The Weinersmiths, a wife-and-husband research team, cowrote the New York Times bestselling popular science book Soonish, a Wall Street Journal and Popular Science book of the year. Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences department at Rice University.
Humans are forever venturing deep into the unknown, pushing the boundaries of our physical limits in pursuit of adventure. The next frontier for humanity is space — but just like exploring on Earth, not all expeditions go to plan. And when something does go wrong, we are faced with the same ethical dilemmas as generations of explorers before us have done.
So while we had to drop a planned section on death in space, we did get interested in a related question while researching space food: the forbidden space meal. The one option on a long Mars trip that is extremely fresh and contains precisely the nutrients a human body needs. The classic example is the"Law of the Sea." The one that says you draw straws and the person who draws the short one gets eaten. Freitas doesn't mention the dinner aspect of space murder, but he does posit a scenario inspired by the novel"Marooned," in which three astronauts are trapped in a capsule without enough oxygen. Due to the precise data available to the spacefarers, they know they have enough oxygen for only two to survive until rescue comes.
Seedhouse asks:"Imagine you're stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers. You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?... One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you."
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