Originally published at: NASA plans to grow mushroom houses on the moon - Boing Boing
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Do you want mycons? Cause that’s how you get mycons.
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Moon mushrooms is certainly an idea. I can’t say mushroom architecture is a wholly original concept though.
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Very little of the latter. It’s rare enough that a handful of billionaires could very quickly use up all the accessible water ice for space colonies and rocket fuel unless the international community takes measures to stop them.
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… they just need to bring a time machine
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One of the more optimistic estimates that I saw was that parts of the surface may have 100 to 400 parts per million of water, or about one soda can’s worth per cubic meter. Even if it were possible to efficiently extract 100% of that water from each cubic meter of dust, that would mean processing a ludicrous amount of dust in order to create enough water to be useful, especially if you were planning to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel a spaceship. The footprint of this mining and processing would cover a huge area.
So not great to scar a once pristine and untouched moonscape but I would hope that if anyone ever does do that they at least use the robots to draw cool, large-scale pictures in the dust while they’re at it like those guys who rake the sand at beaches.
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How exactly are regolith and water all that mushrooms need? They’re decomposers that break down organic material using oxygen, which feels like a pretty critical detail to skip over. The article mentions providing these with cyanobacteria, but…that would add a lot of complexity to the picture. (There are lichens that grow using cyanobacteria, but much slower than mushrooms and only when they’re soaked.)
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… or dead astronauts 
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Is this already a sci-fi story somewhere out there? Astronauts that volunteer to sacrifice themselves, going ahead of colonists with a load of these structure-building fungi, their bodies’ matter becoming the initial basis for future settlements? It’s reminding me of something.
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In one of Cixin Liu’s short sci fi stories “Devourer,” earth is mostly destroyed by giant resource-stripping alien dinosaurs. In the end there’s not much more left than a puddle and some ants. Given the choice to leave on the giant alien ship the few remaining humans (who had earned the respect of the aliens in battle) chose to stay and feed the ants with their bodies in order to keep life going on earth.
There’s also the opening scene of Promethius where the alien architect seeds a lifeless planet with his own body by drinking some nasty black goo.
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the linked nasa article is from january 2020. the al jazeera-link is broken, and the illustration on top is not the moon, but mars.
oh, look, another illustration of a space/mars-hotel we see so often these days;
cozy. lots of space. that would cost quite a dime in la or nyc. but on mars? naaahhh…its cheap, right? sure, you would need almost everything coming from earth, but thats nothing compared what you can save if your use fungi. then you get mcmansions, not just a few lousy “habitats”;
come on! what is that bs? spacex-bet?
well, at least redhouse (see what they did?) may come up with something useful to build with fungi on earth, but I wouldnt bet on it.
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Note also that the inside of the building has conventional flat walls for hanging art on and rectangular doors for walking through and whatnot whereas the outside looks like a low-budget ripoff of Ego’s spaceship from Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2.
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… actual space hotel
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haha, yes! seems actually quite possible thats where they got it; gotg2 was 2017.
There are even books about it.
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