Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "The Real Problem with Growing Plants in Lunar and Martian Soil" video.

@tbthedozer At this point the video was discussing using regolith as a source of minerals for indoor pressurized farms, as Watney did on an ad-hoc basis in the Martian. In the process of pressurizing the farm to enough pressure that liquid water can exist, one would raise the partial pressure of CO2 to more than you need for plants. You would have to replenish it from the external atmosphere as the plants used it up, of course.
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@halnineooo136 Who told you that? Martian soil is irradiated from space, but not with stuff (like neutrons) that would make it radioactive. There is a layer of the products of a possible "natural fission reactor" event in the distant past, but it is not a worldwide deadly coating.
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That was not even a proper closed cycle environment experiment. It was some over budgeted half-assed hippie environmentalist boondoggle. For them, going nuts was a short trip. It in no way had anything to do with developing closed-cycle life support for space exploration. The O2 was being absorbed by the "potting plant" type soil, that and the cockroaches, both of which they insisted on importing for the experiment, which was supposed to be the Earth's biosphere in miniature, complete with different environments (desert, tundra, etc). Hence the name, Biosphere 2. With proper cleaning, the facility might be useful for some serious research. Right now it's a tourist trap. @dazza2350 "just give them some way to access the internet" The Internet was a very new thing back then. I don't even know if Oracle, Arizona had dialup then. If you are going to simulate a Moon or a Mars base, psychology and all, you would have to introduce an artificial signal delay
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