Several months ago, scientists from Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands announced that they’d managed to coax real live plants out of simulated Martian soil — something that scientists had been struggling with for years. There was just one catch: they didn’t know whether the crops were safe to eat. The dirt on Mars has far higher amounts of toxic heavy metals than the soil on Earth, and those metals could end up in the plants.
“As soon as we start to eat them, those heavy metals can pose a problem for us,” Wieger Wamelink, an ecologist working on the experiments, told The Washington Post.
After testing four of the 10 crops they harvested — radish, pea, rye and tomato — the scientists announced in late June that the plants don’t contain concentrations of heavy metals that would be dangerous to humans.
“The four crops are therefore safe to eat,” they said in a press release, “and for some heavy metals, the concentrations were even lower than in the crops grown in potting soil.”
The radishes contained the most metals, which include copper, lead and cadmium, though Wamelink said it wasn’t clear if that’s because they hadn’t been properly cleaned.
“These remarkable results are very promising,” Wamelink told Agence France Presse. “… I am very curious what they will taste like.”
All this doesn’t mean that we’re suddenly ready to stage “The Martian” with real humans — for one thing, the results haven’t been peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal yet, so they need to be viewed with skepticism. For another, simulated Martian soil is not the same as actual soil from Mars. The scientists were working with a rough approximation based on chemical tests conducted by Mars orbiters and landers. They can’t know for sure whether Martian agriculture will work until they try with real dirt.
The team still needs to test the remaining six crops. Once they have determined that all 10 plants are safe to eat, they hope to organize a meal for their funders out of their crops.
Wamelink’s research has been backed by MarsOne — the privately-funded project that aims to send people on a one-way trip to Mars by 2020 — and he believes that the findings could help people survive on Mars.
Wamelink said that cultivating crops in less-than-ideal soil could help address hunger on Earth.
“There are over 7 billion people on the planet, and they have to be fed,” he said. “One solution is to grow crops in places where it’s now basically impossible.”
