These companies hope to (literally) resurrect the dead

“What I would love to have is a homeostatic, isometric, self-managing greenhouse that looks into my iris and my retina, takes a blood sample and looks at my breath, checks my toilet assay, and grows the stuff I need for me.”

So says David Gobel who, as co-founder of The Methuselah Foundation, hopes to increase the healthy human lifespan.

He’s onto something, because in 2000 NASA asked him to create the very same thing―but for space colonies. Searching for a way to grow food that is ideally suited for consumption in space, the aerospace company partnered with The Methuselah Foundation to figure out how to do it, launching a competition to that end in May 2021.

The Deep Space Food Challenge ends in September and will reward the 20 highest-scoring teams $25,000 if they can “create novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that require minimal inputs and maximize safe, nutritious, and palatable food outputs for long-duration space missions, and which have potential to benefit people on Earth.”

If NASA hopes this challenge will result in the ability to feed four astronauts living in outer space for three years, The Methuselah Foundation hopes that, as a byproduct of creating this garden of the future, we will also be able to biologically engineer food that will help…