits because of, of just getting into hobby.

• 1:01:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your mother kicked you out of the basement.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  That's it, that's it.

• 1:01:37Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, well, let's

• 1:01:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to land this play.

• 1:01:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but before we do, Neil, um, let's, let's wrap up the final question. So Kevin, what's the question about plants and or food systems, if you like, that you think science hasn't answered yet?

• 1:01:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 1:01:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you waiting for scientists to figure out?

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  There's a lot, there's a lot of them, man, but the one that just selfishly I'd be interested in is how to impact flavor at a deeper level because when you think about crops that are like, like, like wine, right? People get very snobby about their wine. Oh, the terroir of this land, this or that. It's true for all crops, though.

• 1:02:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  You know, just, just because it's wine, of course, that's a high value crop. I would love to know like, what is impacting the flavor, let's say, of a tomato? I, I actually went to Bayer Monsanto once in the belly of the beast and I did a 50 tomato taste test and there's this whole wheel you're tasting these tomatoes on. I would love to know like, what can I do as a home gardener to impact the acidity of that tomato more?

• 1:02:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you need?

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Flavonoids.

• 1:02:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a home genetically modified organism laboratory.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Or something, or something like that.

• 1:02:40Chuck Nice?

  Or something.

• 1:02:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Yeah, so, so flavor. And, and by the way, the counterpart to that in the grown meat movement.

• 1:02:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:02:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know where that is now, but last I checked, there were a lot of investment money.

• 1:02:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Going into the, what's it called? Not grown meat.

• 1:02:59Chuck Nice?

  Laboratory meat.

• 1:03:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laboratory.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Synthesized meat, but it's actual meat protein.

• 1:03:03Chuck Nice?

  It's meat protein.

• 1:03:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's meat protein.

• 1:03:05Chuck Nice?

  It's just grown in a dish.

• 1:03:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's grown in a dish that you didn't have to kill an animal to provide. All right. Maybe the first one to get the stock.

• 1:03:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:03:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But after that, you didn't have to.

• 1:03:13Chuck Nice?

  What they found out is all the flavor is released, uh, when you kill the animal. So it doesn't work without killing the animal.

• 1:03:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if I in my laboratory, develop a cocktail of flavors that I infuse into those meat fibers and then I sell it as my, uh, you know, the first of these would probably be a ground beef.

• 1:03:34Chuck Nice?

  It's gonna be a burger.

• 1:03:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna be a burger.

• 1:03:35Chuck Nice?

  Definitely gonna be a burger.

• 1:03:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And so I, I'm gonna have a proprietary burger flavor.

• 1:03:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:03:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think that's the next frontier. Because like I said, flavor is just chemistry.

• 1:03:46Chuck Nice?

  It's true.

• 1:03:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just, what is the flavor molecule intersecting with your taste buds?

• 1:03:50Chuck Nice?

  So true.

• 1:03:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all it is.

• 1:03:51Chuck Nice?

  Back to AI.

• 1:03:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, there's one molecule, I learned this and I think it's true. That the molecule for mint, it has a certain chirality to it. Chirality is,

• 1:04:06Chuck Nice?

  A mirror image?

• 1:04:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is a, it would be opposite of a mirror image of it. It turns in a way that the mirror image of that molecule is not the same.

• 1:04:14Chuck Nice?

  It's not the same.

• 1:04:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a mirror image of it, okay?

• 1:04:17Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 1:04:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, that mint tastes one way on your palate. If you make the mirror image molecule of mint, you get the flavor of caraway.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:04:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:04:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the caraway and mint are flavor profiles of the same molecule written,

• 1:04:36Chuck Nice?

  Just flipped.

• 1:04:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flipped in a mirror.

• 1:04:38Chuck Nice?

  Right. So we need a flavor wheel, like you get a color wheel.

• 1:04:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and you get two of this and three of that and put it through this.

• 1:04:44Chuck Nice?

  Can I have a cotton candy burger, please?

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Wow, that's so interesting. Cause caraway's in the, like, the carrot or parsley family and mint's in its own.

• 1:04:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I'm just talking about the flavor.

• 1:04:55Chuck Nice?

  Just the flavor.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the rest of its substance, right?

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Still, that's still fascinating to me.

• 1:04:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, just to be clear, I heard that multiple times, but I've never officially read it in a journal and I've never seen anything to counter it. So I'm putting it out there. But whether or not what I just said is true.

• 1:05:10Chuck Nice?

  No, it's true, cause there's the same thing with banana and I forget the other flavor. But it's the exact same thing.

• 1:05:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, our crack team of

• 1:05:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Researchers

• 1:05:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just verified what I just said.

• 1:05:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, definitely. I believe it, yeah. Same thing with banana. It's the banana molecule, which gives you the flavor of banana.

• 1:05:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The other.

• 1:05:28Chuck Nice?

  It's the same thing, the flip of it, it gives you something else and I

• 1:05:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like what?

• 1:05:31Chuck Nice?

  I can't remember what it is.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Geez.

• 1:05:34Chuck Nice?

  I don't know, roquefort.

• 1:05:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Mr. Espiritu, you've been highly illuminating and enlightening to this conversation and we're delighted that such as you exist in this world and you have an ever-growing YouTube channel on this topic. And tell me about your second YouTube channel real quick.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that one's called Epic Homesteading. It was just the story of building out that property that I've been telling you guys about.

• 1:06:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright. So we can find you in two ways there.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and what's in you, and so we can find you, what's the name of your YouTube channel?

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Epic Gardening.

• 1:06:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Epic gardening and epic gardening and epic homesteading. There you go. That works. That totally works. Well, congratulations on your following and the success that you've produced. And I love people just getting the job done themselves. Yeah. And that and now with YouTube and other platforms, we can all participate. Right. Vicariously with your experiments and your successes. And vicarious is the word because I'm going to Whole Foods.

• 1:06:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude, we gotta call it quits there. But this entire show, you kept saying we. So who's behind the scenes there? Or are you a puppet?

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  I'm simply, I'm simply the face, Neil, the beautiful face.

• 1:06:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The face of what? Well, who do you have behind the scenes there?

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Well, no, I mean, Epic Gardening, it started as a little blog back in the day. Became a YouTube channel. It's now a team of 55 people. We actually, yeah, we own a seed company. So we sell 750, 800 varieties of seed around the whole country. And so when I say we, I mean like the team of gardeners at Epic, which includes master horticulturists, master gardeners, et cetera, and me, the guy who.

• 1:07:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, we got stuck with you when we could have had a master horticulturist?

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  You could have. I know. I know. I know. They just put the, they put the face on for you guys.

• 1:07:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. All right, dude. Keep up the good work. Keep it up. Keep it going. It was a delight to have you. And good to see that it's become an empire, a seed empire. Yeah. We're all, we're all behind you on this. And next time, give us your address. So in the apocalypse, we're bunking at your place.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  I'll send you guys an email. I got you guys covered. All right. Take care.

• 1:07:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, guys. Bye.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Peace out.

• 1:07:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm. So this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. You're coming up with these special editions? Yeah, I mean, you go credit the lane over in LA. Yeah, we have our LA office as part of this, part of the special edition portfolio. But there's, there's still so much to, to land on. Yeah. All right. All right. Chuck, good to have you always. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk Special Edition, all about farming in your back 40. Nice. Except you don't have 40, you do it in your back one third. Yeah. Of an acre. And if you don't have 40 acres and a mule, don't expect it.

• 1:08:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking after.