Science fiction stories have imagined future people living in underground cities on Mars, in hollowed-out asteroids, and in free-floating space stations far from the sun. But if humans are ever to survive in any of those harsh and alien environments, they will need ways to grow food using limited resources—and photosynthesis, the wildly successful yet energy-inefficient process by which plants turn sunlight into sugar, might not cut it.
Now, some scientists are wondering whether it’s possible to produce food more efficiently by skipping photosynthesis altogether, and growing plants in the dark.
The idea sounds as science fictional as cities on Mars. But a team of researchers has taken a first step toward realizing it with a study published in Nature
