Astrobioneers

Team information

Category:

Guusje van Gool LinkedIn
Bachelor Radboud University Nijmegen

Milind Patel
Bachelor Radboud University

Jelle Thoen
Bachelor Radboud universiteit Nijmegen

Amber Tomassen
Bachelor Radboud University

Charles Leroux
Bachelor Radboud Universiteit

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About the team

We are students from the Faculty of Science at Radboud University that are passionate about improving the future of our Earth. This team consists of people from varying fields including biology, mathematics, physics, astronomy, computing science, artificial intelligence, and business administration.

Our vision

Our long term goal is to deal with future desertification of land on Earth. We hope to give sustainable solutions for decreasing food scarcity by taking inspiration from growing plants on the Moon, where water is scarce. Currently, climate change is affecting the land available for agricultural use: between 1982 and 2015, 6% of the world's dryland was desertified through unsustainable land usage in combination with anthropogenic climate change. This is on top of the fact that semi-arid and arid lands account for approximately 30% of the earth’s surface and inhabit 20% of the human population. Population increase, climate change, and desertification will only further increase food shortages worldwide, a problem we aim to solve. We want to create a solution that can help us address challenges of growing food in deserts and water-constrained regions.

Our solution

We want to build mesocosms in dry areas, where agriculture was not feasible at first, that allow for plants, microbes, and animals to grow in symbiosis. Dry soils cover 41% of the earth's surface, and with climate change this percentage will only increase. Thus by giving communities in these areas a way to farm sustainably, food shortages can be remedied. We want to create a cost-effective, resource-minimal, accessible and easy to build mesocosm setup that can be used in remote dry areas. This will help combat local food shortage existing in already arid and semi-arid regions as well as help in areas that face dry conditions due to effects of climate change.