Log 1 of #Clothing and #Textile:
As expected, there’s quite a lot of info out there on how something like a t-short gets made. @ultimape pointed me to an excellent short docu on it that gives you a brief run through of the process, the tech, the people, and touches on the issues and political realities of it.
Along with other things I saw there seems to be one big point that gets hammered: the #garment industry is an extremely polluting and very water usage intensive one.
In the world of #eco-textiles , there are a lot of fabrics made from recycled things. Like recycled plastic or recycled clothing. Which, those are very good, and interesting. Obviously #textiles should be a product of the recycling process.
But I’m more curious about fabric produced with as little water as possible, from the very base of it to the weaving and dying to the final product.
There’s mushroom leather and fermented, I think starch? A ton more research needs to go in to this
And I understand that a ton of research is currently going into these materials so... we shall see. On my side, I’ll keep looking.
But today: time to look at the building of the habitat itself.
@thejf I'm curious where you're imagining it being built? My personal version of your "habitatzero" concept so far has focused on building in the desert as a proxy for building on mars.
The constraints of building on a planet are often quite different from one where you're building a space based habitat. Knowing more context I might be able to share interesting things.
Are you familiar with the term "homeostasis"? Its a good term if looking up biology stuff on the topic of life requirements.
@ultimape Being Canadian, I was thinking in the Canadian North, somewhere on Devon Island. But alternatively, somewhere closer to civilization, in case of things like medical emergencies and such that we can’t handle yet (it should still be an experimental prototype in the end, which means it’ll fail in a lot of ways)
If funding (NASA, ESA, etc.) is in the equation, that would play a role in where it gets built too. That’s definitely a big question mark, but originally, Arctic or desert, yeah.
@thejf oh! Devon Island does seem interesting. Seems it was part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haughton%E2%80%93Mars_Project and was a movie about that released in 2016 that covered the trip just to get there https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3190158/
I've been looking primarily at deserts because of the low water and extreme temperature changes (& dust storms). Arctic like conditions do seem to be a decent proxy (especially Devon), but haven't explored the idea as much thinking it's perhaps not good for fast iteration due to it's remoteness.
@thejf a lot of building projects are pretty generic tho. I was watching https://youtu.be/_kFC0CBjk1Q?t=10m28s back in august that talked about "BILL-E (Bipedal Isotropic Lattice Locomoting Explorer)" which uses robots+ carbon fiber rods to build structures. (think k'nex)
Ended up digging into it a bit more. Fascinating what they're putting together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRJHtg_jJw
I can't find, but there was also a contest a while back that showcased an idea involving ice based structures that was also promising.
@ultimape and yeah, #HabitatZero can’t emulate things like zero G and all the other stuff, but we can still build tools that are helpful (and also build it pretending we’re hiding from intense solar radiation and lack of atmosphere)
As for homeostasis, yep! That’s a really great way to describe the system, a homeostatic habitat!
That’s a big problem for #HabitatZero (well it’s a bigger problem for the world currently but yeah) #Water is so essential to everything we need and do, that in the habitat it will likely be a strained, scarce resource. So at this stage I’m thinking everything needs to be designed in a way to use as little of it as possible. Efficient water usage through and through. Water use should be a top metric for everything.
So, cotton, might be a problem. Which makes me wonder about alternatives.