The history of artificial biospheres: why a space greenhouse is needed. Ecosystem is an elementary unit of the biosphere What an ecosystem receives from space
Scanned and processed by Yuri Abolonko (Smolensk)
NEW IN LIFE, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
SIGNED POPULAR SCIENTIFIC SERIES
COSMONAUTICS, ASTRONOMY
7/1989
Published monthly since 1971.
Yu. I. Grishin
ARTIFICIAL SPACE ECOSYSTEMS
In the appendix of this number:
SPACE TOURISM
CHRONICLE OF COSMONAUTICS
ASTRONOMY NEWS
Znanie Publishing House Moscow 1989
BBK 39.67
D 82
Editor I. G. VIRKO
| Introduction | 3 |
| Man in a natural ecosystem | 5 |
| Crewed spaceship - artificial ecosystem | 11 |
| The relay race of substances in the biological cycle | 21 |
| Are ecosystems efficient? | 26 |
| Artificial and natural biosphere ecosystems: similarities and differences | 32 |
| On biological life support systems for space crews | 36 |
| Green plants as the main link in biological life support systems | 39 |
| Achievements and prospects | 44 |
| Conclusion | 53 |
| Literature | 54 |
ATTACHMENT | |
| Space tourism | 55 |
| Chronicle of astronautics | 57 |
| Astronomy news | 60 |
Grishin Yu. I.
| D 82 |
ISBN 5-07-000519-7
The brochure is devoted to the problems of life support for spacecraft crews and future long-term functioning space structures. Various models of artificial ecological systems, including humans and other biological links, are considered. The brochure is intended for a wide range of readers.
3500000000ББК 39.67
ISBN 5-07-000519-7© Znanie Publishing House, 1989
INTRODUCTION
The beginning of the XXI century can go down in the history of the development of earthly civilization as a qualitatively new stage in the exploration of near-solar space: the direct settlement of natural and artificially created space objects with a long stay of people on these objects.
It seems that quite recently the first artificial satellite of the Earth (1957) was launched into near-earth space orbit, the first flyby and photographing of the far side of the Moon (1959), the first man visited space (Yu.A. Gagarin, 1961), shown on television an exciting the moment of manned spacewalk (A. A. Leonov, 1965) and the first steps of cosmonauts on the lunar surface are demonstrated (N. Armstrong and E. Aldrin, 1969). But every year these and many other outstanding events of the space age are becoming a thing of the past and become part of history. They are, in fact, only the beginning of the implementation of the ideas formulated by the great K.E. Tsiolkovsky, who considered space not only as an astronomical space, but also as a habitat and human life in the future. He believed that "if life did not spread throughout the entire universe, if it were attached to the planet, then this life would often be imperfect and subject to a sad end" (1928).
Today, possible variants of human biological evolution are already predicted in connection with the resettlement of a significant part of the population outside the Earth, possible models of space exploration are being developed, and the transforming influence of space programs on nature, economy and social relations is estimated. The problems of partial or complete self-sufficiency of settlements in space with the help of closed biotechnical life support systems, the creation of lunar and planetary bases, the space industry and construction, the use of extraterrestrial energy sources and materials are also considered and solved.
The words of KE Tsiolkovsky that “humanity will not remain forever on Earth, but in pursuit of light and space, will first timidly penetrate beyond the atmosphere, and then conquer the entire solar space” (1911) are beginning to come true.
At the recent international meetings and forums on cooperation in space in the interests of further expanding scientific research in near-Earth and near-solar space, the study of Mars, the Moon, and other planets of the solar system, hopes were expressed that the implementation of large space programs requiring enormous material and technical and financial costs, will be carried out by the joint efforts of many countries in the framework of international cooperation. "Only the collective mind of mankind is capable of moving to the heights of near-earth space and further to the near-solar and stellar space," said Mikhail Gorbachev in his address to foreign representatives of the communist movement - participants in the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Great October Revolution.
One of the most important conditions for further human exploration of outer space is to ensure the life and safe activities of people during their prolonged stay and work at space stations, spacecraft, planetary and lunar bases remote from the Earth.
The most expedient way to solve this most important problem, as many domestic and foreign researchers believe today, is to create closed biotechnical life support systems in long-term inhabited space structures, i.e., artificial space ecological systems that include humans and other biological links.
In this brochure, we will try to outline the basic principles of building such systems, provide information on the results of large ground experiments carried out in preparation for the creation of space biotechnical life support systems, indicate the problems that still have to be solved on Earth and in space in order to ensure the required reliability of these systems in space conditions.
HUMAN IN THE NATURAL ECOSYSTEM
Before sending a person on a long space journey, let us first try to answer the questions: what does he need to live normally and work fruitfully on Earth, and how is the problem of human life support on our planet being solved?
Answers to these questions are needed to create life support systems for crews on manned spaceships, orbital stations and alien facilities and bases. We can rightfully regard our Earth as a huge spacecraft of natural origin, which has been performing its endless orbital space flight around the Sun for 4.6 billion years now. The crew of this ship today consists of 5 billion people. The rapidly growing population of the Earth, which by the beginning of the XX century. was 1.63 billion people, and on the threshold of the XXI century. should already reach 6 billion, the best evidence of the existence of a sufficiently effective and reliable mechanism for human life support on Earth.
So, what does a person need on Earth to ensure his normal life and activity? It is hardly possible to give a short but exhaustive answer: all aspects of a person's life, activities and interests are too extensive and multifaceted. Recover in detail at least one day of your life, and you will be convinced that a person needs not so little.
Satisfaction of human needs for food, water and air, related to basic physiological needs, is the main condition for his normal life and activity. However, this condition is inextricably linked with another: the human body, like any other living organism, actively exists due to the exchange of substances inside the body and with the external environment.
Consuming oxygen, water, nutrients, vitamins, mineral salts from the environment, the human body uses them to build and renew its organs and tissues, while receiving all the energy necessary for life from food proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Waste products are removed from the body into the environment.
As you know, the intensity of metabolism and energy in the human body is such that without oxygen an adult can exist for only a few minutes, without water - about 10 days, and without food - up to 2 months. The external impression that the human body does not undergo changes is deceptive and incorrect. Changes in the body are ongoing. According to A.P. Myasnikov (1962), during the day in an adult human body weighing 70 kg, 450 billion erythrocytes, from 22 to 30 billion leukocytes, from 270 to 430 billion platelets are replaced and die, about 125 g of proteins are split , 70 g of fat and 450 g of carbohydrates with the release of more than 3000 kcal of heat, 50% of the epithelial cells of the gastrointestinal tract, 1/75 of the bone cells of the skeleton and 1/20 of all integumentary skin cells of the body are restored and die (i.e. through every 20 days a person completely "changes the skin"), about 140 hairs on the head and 1/150 of all eyelashes, etc., fall out and are replaced by new ones. At the same time, on average, 23 040 breaths are made, 11 520 liters pass through the lungs air, 460 liters of oxygen are absorbed, 403 liters of carbon dioxide are excreted from the body and 1.2-1.5 liters of urine containing up to 30 g of solid substances evaporates through the lungs 0.4 liters and is excreted with sweat about 0.6 liters of water containing 10 g of dense substances, 20 g of sebum is formed.
Such is the intensity of human metabolism in just one day!
Thus, a person constantly, throughout his life, releases metabolic products and heat energy formed in the body as a result of the breakdown and oxidation of food, the release and transformation of chemical energy stored in food. The released metabolic products and heat should be constantly or periodically removed from the body, maintaining the quantitative level of metabolism in full accordance with the degree of its physiological, physical and mental activity and ensuring the balance of the body's metabolism with the environment in terms of matter and energy.
Everyone knows how these basic physiological needs of a person are realized in everyday real life: the five-billion-dollar crew of the spacecraft "planet Earth" receives or produces everything necessary for its life on the basis of the reserves and products of the planet, which feeds, drinks and clothes it, contributes to its increase , protects with its atmosphere all living things from the adverse effects of cosmic rays. Here are a few figures that clearly characterize the scale of the main "trade" between man and nature.
The first constant human need is to breathe air. "You can't breathe in the air" - says the Russian proverb. If each person needs an average of 800 grams of oxygen every day, then the entire population of the Earth should consume 1.5 billion tons of oxygen per year. The Earth's atmosphere has huge renewable oxygen reserves: with a total weight of the Earth's atmosphere of about 5 ∙ \u200b\u200b10 15 tons, oxygen is approximately 1/5, which is almost 700 thousand times more than the annual oxygen consumption of the entire population of the Earth. Of course, in addition to people, the oxygen of the atmosphere is used by the animal world, and is also spent on other oxidative processes, the scale of which is enormous on the planet. However, the reverse reduction processes are no less intense: thanks to photosynthesis due to the radiant energy of the Sun in plants of land, seas and oceans, the constant binding of carbon dioxide released by living organisms in oxidative processes into various organic compounds with the simultaneous release of molecular oxygen is carried out. According to the calculations of geochemists, all plants on the Earth emit 400 billion tons of oxygen annually, while binding 150 billion tons of carbon (from carbon dioxide) with 25 billion tons of hydrogen (from water). Nine-tenths of this production comes from aquatic plants.
Consequently, the issue of supplying a person with atmospheric oxygen is successfully solved on Earth mainly through the processes of photosynthesis in plants.
The next most important human need is water.
In the human body, it is the environment in which numerous biochemical reactions of metabolic processes take place. Making up 2/3 of a person's body weight, water plays a huge role in ensuring his life. Water is associated not only with the intake of nutrients into the body, their absorption, distribution and assimilation, but also the release of the final metabolic products.
Water enters the human body as a drink and with food. The amount of water required by the body of an adult varies from 1.5 - 2 to 10 - 15 liters per day and depends on his physical activity and environmental conditions. Dehydration of the body or excessive restriction in water intake leads to a sharp disruption of its functions and to poisoning by metabolic products, in particular nitrogenous.
An additional amount of water is necessary for a person to provide sanitary and household and household needs (washing, washing, production, animal husbandry, etc.). This amount significantly exceeds the physiological norm.
The amount of water on the Earth's surface is enormous; it is over 13.7 ∙ 10 8 km 3 in volume. However, supplies of fresh water suitable for drinking purposes are still limited. The amount of precipitation (fresh water), falling on average per year on the surface of the continents as a result of the water cycle on Earth, is only about 100 thousand km 3 (1/5 of the total precipitation on Earth). And only a small part of this amount is effectively used by humans.
Thus, the reserves of water on the "Earth" spacecraft can be considered unlimited, but the consumption of pure fresh water requires an economical approach.
Food serves the human body as a source of energy and substances involved in the synthesis of constituent parts of tissues, in the renewal of cells and their structural elements. In the body, the processes of biological oxidation of proteins, fats and carbohydrates from food are continuously carried out. A complete food should include the required amounts of amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Food substances, as a rule, are broken down by enzymes in the digestive tract to simpler, low molecular weight compounds (amino acids, monosaccharides, fatty acids, and many others), are absorbed and carried by the blood throughout the body. The end products of food oxidation are most often carbon dioxide and water, which are excreted from the body as waste products. The energy released during the oxidation of food is partly stored in the body in the form of energetically enriched compounds, and partly converted into heat and dissipated in the environment.
The amount of food the body needs depends mainly on the intensity of its physical activity. The energy of the basic metabolism, that is, such a metabolism, when a person is in complete rest, averages 1700 kcal per day (for men under the age of 30 weighing up to 70 kg). In this case, it is spent only on the implementation of physiological processes (respiration, heart function, intestinal peristalsis, etc.) and ensuring the constancy of normal body temperature (36.6 ° C).
Physical and mental activity of a person requires an increase in the expenditure of energy by the body and the consumption of more food. It was found that the daily energy expenditure by a person during mental and physical work of moderate severity is about 3000 kcal. The same calorie content should be the daily diet of a person. The calorie content of the diet is roughly calculated based on the known values \u200b\u200bof the heat released during the complete oxidation of each gram of proteins (4.1 kcal), fats (9.3 kcal) and carbohydrates (4.1 kcal). The appropriate ratio of proteins, fats and carbohydrates in the diet is established by medicine in accordance with the physiological needs of a person and includes from 70 to 105 g of proteins, from 50 to 150 g of fats and from 300 to 600 g of carbohydrates within one value of the caloric content of the diet. Variations in the composition of the diet for proteins, fats and carbohydrates arise, as a rule, due to changes in the physical activity of the body, but also depend on a person's habits, national traditions in nutrition, the availability of a particular food product and, of course, specific social opportunities for satisfying nutritional needs.
Each of the nutrients has specific functions in the body. This is especially true for proteins that contain nitrogen, which is not part of other nutrients, but is necessary for the restoration of its own proteins in the human body. It is estimated that in an adult's body, at least 17 g of its own proteins are destroyed per day, which must be restored through food. Consequently, this amount of protein is the minimum required in the diet of every person.
Fats and carbohydrates can be largely substituted for each other, but up to certain limits.
Ordinary human food fully covers the body's need for proteins, fats and carbohydrates, as well as supplies it with the necessary minerals and vitamins.
However, in contrast to unlimited supplies of oxygen (air) and drinking water, which is still sufficient on the planet and the consumption of which is strictly normalized only in certain, as a rule, arid regions, the amount of food products is limited by the low productivity of the natural trophic (food) cycle, which consists of three basic levels: plants - animals - people. Indeed, plants form biomass using only 0.2% of the energy coming to Earth from sunlight. Consuming plant biomass for food, animals spend for their own needs no more than 10 - 12% of the energy assimilated by them. Ultimately, a person, eating food of animal origin, provides the energy needs of his body with a very low coefficient of use of the initial solar energy.
Satisfying nutritional needs has always been the most difficult human task. The passive use of nature's capabilities in this direction is limited, since most of the world is covered by oceans and deserts with low biological productivity. Only certain regions of the Earth, characterized by stable favorable climatic conditions, provide a high primary productivity of substances, by the way, which are far from always acceptable from the standpoint of human nutritional needs. The growth of the Earth's population, its dispersal across all continents and geographic zones of the planet, including zones with unfavorable climatic conditions, as well as the gradual depletion of natural food sources have led to a state where satisfying food needs on Earth has grown into a common human problem. Today it is believed that the global deficit of dietary protein alone is 15 million tons per year. This means that at least 700 million people worldwide are systematically undernourished. And this is despite the fact that humanity at the end of the XX century. It is distinguished in general by a fairly high social organization, major achievements in the development of science, technology, industry and agricultural production, a deep understanding of its unity in the composition of the biosphere of the planet.
Food is an important environmental factor not only for humans, but for all animals. Depending on the availability of food, its variety, quality and quantity, the characteristics of the population of living organisms (fertility and mortality, life expectancy, rate of development, etc.) can change significantly. Food (trophic) connections between living organisms, as will be shown below, underlie both the biospheric (terrestrial) biological cycle of substances and artificial ecological systems, including humans.
For a long time, the Earth will be able to provide the people living on it with everything they need, if mankind will use the resources of the planet more rationally and carefully, resolve the issues of transforming nature in an environmentally competent manner, exclude the arms race and put an end to nuclear weapons.
The scientific basis for solving the problem of human life support on Earth, formulated by V.I. Vernadsky, is the transition of the Earth's biosphere into the noosphere, i.e., into a biosphere that has been changed by scientific thought and transformed to meet all the needs of a numerically growing humanity (the sphere of reason). V.I.Vernadsky assumed that, having originated on Earth, the noosphere, as man explores circumstellar space, should turn into a special structural element of space.
CREWED SPACE SHIP - ARTIFICIAL ECOSYSTEM
How to solve the problem of providing the crew of the spacecraft with a variety of fresh food, clean water and life-giving air? Naturally, the simplest answer is to take everything you need with you. This is done in cases of short-term manned flights.
As the flight duration increases, more supplies are required. Therefore, it is necessary to regenerate some consumable substances (for example, water), process human waste and waste from technological processes of some ship systems (for example, regenerable carbon dioxide sorbents) to reuse these substances and reduce the initial reserves.
The ideal solution seems to be the implementation of a complete (or almost complete) circulation of substances inside a limited volume of an inhabited space "house". However, such a complex solution can be beneficial and practically feasible only for large space missions lasting more than 1.5 - 3 years (A. M. Genin, D. Talbot, 1975). The decisive role in creating the circulation of substances in such expeditions is assigned, as a rule, to the processes of biosynthesis. The functions of supplying the crew with food, water and oxygen, as well as removing and processing metabolic products and maintaining the required parameters of the crew's habitat on a ship, station, etc., are assigned to the so-called life support systems (LSS). A schematic representation of the main types of LSS for space crews is shown in Fig. one.
 Fig. 1. Diagrams of the main types of life support systems for space crews: 1 - system on stocks (all waste is removed); 2 - a system based on stocks with partial physical and chemical regeneration of substances (FHR) (part of the waste is removed, part of the stock can be renewed); 3 - system with partial FHR and partial biological regeneration of substances by plants (BR) with a waste correction unit (BC); 4 - a system with complete closed regeneration of substances (stocks are limited by microadditives). Designations: E - radiant or thermal energy, IE - energy source, O - waste, BB - bioblock with animals, dotted line - optional process |
LSS of space crews are very complex complexes. Three decades of the space era have confirmed the sufficient efficiency and reliability of the created LSS that have successfully operated on the Soviet spacecraft Vostok and Soyuz, the American Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, as well as on the Salyut and Skylab orbital stations. ". The work of the Mir research complex with an improved life support system on board continues. All these systems have provided flights for more than 200 cosmonauts from different countries.
The principles of construction and operation of LSS, used and are being used at present for space flights, are widely known. They are based on the application of physical and chemical regeneration processes. At the same time, the problem of using biosynthesis processes in space LSS, and even more so the problem of constructing closed biotechnical LSS for space flights, still remain open.
There are various, sometimes directly opposite points of view on the possibility and expediency of the practical implementation of such systems in general and in spacecraft in particular. As arguments against, the following are cited: complexity, lack of study, energy intensity, unreliability, inability, etc. However, the overwhelming majority of experts consider all these issues to be solved, and the use of biotechnical LSS as part of future large space settlements, lunar, planetary and interplanetary bases and others remote extraterrestrial structures - inevitable.
The inclusion of the crew in the LSS along with numerous technical devices of biological links, the functioning of which is carried out according to the complex laws of the development of living matter, requires a qualitatively new, ecological approach to the formation of biotechnological LSS, in which a stable dynamic balance and consistency of the flows of matter and energy in all links must be achieved. systems. In this sense, any manned spacecraft should be considered as an artificial ecological system.
An inhabited spacecraft includes at least one actively functioning biological link - a man (crew) with its microflora. At the same time, man and microflora exist in interaction with the environment artificially created in the spacecraft, providing a stable dynamic balance of the biological system in terms of the flows of matter and energy.
Thus, even with the full provision of the life of the crew in the spacecraft at the expense of the reserves of substances and in the absence of other biological links, the manned spacecraft is already an artificial space ecological system. It can be completely or partially isolated in substance from the external environment (outer space), however, its energy (thermal) isolation from this environment is completely excluded. A constant exchange of energy with the environment or at least a constant heat removal is a necessary condition for the functioning of any artificial space ecosystem.
The XXI century sets before humanity new, even more ambitious tasks in the further exploration of outer space. (Apparently, it will be more accurate to say that mankind sets these tasks before the XXI century.) The specific shape of the future space ecosystem can be determined depending on the purpose and orbit of the space structure (interplanetary manned spacecraft, near-earth orbital station, lunar base, Martian base , a construction space platform, a complex of residential buildings on asteroids, etc.), the number of the crew, the duration of operation, the power availability and technical equipment and, of course, the degree of readiness of certain technological processes, including the processes of controlled biosynthesis and the processes of controlled transformation of matter and energy in biological links of ecosystems.
Today we can say that the tasks and programs of advanced space research were defined in the USSR and the United States at the state level until about 2000. With regard to the tasks of the next century, scientists are still speaking in the form of forecasts. Thus, the results of a study published in 1984 (and carried out back in 1979 by an employee of the Rand Corporation through a questionnaire survey of 15 leading specialists in the US and Great Britain) revealed a picture reflected in the following table:
| Years | Stage content |
| 2020 –2030 | Colonization of the Moon and outer space by large contingents of people (over 1000 people). |
| 2020 – 2071 | Development of artificial human intelligence. |
| 2024 – 2037 | First manned flight to Jupiter. |
| 2030 – 2050 | Flights within the solar system, using the natural resources of the solar system, including the moon. |
| 2045 – 2060 | The first flight of an unmanned probe outside the solar system. |
| 2045 – 2070 | The first manned flight to the borders of the solar system. |
| 2050 – 2100 | Establishing contacts with extraterrestrial intelligence. |
The well-known American physicist J. O "Neil, dealing with the problems of future space settlements of mankind, published his forecast back in 1974, in which 10 thousand people were supposed to work in space in 1988. This forecast did not come true, but today many specialists it is believed that by 1990 50-100 people will be working continuously in space.
The well-known specialist Dr. Puttkamer (Germany) believes that the period from 1990 to 2000 will be characterized by the beginning of the colonization of near-earth space, and after 2000 the autonomy of space inhabitants should be ensured and an ecologically closed habitat system should be created.
Calculations show that with an increase in the duration of a person's stay in space (up to several years), with an increase in the number of the crew and with an increasing distance of the spacecraft from the Earth, it becomes necessary to carry out biological regeneration of consumables, and primarily food, directly on board the spacecraft. At the same time, not only technical and economic (mass-energy) indicators, but also, no less important, indicators of the biological reliability of a person as a determining link in an artificial space ecosystem, testify in favor of biological LSS. Let us explain the latter in more detail.
There are a number of studied (and so far unexplored) connections of the human body with living nature, without which its successful long-term life is impossible. These include, for example, its natural trophic links, which cannot be completely replaced by food from the reserves stored on the ship. So, some vitamins that a person needs without fail (food carotenoids, ascorbic acid, etc.) are unstable during storage: under terrestrial conditions, the shelf life of, for example, vitamins C and P is 5-6 months. Under the influence of space conditions, over time, a chemical restructuring of vitamins occurs, as a result of which they lose their physiological activity. For this reason, they must either be constantly reproduced biologically (in the form of fresh food, such as vegetables), or be regularly delivered from the Earth, as was the case in the course of the record-breaking annual space flight at the Mir station. In addition, biomedical studies have shown that in space flight conditions an increased intake of vitamins by astronauts is required. For example, during flights under the Skylab program, astronauts' consumption of B vitamins and vitamin C (ascorbic acid) increased approximately 10 times, vitamin A (axeroftol) - 2 times, vitamin D (calciferol) - slightly higher than the Earth's norm. It has now also been established that vitamins of biological origin have clear advantages over purified preparations of the same vitamins obtained by chemical means. This is due to the fact that vitamins in the biomass are in combination with a number of other substances, including stimulants, and when eaten, they have a more effective effect on the metabolism of a living organism.
It is known that natural plant foods contain all plant proteins (amino acids), lipids (essential fatty acids), the whole complex of water-soluble and partially fat-soluble vitamins, carbohydrates, biologically active substances and fiber. The role of these food components in metabolism is enormous (V.I. Yazdovskiy, 1988). Naturally, the existing process of preparing space rations, which presupposes strict processing modes (mechanical, thermal, chemical), cannot but reduce the efficiency of certain important food components in human metabolism.
Apparently, one should also take into account the possible cumulative effect of cosmic radioactive radiation on food products stored for a long time on the ship.
Consequently, one conformity of the caloric content of food to the established norm is not enough, it is necessary that the astronaut's food be as varied and fresh as possible.
The discovery by French biologists of the ability of pure water to "memorize" some properties of biologically active molecules and then transmit this information to living cells, it seems, begins to clarify the ancient folk wisdom about "living" and "dead" water. If this discovery is confirmed, then a fundamental problem arises of water regeneration on long-term spacecraft: is water purified or obtained by physicochemical methods in multiple isolated cycles capable of replacing biologically active “living” water?
It can also be assumed that a long stay in an isolated volume of a spacecraft with an artificial gaseous habitat obtained by chemical means is not indifferent to the human body, all generations of which have existed in an atmosphere of biogenic origin, the composition of which is more diverse. It is hardly accidental that living organisms have the ability to distinguish between isotopes of some chemical elements (including stable oxygen isotopes O 16, O 17, O 18), as well as to capture a small difference in the strength of the chemical bonds of isotopes in the molecules of H 2 O, CO 2 and etc. It is known that the atomic weight of oxygen depends on the source of its production: oxygen from air is slightly heavier than oxygen from water. Living organisms "feel" this difference, although it can be quantitatively determined only by special instruments, mass spectrometers. Long-term breathing of chemically pure oxygen in space flight can lead to intensification of oxidative processes in the human body and to pathological changes in the lung tissue.
It should be noted the special role for humans of air, which has a biogenic origin and is enriched with phytoncides of plants. Phytoncides are biologically active substances constantly formed by plants that kill or suppress bacteria, microscopic fungi, and protozoa. The presence of phytoncides in the ambient air is generally beneficial for the human body and makes the air feel fresh. For example, the commander of the third American crew of the Skylab station emphasized that his crew enjoyed breathing in the air enriched with lemon phytoncides.
In known cases of contamination of people with bacteria that settle in air conditioners ("Legionnaires' disease"), phytoncides would be a powerful disinfectant, and in relation to air conditioning systems in closed ecosystems, they could eliminate this possibility. As studies by M. T. Dmitriev have shown, phytoncides can act not only directly, but also indirectly, increasing the bactericidal capacity of the air and increasing the content of light negative ions, which have a beneficial effect on the human body. The number of unwanted heavy positive ions in the air is thus reduced. Phytoncides, which are a kind of carriers of the protective function of plants from the microflora of the environment, are not only released into the air surrounding the plant, but also contained in the biomass of the plants themselves. Garlic, onion, mustard and many other plants are the richest in phytoncides. Eating them for food, a person carries out an imperceptible, but very effective fight against infectious microflora that enters the body.
Speaking about the importance of biological links in the artificial space ecosystem for humans, one cannot fail to note the special positive role of higher plants as a factor in reducing the emotional stress of astronauts and improving psychological comfort. All astronauts who had to carry out experiments with higher plants aboard space stations were unanimous in their assessments. So, L. Popov and V. Ryumin at the Salyut-6 orbital station were happy to look after plants in the experimental greenhouses Malakhit (interior stained glass greenhouse with tropical orchids) and Oasis (experimental greenhouse with vegetable and vitamin crops). They irrigated, monitored the growth and development of plants, carried out preventive examinations and work with the technical part of the greenhouses and simply admired the living interior of orchids in rare moments of relaxation. “We have enjoyed a lot of biological research. For example, we had the Malachite installation with orchids, and when we sent it to Earth, we felt some kind of loss, the station became less comfortable. " This is what L. Popov said after landing. "Working with" Malachite "on board the space complex has always given us special satisfaction," - added L. Popova V. Ryumin.
At a press conference on October 14, 1985, dedicated to the results of the work in orbit by cosmonauts V. Dzhanibekov and G. Grechko on board the Salyut-7 orbital station, the flight engineer (G. Grechko) said: “To all living things, to every sprout in the attitude to space is special, careful: they remind of the Earth, raise the spirits ”.
Thus, astronauts need higher plants not only as a link in an artificial ecological system or as an object of scientific research, but also as an aesthetic element of the familiar terrestrial environment, a living companion of the astronaut in his long, difficult and intense mission. And is it not this aesthetic side and the psychological role of the greenhouse on board the spacecraft that S.P. Korolev had in mind when, in preparation for the upcoming space flights, he formulated the following question as another question: “What can you have on board a heavy interplanetary spacecraft or a heavy orbital station (or in a greenhouse) of ornamental plants that require a minimum of cost and maintenance? " And the first answer to this question has already been received today: these are tropical orchids, which seem to like the atmosphere of the space station.
Discussing the problem of ensuring the reliability and safety of long-term space flights, Academician O. G. Gazenko et al. (1987) rightly points out that “sometimes an unconscious spiritual need for contact with wildlife becomes a real force, which is supported by strict scientific facts indicating economic efficiency and the technical feasibility of making artificial biospheres as close as possible to the natural environment that has brought up humanity. From this point of view, the strategic direction for the creation of biological LSS seems to be very correct ”. And further: “Attempts to isolate man from nature are extremely uneconomical. Biological systems are better than any others to ensure the circulation of substances in large space settlements. "
One of the fundamental advantages of biological systems in comparison with nonbiological ones is the potential for their stable functioning with a minimum volume of control and management functions (E. Ya. Shepelev, 1975). This advantage is due to the natural ability of living systems, which are in constant interaction with the environment, to correct processes for survival at all biological levels - from a single cell of one organism to populations and biogeocenoses - regardless of the degree of understanding of these processes at any given moment by a person and his ability or the inability (or rather, his readiness) to make the necessary adjustments to the process of the circulation of substances in an artificial ecosystem.
The degree of complexity of artificial space ecosystems can be different: from the simplest systems on reserves, systems with physicochemical regeneration of substances and the use of individual biological links to systems with an almost closed biological cycle of substances. The number of biological links and trophic chains, as well as the number of individuals in each link, as already mentioned, depend on the purpose and technical characteristics of the spacecraft.
The efficiency and main parameters of an artificial space ecosystem, including biological links, can be predetermined and calculated on the basis of a quantitative analysis of the processes of biological circulation of substances in nature and an assessment of the energy efficiency of local natural ecosystems. The next section is devoted to this issue.
RELAY OF SUBSTANCES IN THE BIOLOGICAL CIRCUIT
A closed ecological system formed on the basis of biological links should be considered as an ideal LSS for future large space settlements. The creation of such systems is still at the stage of calculations, theoretical constructions and ground testing to interface individual biological units with the test crew.
The main goal of testing experimental biotechnical LSS is to achieve a stable practically closed cycle of substances in an ecosystem with a crew and a relatively independent existence of an artificially formed biocenosis in a mode of long-term dynamic equilibrium based on mainly internal control mechanisms. Therefore, a thorough study of the processes of the biological circulation of substances in the Earth's biosphere is required to use the most effective of them in biotechnical LSS.
The biological cycle in nature is a circular relay race (circulation) of substances and chemical elements between soil, plants, animals and microorganisms. Its essence is as follows. Plants (autotrophic organisms) absorb energy-poor mineral substances of inanimate nature and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These substances are included in the composition of the organic biomass of plant organisms, which has a large supply of energy obtained through the conversion of the sun's radiant energy in the process of photosynthesis. Plant biomass is transformed through food chains in animals and humans (heterotrophic organisms) using some of these substances and energy for their own growth, development and reproduction. Destructive organisms (destructors, or decomposers), including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and organisms that feed on dead organic matter, mineralize waste. Finally, substances and chemical elements are returned back to the soil, atmosphere or aquatic environment. As a result, there is a multi-cycle migration of substances and chemical elements through the branched chain of living organisms. This migration, constantly supported by the energy of the Sun, constitutes the biological cycle.
The degree of reproduction of individual cycles of the general biological cycle reaches 90 - 98%, therefore, it is possible to speak of its complete isolation only conditionally. The main cycles of the biosphere are the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur and other biogenic elements.
Both living and nonliving substances are involved in the natural biological cycle.
Living matter is biogenic, since it is formed only through the reproduction of living organisms already existing on Earth. The inanimate substance present in the biosphere can be of both biogenic origin (fallen bark and leaves of trees, fruits ripened and separated from the plant, chitinous covers of arthropods, horns, teeth and hair of animals, feathers of birds, animal excrement, etc.), and abiogenic (products of emissions from active volcanoes, gases emitted from the earth's interior).
The living matter of the planet by its mass makes up an insignificant part of the biosphere: the entire biomass of the Earth in dry weight is only one hundred thousandth of a percent of the mass of the earth's crust (2 ∙ 10 19 tons). However, it is living matter that plays a decisive role in the formation of the "cultural" layer of the earth's crust, in the implementation of a large-scale relay race of substances and chemical elements between a huge number of living organisms. This is due to a number of specific features of living matter.
Metabolism (metabolism). Metabolism in a living organism is the totality of all transformations of matter and energy in the process of biochemical reactions continuously occurring in the body.
The continuous exchange of substances between a living organism and its environment is the most essential feature of life.
The main indicators of the metabolism of the body with the external environment are the amount, composition and calorie content of poverty, the amount of water and oxygen consumed by a living organism, as well as the degree to which the body uses these substances and energy of poverty. Metabolism is based on the processes of assimilation (transformation of substances that enter the body from the outside) and dissimilation (disintegration of organic substances, caused by the need to release energy for the life of the body).
Thermodynamic nonequilibrium stability. In accordance with the second law (beginning) of thermodynamics, the presence of energy alone is not enough to perform work, and the presence of a potential difference, or energy levels, is also necessary. The measure of the "loss" of the potential difference by any energy system and, accordingly, the measure of the loss of the ability to perform work by this system is entropy.
In processes taking place in inanimate nature, the performance of work leads to an increase in the entropy of the system. So, for the transfer of heat, the direction of the process uniquely determines the second law of thermodynamics: from a more heated body to a less heated one. In a system with zero temperature difference (at the same temperature of bodies), the maximum entropy is observed.
Living matter, living organisms, in contrast to inanimate nature, oppose this law. Never being in equilibrium, they constantly perform work against its establishment, which, it would seem, legitimately should come as a conformity to existing external conditions. Living organisms constantly expend energy to maintain a specific state of a living system. This most important feature is known in the literature as the Bauer principle, or the principle of stable disequilibrium of living systems. This principle shows that living organisms are open non-equilibrium systems that differ from non-living ones in that they evolve in the direction of decreasing entropy.
This feature is characteristic of the biosphere as a whole, which is also a non-equilibrium dynamic system. The living matter of the system is a carrier of enormous potential energy,
The ability to self-reproduce and high intensity of biomass accumulation. Living matter is characterized by a constant desire to increase the number of its individuals, to reproduce. Living matter, including humans, tends to fill all the space acceptable for life. The intensity of reproduction of living organisms, their growth and accumulation of biomass is quite high. The reproduction rate of living organisms, as a rule, is inversely proportional to their size. The variety of sizes of living organisms is another feature of living nature.
The high rates of metabolic reactions in living organisms, which are three to four orders of magnitude higher than the rates of reactions in inanimate nature, are due to the participation of biological accelerators - enzymes in metabolic processes. However, for the growth of each unit of biomass or the accumulation of a unit of energy, a living organism needs to process the initial mass in quantities one or two orders of magnitude higher than the accumulated one.
Ability for diversity, renewal and evolution. The living matter of the biosphere is characterized by different, very short (on a cosmic scale) life cycles. The life span of living beings ranges from several hours (or even minutes) to hundreds of years. In the course of their vital activity, organisms pass through themselves the atoms of the chemical elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, sorting them and binding the chemical elements in the form of specific biomass substances of a given type of organism. Moreover, even within the framework of biochemical uniformity and unity of the organic world (all modern living organisms are built mainly of proteins), living nature is distinguished by a huge morphological diversity and a variety of forms of matter. In total, there are more than 2 million organic compounds that make up living matter. For comparison, let us note that the number of natural compounds (minerals) of inanimate matter is only about 2 thousand. The morphological diversity of living nature is also great: the kingdom of plants on Earth includes almost 500 thousand species, and animals - 1 million 500 thousand.
The formed living organism within the same life cycle has limited adaptive capabilities to changes in environmental conditions. However, the relatively short life cycle of living organisms contributes to their constant renewal from generation to generation by transferring the information accumulated by each generation through the genetic hereditary apparatus, and taking this information into account by the next generation. From this point of view, the short lifespan of organisms of one generation is the price they pay for the survival of a species as a whole in a constantly changing environment.
The evolutionary process is characteristic mainly of higher organisms.
Collectiveness of existence.Living matter actually exists on Earth in the form of biocenoses, and not separate isolated species (populations). The interrelation of populations is due to their trophic (food) dependences on each other, without which the very existence of these species is impossible.
These are the main qualitative features of living matter participating in the biospheric biological cycle of substances. In quantitative terms, the intensity of biomass accumulation in the biosphere is such that, on average, every eight years, the entire living matter of the Earth's biosphere is renewed. Having completed their life cycle, organisms return to nature everything that they have taken from it during their life.
The main functions of the living matter of the biosphere, formulated by the Russian geologist A.V. Lapo (1979), include energetic (biosynthesis with the accumulation of energy and transformation of energy in trophic chains), concentration (selective accumulation of matter), destructive (mineralization and preparation of substances for involvement in the circulation ), environment-forming (change in physical and chemical parameters of the environment) and transport (transfer of matter) functions.
DOES ECOSYSTEMS HAVE EFFICIENCY?
Let us now try to answer the question: is it possible to assess the effectiveness of the biological cycle of substances from the standpoint of satisfying human nutritional needs as the top trophic link of this cycle?
An approximate answer to the question posed can be obtained on the basis of the energy approach to the analysis of the processes of the biological cycle and the study of the transfer of energy and the productivity of natural ecosystems. Indeed, if the substances of the circulation are subject to continuous qualitative change, then the energy of these substances does not disappear, but is distributed by directed flows. Transferring from one trophic level of the biological cycle to another, biochemical energy is gradually transformed and dissipated. The transformation of the energy of matter in trophic levels does not occur arbitrarily, but in accordance with known patterns, and therefore it is controlled within a specific biogeocenosis.
The concept of "biogeocenosis" is similar to the concept of "ecosystem", however, the former carries a more strict semantic load. If almost any autonomously existing natural or artificial biocomplex is called an ecosystem (an anthill, an aquarium, a swamp, a dead tree trunk, a forest, a lake, an ocean, the Earth's biosphere, a spaceship cabin, etc.), then biogeocenosis, being one of the quality levels of the ecosystem , is concretized by the boundaries of its obligatory plant community (phytocenosis). An ecosystem, like any stable set of interacting living organisms, is a category applicable to any biological system only at the supraorganism level, that is, an individual organism cannot be an ecosystem.
The biological circulation of substances is an integral part of the terrestrial biogeocenosis. In the composition of specific local biogeocenoses, the biological cycle of substances is possible, but not required.
Energy connections always accompany trophic connections in the biogeocenosis. Taken together, they form the basis of any biogeocenosis. In general, five trophic levels of biogeocenosis can be distinguished (see table and Fig. 2), through which all its components are sequentially distributed along the chain. Usually, in biogeocenoses, several such chains are formed, which, repeatedly branching and crossing, form complex food (trophic) webs.
Trophic levels and food chains in biogeocenosis
Organisms of the first trophic level - primary producers, called autotrophs (self-feeding) and including microorganisms and higher plants, carry out the processes of synthesis of organic substances from inorganic ones. As a source of energy for the implementation of this process, autotrophs use either light solar energy (phototrophs) or the energy of oxidation of certain mineral compounds (chemotrophs). The phototrophic carbon necessary for synthesis is obtained from carbon dioxide.
Conventionally, the process of photosynthesis in green plants (lower and higher) can be described as the following chemical reaction:
Ultimately, from energetically poor inorganic substances (carbon dioxide, water, mineral salts, trace elements), organic matter (mainly carbohydrates) is synthesized, which is a carrier of energy stored in the chemical bonds of the formed substance. In this reaction, 673 kcal of solar energy is needed to form one gram-molecule of a substance (180 g of glucose).
The efficiency of photosynthesis directly depends on the intensity of light irradiation of plants. On average, the amount of radiant solar energy on the Earth's surface is about 130 W / m 2. In this case, only part of the radiation is photosynthetically active, contained within the wavelength range from 0.38 to 0.71 microns. A significant part of the radiation falling on a plant leaf or a layer of water with microalgae is reflected or passes through the leaf or layer uselessly, and the absorbed radiation is mostly spent on the evaporation of water during plant transpiration.
As a result, the average energy efficiency of the process of photosynthesis of the entire vegetation cover of the globe is about 0.3% of the energy of sunlight entering the Earth. Under conditions favorable for the growth of green plants and with the assistance of humans, individual plantations of plants can bind light energy with an efficiency of 5-10%.
Organisms of subsequent trophic levels (consumers), consisting of heterotrophic (animal) organisms, provide their vital activity in the end due to the plant biomass accumulated in the first trophic level. Chemical energy stored in plant biomass can be released, converted into heat and dissipated into the environment in the process of the reverse combination of carbohydrates with oxygen. Using plant biomass as food, animals oxidize it by breathing. In this case, the process reverse to photosynthesis occurs, in which the energy of food is released and, with a certain efficiency, is spent on the growth and vital activity of a heterotrophic organism.
In quantitative terms, in the biogeocenosis, the plant biomass should "outstrip" the biomass of animals, usually by at least two orders of magnitude. Thus, the total biomass of terrestrial animals does not exceed 1 - 3% of its plant biomass.
The intensity of the energy metabolism of a heterotrophic organism depends on its mass. With an increase in the size of the organism, the metabolic rate, calculated per unit of weight and expressed in the amount of absorbed oxygen per unit of time, decreases markedly. In this case, in a state of relative rest (standard exchange), the dependence of the metabolic rate of an animal on its mass, which has the form of a function y \u003d Ax k (x - the weight of the animal, AND and k - coefficients), turns out to be true both for organisms of the same species, which change their size during growth, and for animals of different weights, but representing a certain group or class.
At the same time, the indicators of the level of exchange of various animal groups already differ significantly among themselves. These differences are especially significant for animals with active metabolism, which are characterized by energy expenditures for muscular work, in particular, for motor functions.
The energy balance of an animal organism (consumer of any level) for a certain period of time in the general case can be expressed by the following equality:
E = E 1 + E 2 + E 3 + E 4 + E 5 ,
where E - energy (calorie content) of food (kcal per day), E 1 - basic metabolic energy, E 2 - energy consumption of the body, E 3 - the energy of "pure" products of the body, E 4 - the energy of unused food substances, E 5 - energy of excrement and body excretions.
Food is the only source of normal energy intake in the animal and human organism, which ensures its vital activity. The concept "food" has a different qualitative content for different animal organisms and includes only those substances that are consumed and utilized by a given living organism and. are necessary for him.
The quantity E for a person averages 2500 kcal per day. Basal metabolic energy E 1 represents the energy of metabolism in a state of complete rest of the body and in the absence of digestive processes. It is spent on maintaining life in the body, is a function of the size of the body surface and is transformed into heat, given by the body to the environment. Quantitative indicators E 1 is usually expressed in specific units, referred to 1 kg of mass or 1 m 2 of the body surface. So, for a person E 1 is 32.1 kcal per day per 1 kg of body weight. Per unit surface, the quantities E 1 different organisms (mammals) are practically the same.
Component E 2 includes the body's energy consumption for heat regulation when the ambient temperature changes, as well as for various activities and work of the body: chewing, digestion and assimilation of food, muscle work when the body moves, etc. E 2 is significantly influenced by the ambient temperature. When the temperature rises and falls from the level optimal for the body, additional energy costs are required to regulate it. The process of regulating constant body temperature is especially developed in warm-blooded animals and humans.
Component E 3 includes two parts: the energy of the growth of the body's own biomass (or population) and the energy of additional production.
An increase in its own biomass takes place, as a rule, in a young growing organism, constantly gaining weight, as well as in an organism that forms reserve nutrients. This part of the component E 3 can be zero, and also take negative values \u200b\u200bwhen there is a lack of food (the body is losing weight).
The energy of additional products is contained in the substances produced by the body for reproduction, protected from enemies, etc.
Each individual is limited to the minimum amount of products created in the course of its life. A relatively high rate of secondary production can be considered to be 10-15% (of the consumed feed), typical, for example, of locusts. The same indicator for mammals spending a significant amount of energy for thermoregulation is at the level of 1 - 2%.
Component E 4 is the energy contained in food substances that were not used by the body and did not get inside the body for one reason or another.
Energy E 5, contained in the body's secretions as a result of incomplete digestibility and assimilation of food, makes up from 30-60% of consumed food (in large ungulates) to 1-20% (in rodents).
The efficiency of energy conversion by an animal organism is quantitatively determined by the ratio of net (secondary) production to the total amount of food consumed or the ratio of net production to the amount of assimilated food. In the food chain, the efficiency (efficiency) of each trophic link (level) averages about 10%. This means that at each subsequent trophic level of the food goal, products are formed that do not exceed 10% of the energy of the previous one in caloric value (or in terms of mass). With such indicators, the overall efficiency of using primary solar energy in the food chain of an ecosystem of four levels will be a small fraction of a percent: on average, only 0.001%.
Despite the seemingly low value of the overall efficiency of the reproduction of products, the main population of the Earth fully provides itself with a balanced food ration, not only at the expense of primary, but also secondary producers. As for a living organism separately, the efficiency of using food (energy) in some of them is quite high and exceeds the efficiency indicators of many technical means. For example, a pig converts 20% of the energy consumed from food into high-calorie meat.
It is customary to assess the efficiency of consumers' use of energy supplied with food in ecology using ecological energy pyramids. The essence of such pyramids lies in the visual representation of the links of the food chain in the form of a subordinate arrangement of rectangles on top of each other, the length or area of \u200b\u200bwhich corresponds to the energy equivalent of the corresponding trophic level per unit of time. To characterize food chains, pyramids of numbers are also used (the areas of rectangles correspond to the number of individuals at each level of the food chain) and pyramids of biomass (the same in relation to the amount of total biomass of organisms at each level).
However, the pyramid of energies gives the most complete picture of the functional organization of biological communities within a specific food chain, since it allows one to take into account the dynamics of the passage of food biomass along this chain.
ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL BIOSPHERIC ECOSYSTEMS: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
KE Tsiolkovsky was the first to propose to create in a space rocket a closed system of circulation of all substances necessary for the life of the crew, i.e., a closed ecosystem. He believed that in a spaceship in miniature all the main processes of transformation of substances that are carried out in the biosphere of the Earth should be reproduced. However, for almost half a century, this proposal has existed as a science fiction hypothesis.
Practical work on the creation of artificial space ecosystems based on the processes of biological circulation of substances rapidly developed in the USA, the USSR and some other countries in the late 50s - early 60s. There is no doubt that this was facilitated by the successes of astronautics, which opened the era of space exploration with the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite in 1957.
In subsequent years, as these works expanded and deepened, most researchers were able to convince themselves that the problem posed turned out to be much more complex than initially assumed. It required not only ground, but also space research, which, in turn, necessitated significant material and financial costs and was constrained by the lack of large spacecraft or research stations. Nevertheless, in the USSR during this period, separate ground experimental samples of ecosystems were created with the inclusion of some biological links and humans in the current cycle of the circulation of substances of these systems. A complex of scientific research was also carried out to develop technologies for the cultivation of biological objects in zero gravity on board space satellites, ships and stations: "Kosmos-92", "Kosmos-605", "Kosmos-782", "Kosmos-936", "Salyut-6" and others. The results of research today allow us to formulate some provisions that are taken as a basis for the construction of future closed space ecosystems and biological life support systems for astronauts.
So, what is common for large artificial space ecosystems and natural biosphere. ecosystems? First of all, it is their relative isolation, their main characters are man and other living bio-links, the biological circulation of substances and the need for an energy source.
Closed ecological systems are systems with an organized cycle of elements, in which substances used at a certain rate for biological exchange of some links are regenerated with the same average rate from the end products of their exchange to the initial state by other links and are used again in the same cycles of biological exchange (Gitelzon et al., 1975).
At the same time, the ecosystem can remain closed even without achieving a complete cycle of substances, irreversibly consuming part of the substances from the previously created reserves.
The natural terrestrial ecosystem is practically closed in substance, since only terrestrial substances and chemical elements participate in the cycles of circulation (the share of cosmic substance that annually falls on the Earth does not exceed 2 ∙ 10-14 percent of the Earth's mass). The degree of participation of terrestrial substances and elements in the repeatedly repeated chemical cycles of the terrestrial circulation is quite large and, as already noted, ensures the reproduction of individual cycles by 90 - 98%.
In an artificial closed ecosystem, it is impossible to repeat all the variety of processes in the earth's biosphere. However, one should not strive for this, since the biosphere as a whole cannot serve as the ideal of an artificial closed ecosystem with a man based on the biological cycle of substances. There are a number of fundamental differences that characterize the biological circulation of substances, artificially created in a limited confined space for the purpose of human life support.
What are these main differences?
The scale of the artificial biological cycle of substances as a means of ensuring human life in a limited confined space cannot be comparable to the scale of the earth's biological cycle, although the basic laws that determine the course and efficiency of processes in its individual biological links can be applied to characterize such links in an artificial ecosystem. In the Earth's biosphere, the actors are almost 500 thousand plant species and 1.5 million animal species, capable of replacing each other in certain critical circumstances (for example, the death of a species or population), maintaining the stability of the biosphere. In an artificial ecosystem, the representativeness of species and the number of individuals are very limited, which sharply increases the “responsibility” of each living organism included in the artificial ecosystem, and imposes increased requirements on its biological stability in extreme conditions.
In the biosphere of the Earth, the circulation of substances and chemical elements is based on a huge number of various, not coordinated in time and space, independent and cross cycles, each of which is carried out at its characteristic speed. In an artificial ecosystem, the number of such cycles is limited, the role of each cycle in the circulation of substances; increases many times, and the agreed rates of the processes in the system must be strictly maintained as a necessary condition for the stable operation of biological LSS.
The presence of dead-end processes in the biosphere does not significantly affect the natural cycle of substances, since there are still significant reserves of substances on the Earth that are first involved in the cycle. In addition, the mass of substances in dead-end processes is immeasurably less than the buffer capacity of the Earth. In artificial space LSS, the always existing general restrictions on mass, volume and energy consumption impose corresponding restrictions on the mass of substances involved in the cycle of biological LSS. The presence or formation in this case of any dead-end process significantly reduces the efficiency of the system as a whole, reduces the rate of its closure, requires appropriate compensation from the stocks of initial substances, and, consequently, an increase in these stocks in the system.
The most important feature of the biological cycle of substances in the artificial ecosystems under consideration is the determining role of man in the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the cycle of substances. The turnover in this case is ultimately carried out in the interests of satisfying the needs of the person (crew), which is the main driving link. The rest of the biological objects are executors of the functions of maintaining the human environment. Based on this, each biological species in an artificial ecosystem creates the most optimal conditions for its existence to achieve the maximum productivity of the species. In the biosphere of the Earth, the intensity of biosynthesis processes is mainly determined by the influx of solar energy into a particular region. In most cases, these possibilities are limited: the intensity of solar radiation on the Earth's surface is about 10 times lower than outside the Earth's atmosphere. In addition, each living organism, in order to survive and develop, constantly needs to adapt to living conditions, to take care of finding food, spending a significant part of its vital energy on this. Therefore, the intensity of biosynthesis in the Earth's biosphere cannot be considered optimal from the standpoint of the main function of biological LSS - satisfying human nutritional needs.
Unlike the Earth's biosphere, artificial ecosystems exclude large-scale abiotic processes and factors that play a noticeable but often blind role in the formation of the biosphere and its elements (weather and climatic influences, depleted soils and unusable territories, chemical properties of water, etc.).
These and other differences contribute to the achievement of a significantly greater efficiency of transformation of matter in artificial ecosystems, a higher rate of realization of cycle cycles, and higher values \u200b\u200bof the efficiency of the biological life support system of a person.
ABOUT BIOLOGICAL LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS OF SPACE CREWS
Biological LSS is an artificial set of specially selected, interconnected and interdependent biological objects (microorganisms, higher plants, animals), consumable substances and technical means, providing in a confined closed space the basic physiological needs of a person for food, water and oxygen, mainly on the basis of sustainable biological circulation of substances.
The necessary combination in biological LSS of living organisms (bioobjects) and technical means makes it possible to call these systems also biotechnical. At the same time, technical means are understood as subsystems, blocks and devices that provide the required conditions for the normal life of biological objects included in the biocomplex (composition, pressure, temperature and humidity of the gas environment, illumination of the living space, sanitary and hygienic indicators of water quality, operational collection, processing or disposal of waste products, etc.). The main technical means of biological LSS include subsystems of energy supply and conversion of energy into light, regulation and maintenance of the gas composition of the atmosphere in a confined confined space, temperature control, space greenhouse blocks, kitchens and means of physicochemical regeneration of water and air, devices for processing, transportation and mineralization waste to others. A number of processes for the regeneration of substances in the system can also be effectively carried out by physicochemical methods (see the figure on page 52).
Biological objects LSS together with humans form a biocomplex. The species and number of living organisms included in the biocomplex is determined so that it can provide a stable, balanced and controlled exchange of substances between the crew and living organisms of the biocomplex during the entire given period. The size (scale) of the biocomplex and the number of species of living organisms presented in the biocomplex depend on the required performance, the degree of closure of the LSS and are established in connection with the specific technical and energy capabilities of the space structure, the duration of its operation, and the number of crew members. The principles of selection of living organisms in the composition of the biocomplex can be borrowed from the ecology of natural terrestrial communities and controlled biogeocenoses, based on the established trophic relationships of biological objects.
The selection of biological species for the formation of trophic cycles of biological LSS is the most difficult task.
Each biological object participating in biological LSS requires a certain living space (ecological niche) for its life, which includes not only a purely physical space, but also a complex of necessary living conditions for a given biological species: ensuring its lifestyle, way of feeding, and environmental conditions. Therefore, for the successful functioning of living organisms as a link in biological LSS, the volume of space they occupy should not be too limited. In other words, there must be minimum minimum dimensions for an inhabited spacecraft, below which the possibility of using biological LSS links in it is excluded.
In the ideal case, the entire initially stored mass of substances intended for the life support of the crew and including all living inhabitants should participate in the circulation of substances inside this space object without introducing additional masses into it. At the same time, such a closed biological LSS with the regeneration of all substances necessary for a person and an unlimited functioning time is today rather a theoretical than a practically real system, if we bear in mind the variants of it that are being considered for space expeditions in the near future.
In the thermodynamic sense (in terms of energy), any ecosystem cannot be closed, since the constant energy exchange of living parts of the ecosystem with the surrounding space is a necessary condition for its existence. The Sun can serve as a source of free energy for biological LSS of spacecraft in the solar space.However, the need for a significant amount of energy for the functioning of large-scale biological LSS requires effective technical solutions to the problem of continuous collection, concentration and input of solar energy into a spacecraft, as well as the subsequent discharge into space of low-potential energy. thermal energy.
A special question arising in connection with the use of living organisms in space flights is how does prolonged weightlessness affect them? Unlike other factors of space flight and outer space, the effect of which on living organisms can be imitated and studied on Earth, the effect of weightlessness can be established only directly in space flight.
GREEN PLANTS AS THE MAIN LINK OF BIOLOGICAL LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS
Higher terrestrial plants are considered to be the main and most probable elements of the biological life support system. They are able not only to produce food for humans that is high-grade by most criteria, but also to regenerate water and atmosphere. Unlike animals, plants are able to synthesize vitamins from simple compounds. Almost all vitamins are formed in the leaves and other green parts of plants.
The efficiency of biosynthesis of higher plants is determined primarily by the light regime: with an increase in the power of the light flux, the intensity of photosynthesis increases to a certain level, after which light saturation of photosynthesis occurs. The maximum (theoretical) efficiency of photosynthesis in sunlight is 28%. Under real conditions for dense crops with good cultivation conditions, it can reach: 15%.
The optimal intensity of physiological (photosynthetically active) radiation (PAR), which ensured maximum photosynthesis in artificial conditions, was 150-200 W / m2 (Nichiporovich, 1966). The productivity of plants (spring wheat, barley) reached 50 g of biomass per day from 1 m 2 (up to 17 g of grain from 1 m 2 per day). In other experiments carried out with the aim of choosing light modes for cultivating radish in closed systems, the yield of root crops was up to 6 kg per 1 m2 in 22 - 24 days with a biological productivity of up to 30 g of biomass (in dry weight) from 1 m2 per day (Lisovsky , Shilenko, 1970). For comparison, we note that in the field, the average daily productivity of crops is 10 g per 1 m 2.
Biocycle: "higher plants - man" would be ideal for human life support if in a long space flight it was possible to be satisfied with only vegetable proteins and fats and if plants could successfully mineralize and utilize all human waste.
The space greenhouse, however, will not be able to solve the entire range of issues assigned to biological LSS. It is known, for example, that higher plants are incapable of ensuring the participation of a number of substances and elements in the cycle. Thus, sodium is not consumed by plants, leaving open the problem of the cycle of NaCl (table salt). The fixation of molecular nitrogen by plants is impossible without the help of nodule soil bacteria. It is also known that, in accordance with the physiological norms of human nutrition, approved in the USSR, at least half of the daily intake of proteins in the diet should be proteins of animal origin, and animal fats - up to 75% of the total norm of fat in the diet.
If the caloric content of the plant part of the diet in accordance with the above norms amounts to 65% of the total caloric content of the diet (the average caloric value of the daily diet of an astronaut at the Salyut-6 station was 3150 kcal), then to obtain the required amount of plant biomass, a greenhouse with an estimated area of one person at least 15 - 20 m 2. Taking into account plant waste that is not consumed for food (about 50%), as well as the need for a food conveyor for continuous daily reproduction of biomass, the actual area of \u200b\u200bthe greenhouse should be increased by at least 2 - 3 times.
The efficiency of the greenhouse can be significantly increased with the additional use of the inedible part of the resulting biomass. There are various ways of utilizing biomass: obtaining nutrients by extraction or hydrolysis, physicochemical or biological mineralization, direct use after appropriate culinary processing, use as animal feed. The implementation of these methods requires the development of appropriate additional technical means and energy consumption, therefore, the optimal solution can be obtained only taking into account the total technical and energy indicators of the ecosystem as a whole.
At the initial stages of the creation and use of biological LSS, individual issues of the complete circulation of substances have not yet been resolved; part of the consumable substances will be taken from the reserves provided on board the spacecraft. In these cases, the greenhouse is responsible for the reproduction of the minimum required amount of fresh greens containing vitamins. A greenhouse with a planting area of \u200b\u200b3-4 m 2 can fully meet the needs of one person in vitamins. In such ecosystems, based on the partial use of the biocycle, higher plants - humans, the main load on the regeneration of substances and the life support of the crew is performed by systems with physicochemical processing methods.
The founder of practical cosmonautics, S.P.Korolev, dreamed of a space flight that was not bound by any restrictions. Only such a flight, according to S.P.Korolev, will mean victory over the elements. In 1962, he formulated a set of priority tasks for space biotechnology as follows: “We should start developing a“ greenhouse according to Tsiolkovsky ”, with gradually building up links or blocks, and we must start working on“ space harvests ”. What is the composition of these crops, what crops? Their effectiveness, usefulness? Reversibility (repeatability) of crops from their own seeds, based on the long-term existence of the greenhouse? Which organizations will carry out this work: on the line of crop production (and issues of soil, moisture, etc.), on the line of mechanization and "light-heat-solar" technology and its regulation systems for greenhouses, etc.? "
This formulation reflects, in fact, the main scientific and practical goals and objectives, the achievement and solution of which must be ensured before the "Tsiolkovsky greenhouse" is created, that is, such a greenhouse, which in a long space flight will supply a person with the necessary fresh food of plant origin, as well as purify water and air. The space greenhouse of future interplanetary ships will become an integral part of their design. In such a greenhouse, optimal conditions for sowing, growth, development and collection of higher plants should be provided. The greenhouse should also be equipped with devices for the distribution of light and air conditioning, units for the preparation, distribution and supply of nutrient solutions, collection of transpiration moisture, etc. Soviet and foreign scientists are successfully working on the creation of such large-scale greenhouses for spaceships now in the near future.
Space plant growing today is still at the initial stage of its development and requires new special research, since many issues related to the reaction of higher plants to extreme conditions of space flight, and above all to conditions of weightlessness, remain unclear. The state of weightlessness has a very significant effect on many physical phenomena, on the vital activity and behavior of living organisms, and even on the operation of onboard equipment. The effectiveness of the influence of dynamic weightlessness can therefore be estimated only in so-called field experiments carried out directly on board orbital space stations.
Experiments with plants in natural conditions were carried out earlier at the Salyut stations and the Kosmos satellites (Kosmos-92, 605, 782, 936, 1129, etc.). Special attention was paid to experiments in the cultivation of higher plants. For this purpose, various special devices were used, each of which was assigned a specific name, for example "Vazon", "Light block", "Fiton", "Biogravistat", etc. Each device, as a rule, was intended to solve one problem. Thus, a small centrifuge "Biogravistat" was used for a comparative assessment of the processes of growing seedlings in zero gravity and in the field of action of centrifugal forces. In the "Vazon" device, the processes of growing onions on a feather were practiced as a vitamin supplement to the diet of astronauts. In the device "Svetoblok" for the first time in zero gravity, the Arabidopsis plant bloomed, planted in an isolated chamber on an artificial nutrient medium, and in the "Fiton" device, Arabidopsis seeds were obtained. A wider range of tasks was solved in research installations "Oasis", consisting of cultivation, lighting, water supply, forced ventilation and telemetric temperature control system. In the "Oasis" installation, cultivation modes with electrical stimulation were worked out on pea and wheat plants as a means of reducing the effect of adverse factors associated with the absence of gravity.
A number of experiments with higher plants in space flight were carried out in the United States at the Skylab, Spacelab and on board the Columbia (Shuttle).
Numerous experiments have shown that the problem of growing plants on space objects under conditions significantly different from ordinary terrestrial ones has not yet been fully solved. It is still not uncommon, for example, when plants stop growing at the generative stage of development. There is still a significant amount of scientific experiments to be carried out to develop the technology of plant cultivation at all stages of their growth and development. It will also be necessary to develop and test the designs of plant cultivators and individual technical means that help eliminate the negative influence of various factors of space flight on plants.
In addition to higher terrestrial plants, lower plants are also considered as elements of an autotrophic link in closed ecosystems. These include aquatic phototrophs - unicellular algae: green, blue-green, diatoms, etc. They are the main producers of primary organic matter in the seas and oceans. The most widely known freshwater microscopic algae Chlorella, which many scientists prefer as the main biological object of the producing link of a closed space ecosystem.
Chlorella culture is characterized by a number of positive features. By assimilating carbon dioxide, the culture releases oxygen. With intensive cultivation, 30-40 liters of chlorella suspension can fully provide gas exchange for one person. In this case, biomass is formed, which, in terms of biochemical composition, is acceptable for use as a feed additive, and with appropriate processing, as an additive to the human diet. The ratio of proteins, fats and carbohydrates in the chlorella biomass can vary depending on the cultivation conditions, which allows a controlled biosynthesis process. The productivity of intensive cultures of chlorella in laboratory cultivation ranges from 30 to 60 g of dry matter from 1 m 2 per day. In experiments on special laboratory cultivators at high illumination, the yield of chlorella reaches 100 g of dry matter from 1 m 2 per day. Chlorella is least influenced by weightlessness. Its cells have a strong cellulose-containing shell and are most resistant to adverse conditions of existence.
The disadvantages of chlorella as a link in an artificial ecosystem include the discrepancy between the coefficient of CO2 assimilation and the human respiration coefficient, the need for increased CO2 concentrations in the gas phase for the effective operation of the biological regeneration link, some discrepancy in the needs of chlorella algae for biogenic elements with the presence of these elements in human excreta, the need for special processing of chlorella cells to achieve the digestibility of biomass. Single-celled algae in general (in particular, chlorella), in contrast to higher plants, are devoid of regulatory adaptations and for reliable efficient functioning in culture require automated control of the biosynthesis process.
The maximum values \u200b\u200bof the efficiency in experiments for all types of algae are in the range from 11 to 16% (the theoretical efficiency of utilization of light energy by microalgae is 28%). However, high crop productivity and low energy consumption are usually contradictory requirements, since the maximum efficiency values \u200b\u200bare achieved at relatively low optical densities of the crop.
Currently, the unicellular alga chlorella, as well as some other types of microalgae (cinedesmus, spirulina, etc.) are used as model biological objects of the autotrophic link in artificial ecosystems.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND PROSPECTS
With the accumulation of practical experience in the study and development of near-earth space, space research programs become more and more complicated. It is necessary to resolve the main issues of the formation of biological LSS for future long-term space expeditions already today, since scientific experiments performed with the links of biological LSS differ in a long duration from the beginning to the moment the final result is obtained. This is due, in particular, to the relatively long developmental cycles that objectively exist in many living organisms selected as links of biological LSS, as well as the need to obtain reliable information on the long-term consequences of trophic and other links of biolinks, which for living organisms can usually manifest themselves only in subsequent generations. Techniques for accelerating such biological experiments do not yet exist. It is this circumstance that requires a much ahead of time in the laying of experiments on the study of energy and mass transfer processes in biological LSS, including humans.
It is clear that the main issues of creating biological LSS for space crews must be preliminarily worked out and solved in ground conditions. For these purposes, special technical and biomedical centers have been created and are being created, including powerful research and test bases, large-volume pressure-pressure chambers, stands simulating space flight conditions, etc. In complex ground-based experiments performed in pressure pressure chambers with the participation of groups of testers, the compatibility of systems and links with each other and with humans is determined, the stability of biological links in a long-functioning artificial ecosystem is determined, the efficiency and reliability of the decisions made are evaluated, and the choice of a biological LSS option is made for its final in-depth study in relation to a specific space object or flight.
In the 60s and 70s, a number of unique scientific experiments were carried out in the USSR aimed at creating biological LSS for the crews of artificial space ecosystems. In November 1968, a long (one year) experiment with the participation of three testers was completed in the USSR. Its main goals were to test and refine the technical means and technologies of complex LSS based on physicochemical methods for the regeneration of substances and a biological method for replenishing human needs for vitamins and fiber when cultivating green crops in a greenhouse.In this experiment, the sown area of \u200b\u200bthe greenhouse was only 7, 5 m 2, the biomass productivity per person averaged 200 g per day. The set of crops included Khibiny cabbage, cucumber grass, watercress and dill.
In the course of the experiment, the possibility of normal cultivation of higher plants in a closed volume was established when a person was in it and repeated use of transpiration water without its regeneration for irrigation of the substrate. In the greenhouse, partial regeneration of substances was carried out, providing a minimum closure in food and oxygen - by 3 - 4%.
In 1970, at the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, an experimental model of a life support system was demonstrated, presented by the All-Union Scientific Research Biotechnical Institute of the USSR Glavmikrobioprom and designed to determine the optimal composition of the complex of biotechnical blocks and their mode of operation. The life support system of the model was designed to meet the needs of three people for water, oxygen and fresh plant products for an unlimited period of time. The main regeneration blocks in the system were represented by an algal cultivator with a capacity of 50 l and a greenhouse with a usable area of \u200b\u200babout 20 m 2 (Fig. 3). The reproduction of animal food products was assigned to the chicken cultivator.
 Fig. 3. The appearance of the greenhouse |
At the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a series of experimental studies of ecosystems, including humans, was carried out. An experiment with a two-link system "man - microalgae" (chlorella) lasting 45 days made it possible to study the mass transfer between the links of the system and the environment and to achieve an indicator of general closure of the circulation of substances equal to 38% (regeneration of the atmosphere and water).
The experiment with the three-link system "man - higher plants - microalgae" was carried out for 30 days. The goal is to study the compatibility of humans with higher plants with completely closed gas exchange and partially closed water exchange. At the same time, an attempt was made to close the food chain for plant (vegetable) biomass. The results of the experiment showed the absence of mutual oppressive influence of the links of the system through the general atmosphere during the experiment. The minimum size of the planting area of \u200b\u200ba continuous crop of vegetables was determined to fully meet the need of one person for fresh vegetables under the selected growing regime (2.5 - 3 m 2).
The introduction of the fourth link into the system - a microbial cultivator designed to process non-food plant waste and return them to the system - started a new experiment with a person lasting 73 days. In the course of the experiment, the gas exchange of links was completely closed, water exchange was almost completely (excluding samples for chemical analysis) and partially - food exchange. During the experiment, a decrease in the productivity of higher plants (wheat) was revealed, explained by the accumulation of plant metabolites or associated microflora in the nutrient medium. It was concluded that it is inexpedient to introduce a link in the mineralization of solid human excreta into the system based on the technical and economic indicators of the four-link biological system.
In 1973, a six-month experiment was completed on the life support of a three-man crew in a closed ecosystem with a total volume of about 300 m 3, which, in addition to the testers, included the links of higher and lower plants. The experiment was carried out in three stages. At the first stage, which lasted two months, all the crew's needs for oxygen and water were met by higher plants, which included wheat, beets, carrots, dill, turnips, cabbage, radishes, cucumbers, onions and sorrel. Waste water from the household compartment was fed into a nutrient medium for wheat. Solid and liquid secretions of the crew were removed from the pressurized volume to the outside. The crew's nutritional needs were met partly by higher plants, and partly by dehydrated food from the reserves. Every day, 1953 g of biomass (in dry weight), including 624 g of edible mass, was synthesized in the link of higher plants from a planting area of \u200b\u200babout 40 m 2, which amounted to 30% of the total requirement of the crew. At the same time, the need for three people in oxygen was fully met (about 1500 liters per day). The closedness of the system "man - higher plants" at this stage was 82%.
At the second stage of the experiment, part of the greenhouse was replaced by a link of lower plants - chlorella. The crew's needs for water and oxygen were met by higher (wheat and vegetable crops) and lower plants, the crew's liquid excretions were sent to the algal reactor, and solid excretions were dried to return water to the circulation. The crew was fed in the same way as in the first stage. A deterioration in wheat growth was revealed due to an increase in the amount of waste water supplied with the nutrient medium per unit of planting area, which was halved.
At the third stage, only vegetable crops were left in the link of higher plants, and the algal reactor performed the main load on the regeneration of the atmosphere of the containment volume. Waste water was not added to the plant nutrient solution. Nevertheless, at this stage of the experiment, intoxication of plants by the atmosphere of the containment volume was detected. The closedness of the system, including chlorella, which utilizes human liquid excretions, increased to 91%.
During the experiment, special attention was paid to the issue of aligning temporal fluctuations in the exchange of crew exometabolites. To this end, the testers lived according to a schedule that ensured the continuity of ecosystem management and the uniformity of the level of mass transfer during the autonomous existence of the ecosystem. For 6 months of the experiment, there were 4 testers in the system, one of whom lived in it continuously, and three - for 6 months, replacing according to the schedule.
The main result of the experiment is proof of the possibility of implementing a biological life support system in a confined enclosed space, autonomously controlled from within. Analysis of the physiological, biochemical and technological functions of the testers did not reveal any directional changes caused by their presence in the artificial ecosystem.
In 1977, at the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a four-month experiment was carried out with an artificial closed ecosystem “man - higher plants”. The main task is to find a way to preserve the productivity of higher plants in a closed ecosystem. At the same time, the possibility of increasing the closedness of the system by increasing the share of the crew's food ration reproduced in it was also studied. The experiment involved two testers (during the first 27 days - three testers). The sown area of \u200b\u200bthe phytotron was about 40 m 2. The set of crops for higher plants included wheat, chufu, beets, carrots, radishes, onions, dill, cabbage, cucumbers, potatoes, and sorrel. In the experiment, the forced circulation of the internal atmosphere was organized along the contour "living compartment - phytotrons (greenhouse) - living compartment". The experiment was a continuation of the previous experiment with a closed ecosystem “man - higher plants - lower plants”.
In the course of the experiment, the first stage of which reproduced the conditions of the previous one, a decrease in plant photosynthesis was revealed, which began from the 5th day and continued up to 24 days. Then, thermocatalytic purification of the atmosphere was switched on (afterburning of accumulated toxic gaseous impurities), as a result of which the inhibitory effect of the atmosphere on plants was removed and the photosynthetic productivity of phytotrons was restored. Due to the additional carbon dioxide obtained from burning straw and cellulose, the reproducible part of the crew's diet was increased to 60% by weight (up to 52% by calorie content).
The water exchange in the system was partially closed: the source of drinking and partly sanitary water was the condensate of transpirational moisture of plants, a nutrient medium with the addition of waste water was used to irrigate wheat, and the water balance was maintained by the introduction of distilled water in quantities that compensate for the withdrawal from the system of liquid human excreta ...
At the end of the experiment, no negative reactions of the body of the testers to the complex effect of the conditions of a closed system were found. The plants fully provided the testers with oxygen, water, and the bulk of plant food.
In the same 1977, a one and a half month experiment with two testers at the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the USSR Ministry of Health was completed. The experiment was carried out with the aim of studying a model of a closed ecosystem, which included a greenhouse and a chlorella plant.
The experiments carried out have shown that when carrying out biological regeneration of the atmosphere and water in an artificial ecosystem with the help of green plants, lower plants (chlorella) have greater biological compatibility with humans than higher ones. This follows from the fact that the atmosphere of the living compartment and human excretions adversely affected the development of higher plants and some additional physicochemical treatment of the air entering the greenhouse was required.
Abroad, work aimed at creating promising LSS is most intensively carried out in the United States. Research is carried out in three directions: theoretical (determination of the structure, composition and design characteristics), experimental ground (testing individual biological links) and experimental flight (preparation and conduct of biological experiments on manned spacecraft). NASA centers and firms developing spacecraft and systems for them are engaged in the problem of creating biological LSS. Universities are involved in many promising studies. NASA has created a department of biosystems that coordinates the work on the program for the creation of a controlled biotech LSS.
The project of creating a grandiose artificial structure called "Biosphere-2" aroused great interest of environmental specialists. This glass, steel and concrete structure is a completely sealed volume of 150,000 m 3 and covers an area of \u200b\u200b10,000 m 2. The entire volume is divided into large-scale compartments, in which physical models of various climatic zones of the Earth are formed, including tropical forest, tropical savannah, lagoon, shallow and deep ocean zones, desert, etc. Biosphere-2 also houses the living quarters of testers, laboratories, workshops, agricultural greenhouses and fish ponds, waste treatment systems and other service systems and technical means necessary for human life. The glass ceilings and walls of the Biosphere-2 compartments are to ensure the flow of radiant solar energy to its inhabitants, among whom there will be eight volunteer testers during the first two years. They will have to prove the possibility of active life and activity in isolated conditions on the basis of the internal biospheric circulation of substances.
The Institute of Ecotechnics, which in 1986 led the creation of Biosphere-2, plans to complete its construction this year. Many reputable scientists and technical specialists have joined the project.
Despite the significant cost of the work (at least $ 30 million), the implementation of the project will make it possible to carry out unique scientific research in the field of ecology and the biosphere of the Earth, to determine the possibility of using individual elements of "Biosphere-2" in various sectors of the economy (biological purification and regeneration of water, air and food). "Such constructions will be necessary for the establishment of settlements in outer space, and perhaps for the preservation of certain types of living things on Earth," says US astronaut R. Schweickart.
The practical significance of the mentioned experiments lies not only in solving individual problems of creating closed space ecosystems, including humans. The results of these experiments are no less important for understanding the laws of ecology and medico-biological foundations of human adaptation to extreme environmental conditions, clarifying the potential of biological objects in intensive cultivation modes, developing waste-free and environmentally friendly technologies to meet human needs for high-quality food, water and air in artificial isolated inhabited structures (underwater settlements, polar stations, settlements of geologists in the Far North, defense structures, etc.).
In the future, you can imagine entire waste-free and environmentally friendly cities. For example, Ch. Marchetti, director of the International Institute for Systems Analysis, believes: “Our civilization will be able to exist peacefully, and moreover, in better conditions than the current ones, locked up in island cities that are completely self-sufficient, independent of the vicissitudes of nature, that do not need natural raw materials, nor in natural energy and guaranteed from pollution. " We add that this requires the fulfillment of only one condition: the unification of the efforts of all mankind in peaceful creative labor on Earth and in space.
CONCLUSION
The successful solution of the problem of creating large artificial ecosystems, including humans and based on a fully or partially closed biological cycle of substances, is of great importance not only for the further progress of astronautics. In an era when "with such frightening clarity, we saw that the second front, the ecological one, is approaching the front of the nuclear-space threat and is on a par with it" (from the speech of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR E. A. Shevardnadze at the 43rd session of the General Assembly of the UN), one of the real ways out of the approaching environmental crisis can be the way of creating practically waste-free and environmentally friendly intensive agro-industrial technologies, which should be based on the biological cycle of substances and more efficient use of solar energy.
This is a fundamentally new scientific and technical problem, the results of the solution of which can be of great importance for the protection and protection of the environment, the development and widespread use of new intensive and waste-free biotechnologies, the creation of autonomous automated and robotic complexes for the production of food biomass, the solution of the food program at a high modern scientific and technical level. The cosmic is inseparable from the earthly, therefore, even today the results of space programs give a significant economic and social effect in the most diverse areas of the national economy.
Space serves and should serve people.
LITERATURE
Blinkin S.A., Rudnitskaya T.V.Phytoncides around us. - M .: Knowledge, 1981.
Gazenko O. G., Pestov I. D., Makarov V. I.Humanity and space. - Moscow: Nauka, 1987.
Dadykin V.P. Space plant growing. - M .: Knowledge, 1968.
Dajo R. Fundamentals of Ecology. - M .: Progress, 1975.
Closed system: man - higher plants (four-month experiment) / Ed. G.M. Lisovsky. - Novosibirsk-Science, 1979.
Cosmonautics. Encyclopedia. / Ed. V.P. Glushko - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1985.
Lapo A.V. Traces of bygone biospheres. - M .: Knowledge, 1987.
A.A. NichiporovichEfficiency of a green leaf. - M .: Knowledge 1964.
Fundamentals of space biology and medicine. / Ed. About G. Gazenko (USSR) and M. Calvin (USA). - T. 3 - M .: Nauka, 1975.
Plotnikov V.V. At the crossroads of ecology. - M .: Thought, 1985
Sytnik K.M., Brion A.V., Gordetsky A.V.Biosphere, ecology, nature protection. - Kiev: Naukova Dumka, 1987.
Experimental Ecological Systems Including Man / Ed. V.N. Chernigovsky. - M .: Nauka, 1975
Yazdovsky V.I. Artificial biosphere. - M .: Nauka, 1976
application
SPACE TOURISM
V. P. MIKHAILOV
In the context of the tourist boom, which began everywhere in the 60s, experts drew attention to the possibility of space travel for tourism purposes.
Space tourism is developing in two directions. One of them is purely terrestrial - without flying into space. Tourists visit terrestrial objects - cosmodromes, flight control points, "star" towns, enterprises for the development and manufacture of elements of space technology, attend and watch the launch of spacecraft and carrier rockets.
Terrestrial space tourism began in July 1966, when the first bus tours of NASA's Cape Kennedy launch sites were organized. In the early 70s, tourists on buses visited the site of complex No. 39, from which astronauts took off when flying to the moon, a vertical assembly building (hangar over 100 m high), where the Saturn-V launch vehicle was assembled and tested and the spacecraft docked. the Apollo ship, the parking of a unique tracked chassis that delivers the launch vehicle to the launch pad, and much more. In a special cinema they watched newsreels of space events. At that time, up to 6-7 thousand tourists made such an excursion every day in the summer, and about 2 thousand in the off-season. Unorganized tourists increased the flow of visitors by about 20-25%.
From the very beginning, such excursions have gained wide popularity. Already in 1971, their four millionth participant was recorded. During some launches (for example, to the moon), the number of tourists was hundreds of thousands.
Another area is direct space tourism. Although today it is in its infancy, the prospects are broad. In addition to the purely tourist aspect, here it is necessary to bear in mind the strategic and economic aspects.
The strategic aspect is the possible partial resettlement of mankind within the solar system. Of course, this is a matter for the distant future. Resettlement will take place over hundreds of years and millennia. A person must get used to living in outer space, settle down in it, accumulate a certain experience - unless, of course, any earthly or cosmic cataclysms occur, when this process needs to be accelerated. And space tourism is a good model for practicing this process. On the other hand, the experience of ensuring human life in space, accumulated during tourist travel, familiarity with equipment, life support devices in space will allow a person to live and work more successfully on Earth in conditions of environmental degradation, use space "ground" technical means and systems.
The economic aspect of space tourism is also very important for astronautics. Some experts see space tourism, focused on the use of personal funds of space tourists, as a significant source of funding for space programs. In their opinion, an increase in cargo traffic into space as a result of space tourism in comparison with the current one by 100 times (which is real) will, in turn, reduce the specific cost of launching a payload unit by 100-200 times for the entire cosmonautics as a whole without attracting additional public investment.
According to experts, the annual expenditure of mankind on tourism is expressed in the amount of about 200 billion pounds. Art. In the coming decades, space tourism could account for 5% of this figure, i.e. 10 billion pounds. Art. It is believed that if the cost of a space tour is optimally balanced and at the same time a sufficiently high flight safety is ensured (comparable at least to the level of flight safety on a modern passenger jet liner), then about 100 million people would express a desire to make space travel in the coming decades. According to other estimates, the flow of space tourists will reach 100 thousand people annually by 2025, and over the next 50 years the number of those who have been in space will reach about 120 million people.
How much can a space tour cost these days? Let's estimate the upper limit of the "tour". In the USSR, cosmonaut training is about 1 million rubles, a serial launch vehicle costs 2–3 million rubles, and a two-seater spacecraft costs 7–8 million rubles. Thus, the "flight for two" will amount to approximately 11-13 million rubles, not counting the so-called ground support. This figure could be significantly reduced if the spacecraft was made in a purely tourist version: not to stuff it with sophisticated scientific equipment, thereby increasing the number of passengers, to prepare them for flight not according to the cosmonaut program, but according to a simpler one, etc. it would be interesting to more accurately determine the cost of a tour flight, but this should be done. economists in the field of rocket and space technology.
There are other ways to reduce the cost of tourist space travel. One of them is the creation of a special reusable tourist ship. Optimists believe that the cost of flying on space transport ships of the second and third generation will be commensurate with the cost of flying on a passenger jet, which will predetermine mass space tourism. Nevertheless, experts suggest that the cost of the tour for the first tourists will be about $ 1 million.In the next decades, it will rapidly decrease and reach $ 100 thousand. As the optimally saturated infrastructure of space tourism is reached, including a fleet of spaceships, hotels in orbits of the Earth and on the Moon, in-line production of tourist equipment, training in safety measures, etc., in conditions of mass tourism, the cost of the tour will decrease to 2 thousand dollars.This means that the cost of launching a payload into space should be no more USD 20 / kg. Currently, this figure is 7-8 thousand.
There are still many difficulties and unresolved problems on the way of space tourism. However, space tourism is a 21st milestone reality. In the meantime, 260 people from ten countries of the world have already contributed money to one of the American organizations that has started working in this direction for the development and implementation of a space tourist flight. Some US travel agencies have begun selling tickets for the first Earth-Moon tourist flight. Departure date is open. It is believed that it will appear on the ticket in 20-30 years.
And yet the Americans are not the first here. In 1927, the world's first international exhibition of spacecraft took place on Tverskaya Street in Moscow. On it lists of those wishing to fly to the Moon or Mars were compiled. There were a lot of people willing. Perhaps one of them has not yet lost hope of going on the first tourist trip into space.
CHRONICLE OF COSMONAUTICS *
* Continued (see No. 3, 1989). According to the materials of various information agencies and periodicals, data are given on the launch of some artificial earth satellites (AES), starting from November 15, 1989. The launches of the “Cosmos” satellite are not registered. They are regularly reported, for example, by the journal "Priroda", and we are sending interested readers. A separate appendix is \u200b\u200bdevoted to manned space flights.
NOVEMBER 15, 1988 in the Soviet Union for the first time a test launch of the Energia universal rocket and space transport system with the Buran reusable spacecraft was carried out. Having completed a two-orbital unmanned flight, the Buran orbiter successfully landed in an automatic mode on the landing strip of the Baikonur cosmodrome. The "Buran" spacecraft is built according to a tailless aircraft with a variable sweep delta wing. It is capable of performing a controlled descent in the atmosphere with a lateral maneuver up to 2000 km. The length of the ship is 36.4 m, the wingspan is about 24 m, the height of the ship standing on the chassis is more than 16 m. The launch weight is more than 100 tons, of which 14 tons are fuel. Its cargo compartment can accommodate a payload weighing up to 30 tons. A sealed cabin for the crew and equipment with a volume of more than 70 m 3 is built into the bow compartment. The main propulsion system is located in the tail section of the ship, two groups of engines for maneuvering are located at the end of the tail section and in the front of the hull. The heat-protective coating, consisting of almost 40 thousand tiles of an individual profile, is made of special materials - high-temperature quartz and organic fibers, as well as a material based on carbon. The first flight of the reusable spacecraft "Buran" opens a qualitatively new stage in the Soviet space research program.
On DECEMBER 10, 1988, the Proton launch vehicle launched into orbit the next (19th) Soviet TV broadcast satellite Ekran. Launched into geostationary orbit at a position of 99 ° E. (international registration index "Stationar T"), these satellites are used to transmit television programs in the decimeter range of wavelengths to the regions of the Urals and Siberia to subscriber receivers for collective use.
DECEMBER 11, 1988 from the Kourou cosmodrome in French Guiana with the help of the Western European launch vehicle Ariane-4 launched into geostationary orbit two communication satellites - the English Sky-Net-4B and belonging to the Luxembourg consortium SES Astra-1. The Astra-1 satellite is intended for relaying television programs to local distribution centers in Western European countries. The satellite has 16 medium-power repeaters, most of which are leased by British Telecom. The estimated position of the Astra-1 satellite is 19.2 ° W. e. Initially, the British satellite was supposed to be launched with the help of the American Space Shuttle. However, the Challenger accident in January 1986 disrupted these plans, and it was decided to use the Arian LV for launch. The launch of two satellites was carried out by the Ariane-4 LV equipped with two solid-propellant and two liquid-propellant boosters. The Arianspace consortium announced to potential consumers that this model of the rocket is capable of delivering a payload weighing 3.7 tons to a transfer orbit with an apogee altitude of 36 thousand km. In this version, Ariane-4 is used for the second time. The first launch of the LV in this configuration was a test one. Then in 1988 with its help three satellites were launched into orbit: the Western European meteorological "Meteosat-3" and the radio amateur "Amsat-3", as well as the American messenger "Panamsat-1".
On DECEMBER 22, 1988, in the USSR, the Molniya LV was launched into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee altitude of 39,042 km in the Northern Hemisphere, the next (32nd) AES Molniya-3 was launched in order to ensure the operation of a long-distance telephone and telegraph radio communication system and transmission of television programs on the "Orbit" system.
On DECEMBER 23, 1988, the 24th AES of the PRC was launched from the Sichan cosmodrome with the help of the "Great March-3" launch vehicle. It is the fourth Chinese communications satellite to be launched into geostationary orbit. The commissioning of the satellite will complete the transfer of all national television programs to retransmission via the satellite system. Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China Li Peng was present at the launch of the satellite.
On DECEMBER 25, 1988, the Soyuz launch vehicle launched into orbit the Progress-39 automatic cargo spacecraft intended to supply the Soviet Mir orbital station. The ship docked with the station on December 27, undocked from it on February 7, 1989, and on the same day entered the atmosphere and ceased to exist.
On DECEMBER 28, 1988 in the USSR the Molniya LV was launched into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee altitude of 38 870 km in the Northern Hemisphere by the next (75th) communications satellite Moliya-1. This satellite is operated as part of the satellite system used in the Soviet Union for telephone and telegraph radio communications, as well as the transmission of television programs via the Orbita system.
On JANUARY 26, 1989, the next (17th) communications satellite "Horizon" was launched in the USSR by the Proton LV. Launched into geostationary orbit at 53 ° E. etc., he received the international registration index "Stationar-5". AES "Gorizont" is used to transmit television programs to the network of ground stations "Orbita", "Moscow" and "Intersputnik", as well as to communicate with ships and aircraft using additional repeaters.
On 27 JANUARY 1989, the Ariane-2 launch vehicle was launched into the transfer orbit by the Intelsat-5A satellite (sample F-15) for use in the global commercial satellite communications system of the international consortium ITSO. Transferred to a stationary position in geostationary orbit 60 ° E. The satellite will replace the Intelsat-5A satellite (sample F-12) located there, launched in September 1985.
On FEBRUARY 10, 1989, the Soyuz launch vehicle launched the Progress-40 automatic cargo spacecraft intended to supply the Soviet orbital station Mir. The ship docked with the station on February 12, and undocked from it on March 3. After undocking, an experiment was carried out to deploy two large multi-link structures in open space, which were folded on the outer surface of the Progress-40 spacecraft. At the command of the on-board automatics, these structures were opened in turn. Their deployment was carried out through the use of elements from a material with a shape memory effect. On March 5, the propulsion system was activated on the ship. As a result of braking, the ship entered the atmosphere and ceased to exist.
On 15 FEBRUARY 1989, the USSR LV Molniya was launched into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee altitude of 38 937 km in the Northern Hemisphere of the next (76th) communications satellite Molniya-1. This satellite is included in the satellite system used in the Soviet Union for telephone and telegraph radio communications, as well as the transmission of television programs via the Orbita system.
On MARCH 16, the Soyuz LV in the USSR launched the Progress-41 automatic cargo spacecraft intended to supply the Soviet Mir orbital station. The ship docked with the station on March 18.
Chronicle of manned flights 1
1 Continuation (see No. 3 for 1989).
2 The number of flights into space, including the last, is indicated in brackets.
3 Expedition to the Mir station.
4 Cosmonauts A. Volkov and S. Krikalev remained in the crew of the Mir station. December 21, 1988 together with J.-L. V. Titov and M. Manarov returned to the ground from the Mir station by Chretien, making the longest flight in the history of cosmonautics lasting 1 year.
ASTRONOMY NEWS
THREADS IN WONDERLAND
We have already mentioned in our small notes about one of the cosmological consequences of some models of the Great Unification - the prediction of the existence of cosmological threads. These are one-dimensional extended structures with a high linear mass density (~ Ф 0 2, where Ф 0 is a nonzero vacuum average) and a thickness of ~ 1 / Ф 0.
Among the many realistic models of the Grand Unification (since there are also unrealistic ones), the most successful are those schemes that include mirror particles, strictly symmetric in their properties to the corresponding ordinary particles. Not only matter particles (electrons, quarks) acquire mirror twins, but also particles-carriers of interactions (photons, W-bosons, gluons, etc.). In schemes of this kind, breaking the complete symmetry leads to a transition from ordinary particles to specular ones. The threads that appear in these patterns are called Alice threads. They are distinguished from "ordinary" cosmological threads by the following additional property: walking around the thread changes the specularity of the object.
It follows from this "looking-glass" property that the definition of specularity itself becomes relative: if a macroscopic object is considered ordinary by us when we walk around the thread from the left, then it turns out to be mirror-like if the thread is passed around from the right (or: vice versa). In addition, electromagnetic radiation, perceived by us as usual to the left of Alice's thread, to the right of her will be specular. Our ordinary electromagnetic receivers cannot register it.
But this is all in theory. Are there any possible observational manifestations of alis' threads? All the properties that ordinary cosmological filaments have are also possessed by Alice's filaments. But unlike the first threads of Alice, in the course of their evolution, they must change the relative specularity of particles and rays of light. The existence of mirror particles leads to the fact that stars and, probably, globular clusters should have the same specularity, and galaxies and larger inhomogeneities (clusters, superclusters) consist of an equal number of mirror and ordinary particles. Moreover, their average characteristics (spectrum, luminosity, mass and velocity distribution, etc.) are the same. Therefore, if we cannot "resolve" the galaxy into separate stars, then we cannot even notice the passage of Alice's filament between them and the galaxy, because both the specular and ordinary luminosities and spectra of the galaxy are completely symmetric.
One can try to detect the manifestation of Alice's thread (as, incidentally, of the cosmological thread of any nature) by the effect of the gas glow in the shock wave caused by it. The latter is formed when the substance is perturbed by the conical gravitational field of the filament. True, the luminosity of the gas in the shock wave behind the filament is difficult to separate from the background of the total luminosity of such a gas. The same applies to the perturbation of the CMB temperature in the direction of the filament. Therefore, the most promising, as theorists believe, is the search for the gravitational lens effect caused by Alice's thread.
IS CONSTANT?
We are talking about Newtonian gravitational constant G... There are many theories predicting the need to change it. However, not only it, but also other fundamental constants - in some models of superstring theory, for example, these constants should change with the age of the Universe (with the expansion of the Universe G, for example, should decrease).
None of the experiments carried out to date have provided any evidence for inconsistency. G... Only the upper limits of such a change have been established - about 10-11 parts per year. Recently, American scientists have confirmed this estimate by observing a binary radio pulsar.
Discovered in 1974, the binary pulsar PSR 1913 + 16 consists of a neutron star orbiting another compact object. It is so fortunate that the rate of change of its orbital period is known with surprisingly high accuracy.
General relativity predicts that such a binary system emits gravitational waves. In this case, the orbital period of the binary pulsar changes. The rate of its change predicted on the assumption of constancy G, coincides perfectly with the observed.
Observations of American scientists allow us to estimate the limit on variability G by the small difference between observations and predictions of general relativity. This estimate, as already mentioned, gives a value of the order of 10-11 parts per year. So most likely G never changes.
"LIGHT ECHO" SUPERNOVOY-87
Australian and American astronomers have discovered a fairly strong increase in infrared radiation from the LMC Supernova. The very fact of such radiation is nothing special. Its outburst is incomprehensible and unexpected.
Several hypotheses have been proposed. According to one of them, the pulsar "shines" in the gas ejected by the exploded star (however, the pulsar radiation should be of shorter wavelengths). According to the second hypothesis, the gases from the explosion condense into solid macro-dust particles, which, when heated, emit infrared radiation.
The third hypothesis is also "dusty". Thousands and thousands of years before the explosion, the original star was losing the gas that collected around it. The dusty shell stretched around the Supernova for almost a light-year - it took so long for the light from the exploding star to reach the dust cloud. The heated dust re-radiates in the infrared range, and the radiation takes another year to reach Earth observers. This explains the time elapsed from the registration of the supernova explosion to the detection of the infrared radiation flash.
MISSING MASS
If the modern theory of stellar evolution is correct (and there seems to be no reason to doubt this), then low-mass stars (with a mass less than the mass of the Sun) do not "have the temper" to end their lives in the form of a planetary nebula - a glowing cloud of gas in the center of which the remainder of the original star.
However, for quite a long time this prohibition was mysteriously violated - in many cases the mass of the planetary nebula turned out to be less than the mass of the Sun. The English and Dutch astronomers have studied three bright planetary nebulae (or rather, their faint shells). Using the spectra they obtained, they calculated the mass of both the envelope and the nebula itself. The problem of mass deficit has become clear - there is much more matter in the envelope than in the nebula itself. Initially, the stars - "organizers" of planetary nebulae - should be heavier. The missing mass is in the shell.
But then a new mystery arose. The gas temperatures calculated for the nebula and the envelope differ - the envelope turned out to be 2 times hotter than the nebula. It would seem that it should be the other way around, because the central star must heat the envelope gas. One of the assumptions explaining this paradox: energy for heating the envelope is supplied by a fast "wind" blowing from the central star.
WARNING - FLASH
The American satellite SMM, designed to explore the Sun, predicted its premature "demise" - deorbiting. The data obtained with this satellite suggests that, according to experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we will spend the next four years in an environment of increased solar activity. With all the ensuing consequences - magnetic storms that impede radio communication and navigation, interfere with the operation of radars, posing a very definite danger to: crews of spaceships, damaging the delicate electronic parts of satellites, etc.
Solar flares emit harsh ultraviolet radiation that heats the upper atmosphere. As a result, the height of its upper (conditional) border increases. In short, the atmosphere is “disturbed,” which primarily affects satellites in low orbits. Their lifespan is shortening. At one time, this happened with the American Skylab station, which left orbit ahead of schedule. The same fate, as already mentioned, awaits the SMM satellite.
The cycles of solar activity have been known for a long time, but the nature of the processes that cause these phenomena remains not fully understood.
NEW TELESCOPES
Mount Mauna Kea (4170 m, Hawaii, USA) will soon become an astronomical Mecca. In addition to the telescopes already in existence at the observatory located on this mountain, new, more powerful optical telescopes are being designed (and already under construction).
The University of California is building a 10-meter telescope, which is to be completed and installed in 1992. It will consist of 36 hexagonal conjugate mirrors arranged in three concentric rings. Electronic sensors installed at all ends of the segment mirrors will transmit data about their current position and orientation relative to each other in a computer, which will issue commands to active mirror drives. As a result, the integrity of the composite surface and its shape is ensured when exposed to mechanical displacement and wind loads.
On the same Mauna Kea in 1995 it is planned to install a 7.5-meter telescope developed by Japanese scientists. It will be located more than a hundred meters from the American one. This "asparagus" will represent the most powerful optical-interferometric system that will allow you to look at huge distances, study quasars, and discover new stars and galaxies.
Four separate telescopes (8 m in diameter each), brought together by fiber optics into a single focal plane, are supposed to be built at the Southern Observatory (Chile) by 8 Western European countries - co-owners of this observatory. The construction of the first mirror (i.e., the first telescope) is scheduled to be completed by 1994, and the remaining three by 2000.
WHAT IS COMING FROM
As you know, the Martian atmosphere has a fairly high concentration of carbon dioxide. This gas escapes into space, so its constant concentration must be maintained at the expense of some source.
Experts believe that such a source is the rare mineral scapolite on Earth (on our planet it is a semiprecious stone containing, in addition to carbon, silicon, oxygen, also sodium, calcium, chlorine, sulfur, hydrogen), which can store a large amount of carbon dioxide as part of its crystal structure (carbonate). There is a lot of scapolite on Mars.
Subject: “Man and his place in nature”.
Objectives.
Educational:
- continue systematic work on the formation of an elementary holistic picture of the world among younger students;
- to acquaint with artificial ecosystems of cities and villages as a place of human life (habitat);
- teach to see the difference in the farms of ancient people and modern man, to understand the specifics of artificial ecosystems;
- teach students to find contradictions between human economy and nature and suggest ways to eliminate them;
- to form the concept of an ecological type of economy, harmoniously combined with nature.
Developing:
- develop the ability to cognize and understand the world around, meaningfully apply the knowledge gained to solve educational, cognitive and life tasks;
- develop speech, logical thinking;
Educating:
- to educate a respectful attitude towards the nature around us, an economical use of natural resources, a caring attitude towards the world.
Lesson type: lesson in learning new material.
Type of training: problematic.
The main stages of the lesson:
- Introduction of new knowledge based on previous experience.
- Reproduction of new knowledge.
Equipment:
- video recordings to demonstrate the ecosystem of the city and village;
- working page;
- reference circuits;
- illustrations of a reasonable combination of civilization and nature.
DURING THE CLASSES
I. Enhanced knowledge and problem statement.
1. Guys, today we have the first lesson of the last section of our textbook and our entire course "Peace and Man". The title of this section, in my opinion, is a bit unusual. And what is its singularity?
On the board there is a note: "How can we live?"
It turns out that this issue worries many people of our planet, regardless of what country they live in and what language they communicate with each other. But the main thing is that these people are not indifferent to the fate of our planet, our common home.
I am convinced that you and I should not stand aside and try to find an answer to this question.
Do you know what is conference? And is it possible to call our lesson “ conference lesson”?
Dictionary: “Conference- a meeting, a meeting of various, including educational organizations, to discuss any special issues. "
(Children read on the working page the interpretation of the word "conference" and discuss the question posed).
And now I propose, reflecting on our special question “How do we live?" and “ Man and his place in nature”, Remember what we know, learned.
2. Blitz - quiz "Test your knowledge":
- The Ural Mountains divide Europe and Asia;
- America was discovered by Christopher Columbus;
- Volga, Ob, Yenisei, Lena, Amur - rivers of our country;
- There are other continents to the south of Antarctica;
- If you take good care of the use of water, light, i.e. save energy, then nature will be preserved and people will live easier;
- The Sahara Desert is located in South America;
- Travelers went to visit each other from island to island on foot;
- Collecting edible plants and hunting wild animals is the oldest human occupation;
- An ecosystem is such a commonwealth of living and inanimate nature on earth, in which everyone feels at home.
- An ecological system is a cell of the Earth's living shell.
(Children listen to these statements and put “+” in the table on the working page if they agree with the statement, and “-” if they do not agree with the statement. After completing the assignment, the teacher posts a checklist on the board, and the students conduct self-control and self-examination of the completed assignment).
3. Solving the crossword puzzle in pairs.
- An ecosystem scientist.
- Living organisms that eat other organisms.
- The smallest "scavengers".
- Organisms that "eaters" eat.
4. Problematic dialogue.
Yes, these are our friends Lena and Misha. Let's listen to them ...
Lena: Man, developing science and technology, violates natural ecosystems. So he can live without them?
Misha: No, Lena, you're wrong. A person, like any other organism, needs other members of his ecosystem, because he must breathe, eat, participate in the cycle of substances.
And again, for the third time, we hear the same word. How many of you paid attention to him? Indeed, this word "Ecosystem". (Hanging out on the board).
What is an ecosystem?
(Children consult the dictionary on the work page and give different definitions.)
What ecosystems are there?
- Natural - natural;
- artificial Are ecosystems created by human hands.
Give an example of natural ecosystems; artificial ecosystems.
5. Statement of the problem.
Children, what do you think, in which of the listed ecosystems there is a place for a person, for you and me?
II. Sharing knowledge.
1. Consider at our conference the questions that we have to study and discuss:
- two human farms;
- where the person lives;
- how the achievements of science and technology affect the lives of people, how they are useful, how they are harmful and what dangers are hidden in their use.
2. Independent acquaintance with two types of human economy through the pages of the textbook.
3. Collective work with the class through a problem conversation in order to systematize the knowledge gained:
- What did the ancient people do?
- Did they differ from wild animals in the way they got food?
- If they appropriated ready-made natural resources, then what could their economy be called? Form a word from the verb “appropriate”, answering the question what kind of household? (Appropriating).
- Why did people later learn to breed domestic animals and cultivated plants?
- Where did people start to live?
- What became their main occupation?
- If people began to produce food and other products necessary for life, then what can you call their economy? Form a word from the verb “to produce”, answering the question what kind of household? (Productive)
4. Demonstration of two ecological pyramids:
- Which of them symbolizes the appropriating economy, and which is the producing economy?
- Which of them can be correlated with a natural ecosystem, and which with an artificial ecosystem?
- What would you call this ecosystem?
(Ecosystem of field, garden, barnyard, poultry house, livestock farm - agricultural ecosystem)
This is the first artificial ecosystem that humans have created. Farmers engaged in agricultural labor live here.
The second artificial ecosystem created by people for their own life is the ecosystem of the city.
If fields, gardens, stockyards resemble natural ecosystems, then the city is striking in its inconsistency with the natural environment. Instead of rustling leaves and singing birds, we hear in the city the noise of motors, the creak of brakes, the clatter of tram wheels on the rails. On the plain, stone mountains soar from multi-storey buildings. Unfortunately, there are few green plants in the city. It is because of the lack or absence of greenery that people - townspeople on weekends try to leave the city for their summer cottage, in the forest, to breathe fresh air, take a break from the city noise. Sometimes people believe that modern man is almost independent of nature. This is a very dangerous delusion.
Remember! A person in the past, present and future is connected with nature by many invisible threads. Take care of her!
But, in spite of everything, the city is an ecosystem that people have created for life in it.
5. Completing task 2 on page 59.
- What opportunities did a person get by creating artificial ecosystems?
- What is the relationship between natural and artificial ecosystems? Why?
- What is human strength?
- Has it always been beneficial to humans and the surrounding nature?
- Is the cycle in nature closed or not?
- What happens under the influence of human management? (Environmental pollution, disappearance of plants and animals, reduction of land fertility, lack of fuel, etc.)
6. Completing task 3 on page 59.
- What are the consequences of the use of force by a person that he possesses?
- What does this lead to?
- What needs to be fixed?
- If the circulation becomes closed, then this type of economy can be called ... (ecological).
- What to do? Can we help?
Back to the concept "ecosystem".
(The definition is posted on the board)
Ecosystem - this is such a relationship (community) between living and inanimate nature, in which all its inhabitants feel at home.
7. Work on keywords:
- Commonwealth
- Nature
- Inanimate nature
- Everything? Who's everyone?
- How is home?
III. Workshop on self-application and use of the acquired knowledge.
- Answers to questions on page 59.
- Performing 2-3 tasks of your choice (1, 4, 5, 7, 8).
- Fill out the table on the work page. Calculate the amount of points, and you will find out if you take good care of nature in the city's ecosystem.
| 1 | ||
| 1 | ||
| 1 | ||
| 1 | ||
| I've been feeding the birds all winter. | 2 | |
| I don’t disturb the birds at the nest. | 1 | |
| I made a dwelling house for nesting birds. | 3 | |
| 1 | ||
| I planted a tree. | 5 |
13–16 points - you are a great fellow, an environmentalist. Everyone can take an example from you.
9-12 points - you know how to be friends with nature.
Less than 9 points - you have something to think about. Try to be more careful with the nature around you.
IV. Summing up the results of the lesson - conference.
- Exchange of views on the implementation of tasks;
- What new did you learn in the lesson?
- Why is human power a big threat to the entire surrounding world?
Man has two paths. The first is for all people to fly into space together and settle on other planets. But if this becomes possible, it will not be very soon, maybe in hundreds and hundreds of years.
The second way is to adapt to nature, to learn not to destroy it, not to disrupt the well-established economy, to try to start restoring what was destroyed and spoiled. And to treat the current nature with care, protecting what is left. Perhaps this path is the only possible one.
V. Homework.
Lesson number 12, task 6.
ATTACHMENT 1
WORK PAGE
Student (s) ____________________________
TOPIC: “How can we live?Man and his place in nature ”.
Plan.
- Two human farms.
- Where does the person live.
- How can we live.
Exercise 1. Blitz is a quiz.
Task 2. Crossword.
- An ecosystem scientist.
- Living organisms that eat other organisms (plants and animals).
- A gas essential for breathing for all living organisms.
- What does the ecosystem get from space?
- The smallest "scavengers".
- Organisms that process waste and residues of living organisms.
- The organ of a plant, in which the transformation of inanimate substances into organic material for all organisms occurs.
- Top dressing to increase plant yield.
- Organisms that eaters feed on.
- The top fertile layer of the earth, from which the plant receives water and nutrients.
Task 3. Discovery of new concepts.
1.____________________
2.____________________
3.____________________
4.____________________
5.____________________
6.____________________
7.____________________
8.____________?_______
Task 4. The table is a test.
| Useful business | Execution mark | Points |
| I turn off the light when I leave the room. | 1 | |
| I turn off the tap when I leave the bathroom. | 1 | |
| I try not to pick flowers in the forest and park. | 1 | |
| I do not break trees for a fire, but I take dead wood. | 1 | |
| I've been feeding the birds all winter. | 2 | |
| I don’t disturb the birds at the nest. | 1 | |
| I made a bird nesting house. | 3 | |
| I take care of house plants and animals. | 1 | |
| I planted a tree. | 5 |
APPENDIX 2
DICTIONARY.
CONFERENCE - a meeting, a meeting of different, including educational organizations, to discuss any special issues.
ECOSYSTEM- living organisms living together and the piece of land on which they feel at home.
ECOSYSTEM- a small part of the biosphere. Many elements of the biosphere can be found in this system: air, soil, water, rocks.
ECOSYSTEM- the unity of living and inanimate nature, in which living organisms of different professions are able to jointly maintain the circulation of substances.
ECOSYSTEM -it is a community of living organisms in unity with the place in which they live.
ECOSYSTEM -it is such a relationship between living and inanimate nature, in which all inhabitants feel at home.
So, in an ecosystem, we see the interaction of a vital community, consisting of many organisms, with characteristic environmental factors acting on this community. Ecosystems are usually classified according to the most important environmental factors. So, they talk about marine, terrestrial or land, coastal or littoral, lacustrine or limnic ecosystems, and so on. How is the ecosystem built?
It usually has four main elements:
1. Inanimate (abiotic) environment. These are water, minerals, gases, as well as inanimate organic matter and humus.
2. Producers (manufacturers). These include living things that are able to build organic matter from inorganic materials of the environment. This work is carried out mainly by green plants, which use solar energy to produce organic compounds from carbon dioxide, water and minerals. This process is called photosynthesis. It releases oxygen (O 2). Organic substances produced by plants go to food for animals and humans, oxygen is used for breathing.
3. Consignments (consumers). They use plant-based products. Organisms that feed only on plants are called first-order consumers. Animals that eat only (or mainly) meat are called second-order consumers.
4. Reducers (destructors, decomposers). This group of organisms decomposes the remains of dead creatures, for example, plant residues or animal corpses, turning them back into raw materials - water, minerals, CO 2, which is suitable for producers who turn it into components again into organic matter.
Reducers are many worms, insect larvae and other small soil organisms. Bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms that transform living matter into mineral are called mineralizers.
An ecosystem can also be artificial. An example of an artificial ecosystem, extremely simplified and incomplete in comparison with natural ones, is a spaceship. Its pilot has to live for a long time in the confined space of the ship, making do with limited supplies of food, oxygen and energy. At the same time, it is desirable, if possible, to recover and reuse spent stocks of substances and waste. For this purpose, special regeneration units are provided in the spacecraft, and recently experiments have been carried out with living organisms (plants and animals), which should participate in the processing of the astronaut's waste using the energy of sunlight.
Let's compare an artificial ecosystem of a spacecraft with any natural one, for example, a pond ecosystem. Observations show that the number of organisms in this biotope remains - with some seasonal fluctuations - mostly constant. This ecosystem is called stable. Equilibrium is maintained until external factors change. The main ones are the inflow and outflow of water, the inflow of various nutrients, and solar radiation.
Various organisms live in the ecosystem of the pond. So, after the creation of an artificial reservoir, it is gradually colonized by bacteria, plankton, then fish, and higher plants. When development has reached a certain peak and external influences remain unchanged for a long time (inflow of water, substances, radiation, on the one hand, and outflow or evaporation, removal of substances and outflow of energy - on the other), the ecosystem of the pond stabilizes. A balance is established between living beings.
Like a simplified artificial spaceship ecosystem, a pond ecosystem is self-sustaining. Unlimited growth is hindered by interactions between producer plants, on the one hand, and animals and plants, consumers and decomposers, on the other.
Consumables can multiply only as long as they do not overuse the supply of available nutrients. If they multiply excessively, the increase in their numbers will stop by itself, as they will not have enough food. Producers, in turn, require a constant supply of minerals. Reducers, or destructors, decompose organic matter and thereby increase the supply of minerals. They again put waste into circulation. And the cycle begins again: the plants (producers) absorb these minerals and, with the help of solar energy, again produce energy-rich nutrients from them.
Nature works extremely economically. The biomass created by organisms (the substance of their bodies) and the energy contained in it are transferred to the rest of the ecosystem: animals eat plants, other animals eat the first, man eats both plants and animals. This process is called the food chain. Examples of food chains: plants - herbivore - predator; cereal - field mouse - fox; fodder plants - cow - man. As a rule, each species feeds on more than one species. Therefore, food chains are intertwined to form a food web. The more strongly organisms are connected with each other by food webs and other interactions, the more resilient the community is against possible disturbances. Natural, undisturbed ecosystems strive for balance. The state of equilibrium is based on the interaction of biotic and abiotic environmental factors.
The maintenance of closed cycles in natural ecosystems is possible due to two factors: the presence of decomposers (decomposers), which use all waste and residues, and the constant supply of solar energy. In urban and artificial ecosystems, there are few or no decomposers, and waste - liquid, solid and gaseous - accumulates, polluting the environment. The rapid decomposition and recycling of such wastes can be facilitated by encouraging the development of decomposers, for example by composting. This is how man learns from nature.
In terms of energy input, natural and anthropogenic (man-made) ecosystems are similar. Both natural and artificial ecosystems - houses, cities, transport systems - require external energy supply. But natural ecosystems receive energy from an almost eternal source - the Sun, which, moreover, “producing” energy, does not pollute the environment. Man, on the contrary, feeds the processes of production and consumption mainly from the end sources of energy - coal and oil, which, along with energy, provide dust, gases, heat and other waste that are harmful to the environment and cannot be processed within the artificial ecosystem itself. Let's not forget that even when consuming such "clean" energy as electricity (if it is produced at a thermal power plant), air pollution and thermal pollution of the environment occur.
UDC 94: 574.4
https://doi.org/10.24158/fik.2017.6.22
Tkachenko Yuri Leonidovich
candidate of Technical Sciences, Associate Professor, Associate Professor of the Moscow State Technical University named after N.E. Bauman
Morozov Sergey Dmitrievich
senior Lecturer
Moscow State Technical
university named after N.E. Bauman
FROM THE HISTORY OF CREATION OF ARTIFICIAL ECOSYSTEMS
Tkachenko Yuri Leonidovich
PhD in Technical Science, Assistant Professor, Bauman Moscow State Technical University
Morozov Sergey Dmitrievich
Senior Lecturer, Bauman Moscow State Technical University
GLIMPSES OF HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL ECOSYSTEMS "CREATION
Annotation:
The article discusses the documentary facts of the creation of artificial ecosystems intended for use in space and terrestrial conditions. The pioneer role of K.E. Tsiolkovsky, who was the first to develop the concept of creating a closed habitat for people in space, and the influence of V.I. Vernadsky, devoted to the biosphere, on approaches to the construction of artificial ecosystems. The decisive contribution of S.P. Korolev in the first practical implementation of Tsiolkovsky's projects for the construction of prototypes of space settlements. The most important historical stages of this process are described: experiments "Bios" (USSR), "Biosphere-2" (USA), "OEER" (Japan), "Mars-500" (Russia), "Yuegong-1" (China).
Keywords:
artificial ecosystem, space settlements, closed habitat, K.E. Tsiolkovsky, S.P. Korolev and V.I. Vernadsky.
The article describes the documentary facts of artificial ecosystems "creation designed for space and terrestrial applications. The study shows the pioneering role of KE Tsiolkovsky who was the first to develop the concept of closed ecological systems for people in space and the influence of VI Vernadsky" s biosphere works on the approaches to construct artificial ecosystems. The article presents the crucial contribution of S.P. Korolev to the first practical implementation of building the space habitat prototypes according to K.E. Tsiolkovsky "s projects. The article describes the major historical stages of this process that are such experiments as BIOS (the USSR), Biosphere 2 (the USA), CEEF (Japan), Mars-500 (Russia), Yuegong-1 (China ).
artificial ecosystem, space habitats, closed ecological system, K.E. Tsiolkovsky, S.P. Korolev, V.I. Vernadsky.
Introduction
The idea of \u200b\u200bthe need to create an artificial closed human environment was born simultaneously with the emergence of the dream of space flights. People have always been interested in the ability to move in air and outer space. In the XX century. started practical space exploration, and in the XXI century. astronautics has already become an integral part of the world economy. Cosmonautics forerunner, cosmist philosopher K.E. Tsiolkovsky in Monism of the Universe (1925) wrote: “The technology of the future will make it possible to overcome the earth's gravity and travel throughout the solar system. After the settlement of our solar system, other solar systems of our Milky Way will begin to populate. With difficulty man will separate from the earth. " By "technology of the future" Tsiolkovsky meant not only rocket technology, using the principle of jet propulsion, but also the human habitat in space, built in the image and likeness of the earth's biosphere.
The birth of the concept of "space biosphere"
K.E. Tsiolkovsky was the first to suggest the idea of \u200b\u200busing nature-like principles and biospheric mechanisms for the reproduction of oxygen, food, fresh water and the disposal of the resulting waste for the life support of the crew of his "jet device". This issue was considered by Tsiolkovsky in almost all of his scientific works, philosophical and fantastic works. The possibility of creating such an environment is justified by the works of V.I. Vernadsky, who revealed the basic principles of the construction and functioning of the Earth's biosphere. In the period from 1909 to 1910, Vernadsky published a series of notes devoted to observations of the distribution of chemical elements in the earth's crust, and concluded that the leading role of living organisms for creating the circulation of matter on the planet. Having familiarized himself with these works of Vernadsky and other works in the field of a then new scientific direction - ecology, Tsiolkovsky wrote in the second part of the article "Exploration of world spaces with jet devices" (1911): "How the earth's atmosphere is cleaned by plants using the Sun, so
our artificial atmosphere also renews. Just as plants on Earth absorb impurities with their leaves and roots and provide food in return, so the plants we have captured on our journeys can continuously work for us. As everything that exists on earth lives with the same amount of gases, liquids and solids, so we can forever live with the supply of matter we have taken. "
Tsiolkovsky's authorship also belongs to the project of a space settlement for a large number of residents, for whom the renewal of the atmosphere, water and food resources is organized due to the closed cycle of chemicals. Tsiolkovsky describes such a "cosmic biosphere" in a manuscript, which he kept up to 1933, but was never able to finish:
“The community contains up to a thousand people, people of both sexes and all ages. The humidity is regulated by the refrigerator. He also collects all the excess water evaporated by people. The hostel communicates with the greenhouse, from which it receives purified oxygen and where it sends all the products of its secretions. Some of them in the form of liquids penetrate the soil of greenhouses, others are directly released into their atmosphere.
When a third of the cylinder's surface is occupied by windows, 87% of the most light is obtained and 13% is lost. Passages are inconvenient everywhere ... ”(At this point the manuscript breaks off).
First experimental installations
Tsiolkovsky's unfinished manuscript, entitled Life in the Interstellar Medium, was published by the Nauka publishing house more than 30 years later - in 1964. The publication was initiated by the General Designer of Space Technology, Academician S.P. Korolyov. In 1962, he, already having the experience of a successful space flight carried out by the first cosmonaut Yu.A. Gagarin on April 12, 1961, set a fundamentally new vector for the development of the space project: “It would be necessary to start the development of a“ greenhouse according to Tsiolkovsky ”, with gradually increasing units or blocks, and we must start working on“ space harvests ”. Which organizations will carry out this work: in the area of \u200b\u200bcrop production and issues of soil, moisture, in the area of \u200b\u200bmechanization and "light-heat-solar" technology and its regulation systems for greenhouses? " ...
The creation of the world's first closed artificial ecosystem for space purposes began with the meeting of S.P. Korolev and the director of the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences (IF SB AS USSR) L.V. Kirensky, at which Korolev conveyed his proposals for a "space greenhouse" to Kirensky. After that, a series of meetings was held at the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where the question of which department would become the base for the deployment of work on the space program was decided. The task of creating an artificial ecosystem in a sealed capsule, in which a person could stay for a long time in an environment close to terrestrial conditions, set by Korolev, was entrusted to the Department of Protozoa. This unusual decision, as it turned out later, turned out to be correct: it was the simplest microalgae that were able to fully provide the crew with oxygen and clean water.
It is significant that in the same year - 1964, when the last manuscript of Tsiolkovsky was published, work began on the practical development of the first closed artificial ecological system in history, including human metabolism in the internal circulation of matter. In the Biophysics Department of the Institute of Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, later transformed into an independent Institute of Biophysics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the construction of the experimental setup "Bios-1" began in Krasnoyarsk, in which I.I. Gitelzon and I.A. Terskov, who became the founders of a new direction in biophysics. The main task was to organize the supply of oxygen and water to humans. The first installation consisted of two components: a pressurized cabin with a volume of 12 m3, inside which a person was placed, and a special cultivator tank with a volume of 20 liters for growing chlorella vulgaris. Seven experiments of various durations (from 12 hours to 45 days) have shown the ability to completely close the gas exchange, that is, to ensure the production of oxygen and the utilization of carbon dioxide by microalgae. Through the vital processes of chlorella, water circulation was also established, during which water was purified in the amount necessary for drinking and satisfying other needs.
In "Bios-1" experiments lasting more than 45 days failed, as the growth of microalgae stopped. In 1966, in order to develop an artificial ecosystem containing both lower and higher plants, "Bios-1" was upgraded to "Bios-2" by connecting a phytotron with a volume of 8 m3 to the pressurized cabin. Fitotron is a special technical device for growing higher plants under artificial lighting and microclimate conditions: vegetables and wheat. Higher plants served as a food source for the crew and provided air regeneration. Since higher plants also gave oxygen, it was possible to conduct experiments with the participation of two testers, which lasted 30, 73 and 90 days. The installation was in operation until 1970.
"Bios-3" was put into operation in 1972. This hermetically sealed structure the size of a 4-room apartment, which is still operational, with a volume of 315 m3, was built in the basement of the Institute of Biophysics of the SB RAS in Krasnoyarsk. Inside, the installation is divided by sealed bulkheads with airlocks into four compartments: two greenhouses for edible plants grown in phytotrons using hydroponic methods that do not require soil, a compartment for breeding chlorella that produces oxygen and clean water, and a compartment for accommodating crew members. The living compartment contains sleeping places, a kitchen and a dining room, a toilet, a control panel, devices for processing plant products and waste disposal.
In phytotrons, the crew grew specially bred dwarf wheat varieties containing a minimum of inedible biomass. Vegetables were also bred: onions, cucumbers, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, beets, sorrel and dill. The Central Asian oil plant "chufa" was selected, which served as a source of vegetable fats irreplaceable for the human body. The crew received the necessary proteins by eating canned meat and fish.
Ten test settlements were carried out at Bios-3 during the 1970s and early 1980s. Three of them lasted for several months. The longest experience of continuous complete isolation of the crew of three lasted 6 months - from December 24, 1972 to June 22, 1973. This experiment had a complex structure and was carried out in three stages. Each stage had its own composition of researchers. Inside the installation, M.P. Shilenko, N.I. Petrov and N.I. Bugreev, who worked for 4 months each. The participant of the experiment V.V. Terskikh stayed at Bios-3 for all 6 months.
Phytotrons "Bios-3" produced a sufficient harvest of grain and vegetables per day. Most of the time the crew spent growing edible plants from seeds, harvesting and processing it, baking bread and preparing food. In 1976-1977. an experiment lasted 4 months, in which two testers were involved: G.Z. Asinyarov and N.I. Bugreev. From the fall of 1983 to the spring of 1984, a 5-month experiment was conducted with the participation of N.I. Bugreev and S.S. Alekseev, who completed the work of "Bios". N.I. Bugreev, thus, set an absolute record at that time for staying in a closed artificial environment, having lived in the installation for a total of 15 months. In the late 1980s, the Bios program was frozen, as its state funding ceased.
"Biosphere" behind glass
The Americans took up the baton in creating a closed habitat. In 1984, Space Biospheres Ventures began building Biosphere-2, an enclosed experimental complex in a site located in the US Arizona desert.
The ideologists of Biosphere-2 were Mark Nelson and John Allen, who were imbued with the ideas of V.I. Vernadsky, having united about 20 scientists abroad on the basis of the theory of the biosphere. In the USSR, in the publishing house "Mysl" in 1991, a book by this group of authors "Catalog of the Biosphere" was published, which described the forthcoming experiment. Allen and Nelson wrote about their tasks to create "cosmic biospheres" in the following way: "Armed with the great designs, ideas and models of Vernadsky and other scientists, mankind now readily ponders not only possible ways of interacting with the biosphere, but also ways of promoting its" mitosis " adapting our earthly life for full participation in the fate of the Cosmos itself by creating an opportunity to travel and live in outer space ”.
"Biosphere-2" is a capital structure made of glass, concrete and steel, located on an area of \u200b\u200b1.27 hectares. The volume of the complex was more than 200 thousand m3. The system was sealed, that is, it could be completely separated from the external environment. Inside it, aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems of the biosphere were artificially recreated: a mini-ocean with an artificial reef made of corals, a rainforest - jungle, savannah, woodland of thorny plants, desert, freshwater and saltwater swamps. The latter took the form of a winding river bed flooded with an artificial ocean - an estuary planted with mangrove thickets. The biological communities of ecosystems included 3800 species of animals, plants, and microorganisms. Inside the "Biosphere-2" were arranged living quarters for the participants in the experiment and agricultural areas, which made up a whole ranch, called Sun Space.
On September 26, 1991, 8 people were isolated inside the complex of structures - 4 men and 4 women. Experimenters - "bionauts", among whom was the ideologist of the project Mark Nelson, were engaged in traditional agriculture - rice growing. For this, rural and livestock farms were used, highly reliable tools were used, which had to be activated only due to the muscular strength of a person. Grass, shrubs and trees were planted inside the facility. The researchers cultivated rice and wheat, sweet potatoes and beets, bananas and papayas, and other crops, which together made it possible to obtain 46 types of diverse plant foods. The meat ration was provided by animal husbandry. The livestock farm was home to chickens, goats and pigs. In addition, the bionauts raised fish and shrimp.
Difficulties began almost immediately after the start of the experiment. A week later, the technician of "Biosphere-2" reported that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was gradually decreasing and the concentration of carbon dioxide was increasing. It was also found that the farm provided only 83% of the researchers' required diet. In addition, in 1992, the multiplying pest moths destroyed almost all rice crops. The weather was cloudy throughout the winter of this year, which led to a decrease in oxygen production and plant nutrition. The artificial ocean acidified due to the dissolution of a large volume of carbon dioxide in its water, due to which the coral reef died. The extinction of animals in the jungle and savanna began. Within two years, the oxygen concentration behind the glass dropped to 14% instead of the original 21% by volume.
The Bionauts came out in September 1993, after two years behind the glass. It is believed that "Biosphere-2" failed. Due to the small scale of the model, the "ecological catastrophe" in it happened very quickly and showed all the perniciousness of the modern way of managing a person creating environmental problems: lack of nutrition, withdrawal of biomass, pollution of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, decrease in species diversity. The experience of "Biosphere-2" was of great ideological significance. One of the "bionauts" - Jane Poynter, giving lectures after the end of the experiment in "Biosphere-2", said: "Only here I first realized how dependent a person on the biosphere is - if all plants die, then people will have nothing to breathe and there will be nothing to eat. If all the water is polluted, then people will have nothing to drink ”. Complex "Biosphere-2" is still open to the public, as its authors believe that they have created a fundamentally new basis for public education in the field of environmental protection.
Inhabited space stations prototypes
The installations created since the second half of the 1990s initially had a clear purpose - modeling the life support system of a spacecraft or a habitable base for flight conditions and exploration of Mars or the Moon. From 1998 to 2001, studies were carried out in Japan at the CEEF (Closed Ecological Experimental Facility), which is a closed artificial ecosystem. The purpose of the experiments was to study closed cycles of gas exchange, water circulation and nutrition while simulating the conditions of a Martian habitable base. The complex included a phytotron unit for growing plants, a compartment for breeding domestic animals (goats), a special geohydrospheric unit that simulates terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and a habitable module for a crew of two. Planting area was 150 m2, livestock module - 30 m2, residential - 50 m2. The authors of the project were the employees of the Tokyo Aerospace Institute K. Nitta and M. Oguchi. The facility is located on the island of Honshu in the city of Rokkasho. There are no data on long-term experiments to isolate people in this facility; the results of modeling the consequences of global warming and studies of the migration of radionuclides in internal flows of matter have been published.
Simulation of a closed habitat for simulating long-term space flights is carried out at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) RAS (Moscow), founded by M.V. Keldysh and S.P. Korolev in 1963. The basis of this work is the study of people staying in isolated conditions for a long time inside the Mars-500 complex. The experiment on 520-day isolation of the crew began in June 2010 and ended in November 2011. Male researchers took part in the experiment: A.S. Sitev, S.R. Kamolov, A.E. Smoleevsky (Russia), Diego Urbina (Italy), Charles Romain (France), Wang Yue (China). One of the modules of the complex includes a greenhouse for growing vegetables. The planting area does not exceed 14.7 m2 in a volume of 69 m3. The greenhouse served as a source of vitamins to supplement and improve the diet of the participants in the experiment. The Mars-500 complex is based on physicochemical, and not biological, processes of providing the crew with oxygen and clean water using canned food supplies, therefore it differs significantly from the Bios-3 installation.
The Chinese complex Yuegong-1 (Moon Palace) is the closest conceptually to the Bios project. The complex reproduces the conditions of the lunar base. "Yuegong-1" was developed at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics by Professor Li Hong. Scientists from Moscow and Krasnoyarsk advised the creators of the Chinese complex.
The Yuegong-1 complex covers an area of \u200b\u200b160 m2 with a volume of 500 m3 and consists of three semi-cylindrical modules. The first module is a living room, which houses a saloon, cabins for three crew members, a waste treatment system and a room for personal hygiene. The other two modules house greenhouses for the production of plant foods. The grown plants made up more than 40% of the crew's diet. In terms of water and air, the plant environment was 99% closed.
The construction of the Yuegong-1 installation was completed on November 9, 2013. From December 23 to December 30, 2014, the testers, who were two university students, carried out a trial settlement of the Lunar Palace. The experiment itself was carried out for 105 days - from February 3 to May 20, 2014. A crew of three people participated in it: a man Xie Beizhen and two women - Wang Minjuan and Dong Chen. The experiment was successful and received wide coverage in the Chinese media. Conclusion
The presented history of the creation of closed artificial ecosystems is a fragment of the global historical process of human development. Thanks to his ability to think, man created practical cosmonautics and proved his ability to go beyond the planet. A deep study of the biospheric mechanisms of the construction and functioning of the habitat will allow people to create favorable conditions on planets and their satellites, asteroids, and other cosmic bodies. This activity will make it possible to realize the meaning of human existence.
IN AND. Vernadsky wrote about the spread of life over the Earth and outer space. Only a man with his mind is capable of leading the expansion of our biosphere further, up to the development of the studied boundaries of the Cosmos. Humanity needs to extend the biosphere to asteroids and nearby space bodies in order to go further beyond the studied limits of the Universe. This is important for the preservation of not only our biosphere, but also the biological species of man itself. As a result of the exploration foreseen by Tsiolkovsky first of the near-Earth space, the solar system, and then of the distant space, dynamic populations of mankind can form - that is, some people will constantly live on space bases outside the Earth. History as a science, thus, will go beyond the planetary framework and will truly become the history of not only the Earth, but also the Cosmos.
1. The world of philosophy. In 2 volumes.Vol. 2.M., 1991.624 p.
2. Tsiolkovsky K.E. Industrial space exploration: a collection of works. M., 1989.278 p.
3. Photocopies of K.E. Tsiolkovsky [Electronic resource]. URL: http://tsiolkovsky.org/wp-content/up-loads/2016/02/ZHizn-v-mezhzvezdnoj-srede.pdf (date accessed: 25.04.2017).
4. Grishin Yu.I. Artificial space ecosystems. M., 1989.64 p. (New in life, science, technology. Series "Cosmonautics, astronomy". No. 7).
5. Gitelzon I.I., Degermendzhi A.G., Tikhomirov A.A. Closed life support systems // Science in Russia. 2011. No. 6. S. 4-10.
6. Degermendzhi A.G., Tikhomirov A.A. Creation of artificial closed ecosystems for terrestrial and space purposes // Vestnik RAN. 2014. T. 84, No. 3. S. 233-240.
7. Catalog of the biosphere. M., 1991.253 p.
8. Nelson M., Dempster W.F., Allen J.P. "Modular Biospheres" - New Testbed Platforms for Public Environmental Education and Research // Advances in Space Research. 2008. Vol. 41, no. 5.R. 787-797.
9. Nitta K. The CEEF, Closed Ecosystem as a Laboratory for Determining the Dynamics of Radioactive Isotopes // Ibid. 2001. Vol. 27, no. 9.R. 1505-1512.
10. Grigoriev A.I., Morukov B.V. "Mars-500": preliminary results // Earth and Universe. 2013. No. 3. S. 31-41.
11. Paveltsev P. "Yuegun-1" - the successor of the BIOS-3 project // Cosmonautics News. 2014. T. 24, No. 7. S. 63-65.
1935 A. Tensley introduced the concept of "ecosystem" 1940 V.N. Sukachev - "Biocenosis"
Mixed forest ecosystem
1 - vegetation 2 - animals 3 - soil inhabitants 4 - air 5 - soil itself
Ecosystem - an open, but integral, stable system of living and nonliving components historically formed in a particular territory or water area.
Classification of ecosystems by sizeAll ecosystems are divided into 4 categories
Microecosystems
Mesoecosystems
Macroecosystems (huge homogeneous spaces stretching for hundreds of kilometers (tropical forests, ocean))
Global ecosystem (biosphere)
Classification by degree of opennessOpen means the ability to exchange energy and information with the environment.
Isolated
Closed
Open ∞
The classification is based on such a component as vegetation. It is characterized by static and physiological character.
Life form classifications
Woody \u003d woody
Herbaceous \u003d meadow and steppe
Semi-shrub \u003d tundra and desert
Ecosystem productivity classification
Desert forest
Ecosystem structure
Types of connections in the ecosystem
Trophic (food)
Tropical (energy)
Teleological (informational)
Food chain Is a sequence of food links, each of which is a living organism.
grass hare wolf
Trophic level - a group of organisms assigned to any stage of the food pyramid.
elk hawk
grass hare wolf
fox man
the implementation of trophic links, 3 functional groups of organisms act:
Autotrophs (plants are organisms that synthesize organic matter from inorganic)
Heterotrophs (organisms that are unable to synthesize organic substances from inorganic ones by photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. They eat ready-made substances)
Reducers (Destructors) (organisms (bacteria and fungi) that destroy the dead remains of living things, turning them into inorganic and elementary organic compounds.)
Small (biological) cycle of substances in nature
Energy connections (tropical)
Obey two laws of ecology
The Law of Ecological Accumulative Energy This is the ability, inherent in many ecosystems, to concert the energy received by the body into complex organic substances and accumulate energy in huge quantities.
Biogenic flow law
Efficiency (human) \u003d 50% Efficiency (nature) \u003d 10%
Information links
In ecosystems, information can be transmitted in different ways:
Behavior
(in plants it is still not known)
Ecosystem properties
Integrity - the property of an ecosystem to function as a single organism
Sustainability - the ability of an ecosystem to withstand the system from the outside
Composition constancy is the ability of an ecosystem to maintain the composition of species in a relatively unchanged state.
Self-regulation - the ability of an ecosystem through biological organs to automatically regulate the number of species.
Biosphere. Structure and function
Biosphere - in 1875, the Austrian biologist Suess.
This is the lower part of the atmosphere, the entire hydrosphere, its upper part of the earth's lithosphere, inhabited by living organisms.
The theory of the origin of life
Cosmological This hypothesis is based on the idea that life was brought from space
Theological
The theory of A.I. Oparina
Oparin took a bottle with a sugar solution for his experiment
The drop coacervates absorbed the sugar. A semblance of a cell membrane appeared.
In 1924 Oparin publishes the monograph "The Origin of Life". In 1926, "Biosphere" by V.I. Vernadsky. In Vernadsky's monograph, 2 postulates stand out
The planetary biochemical role in nature belongs to living organisms.
The biosphere has a complex organization.
Biosphere composition
In the biosphere, Vernadsky distinguishes 7 types of substance:
Inert - a substance that exists in nature before the appearance of the first living organisms (water, mountain vapors, volcanic lava)
Bioinert - a substance of organic origin with inanimate properties. The result of the joint activity of living organisms (water, soil, weathering crust, sedimentary rocks, clay materials) and inert (abiogenic) processes.
Biogenic - a substance of organic origin, released into the environment in the course of their life. (atmospheric gases, coal, oil, peat, limestone, chalk, forest floor, soil humus, etc.)
Radioactive
Scattered atoms - 50 km
Substance of cosmic origin
Living matter - all living organisms living in nature
Properties of organisms
The ubiquity of life - the ability of living organisms to dwell everywhere
Implementation of redox reactions
The ability to carry out the migration of chemical elements
Ability to carry out gas migration
The ability to carry out a small cycle of substances in nature
The ability to accumulate chemical elements in their tissues and concert
