While a huge challenge, providing food for a crew of people from crops grown on the Moon or Mars is at least plausible; not so for growing food for consumption on Earth. It would be easier to farm the arctic or the deserts here on earth. In addition to the challenges of growing the crops, there is the whole issue of transporting the food back to earth at a reasonable cost. Why fret about fresh California strawberries flown to New York if we are going to import food from the Moon? Yet, despite these obvious flaws, many people, as shown by the interest and writing about farming space, still think this is a reasonable alternative. Why?
Some, too impressed by our technological prowess, forget that soft science fiction is not real. “Bioregenerating Soil-based Space Agriculture” sounds suspiciously like terra-forming to me, an often used process in soft science fiction, but not anything we could currently achieve. But why not in the future, hundreds of years from now?
