picture this you're trapped inside of a spaceship and life support has failed in just a few minutes you're going to run out of air obviously you can't open the door so you open your emergency Air Supply instead but you're only delaying the inevitable if only there was a way to transform your toxic carbon dioxide breath back into lifegiving oxygen then you hear it plants is it really that simple though the Earth is covered with plants and they process the air for 8 billion people but for just one person in a sealed room how many plants would they need that's what I'm going to find out and even though our story ends in pretend space it All Began on the real toilet scrolling through social media I Came Upon a post that said the snake plant is so effective at producing oxygen that if you were in a sealed room with no air flow you would only need six to eight of them to survive and that's according to n now I've personally thought about this problem ever since I saw Mission to Mars back in the year 2000 when I was 10 you see space hipster Don cheel was getting stranded on Mars way before Matt Damon ever made it cool and the only reason Don was able to survive was because it works you know I I give them CO2 and light and they give me oxygen and food but even though this scenario has been randomly popping into my head for the last 25 years for most other people the conversation went like this have you ever wondered how many PL that you would need to breathe no so if you're wondering why you should care about this question let's get some perspective people can survive some truly harsh places Siberia the Sahara Cleveland but all of those places have actual breathable air we take for granted that right now we can breathe everywhere we go on Earth but last I checked we haven't discovered any plants in space not to mention we have cut down quite a few of them here who knows in the future knowing the number of plants that you need to survive could become something that you reference every day leaving the house wallet keys phone plants but do you need a green house or just a green backpack could scuba divers carry a succulent should astronauts just sniff a ficus it's a fascinating question and I can't wait to find out but we can't go to outer space to do it so we're just going to have to bring outer space to my inner basement now there weren't any used space capsules for sale on Market place so I'm going to make my own and all we really need to do is create an airtight box one that we can open and close with just enough room for me and some plants but not so much room that it takes forever to run out of air once inside I'll just breathe and as my breath turns oxygen into carbon dioxide I will monitor that CO2 level and use a stopwatch to time how long it takes to reach an unsafe level then I'll do the same thing but with different amounts of plants and compare the times my first objective is to see if this post about the snake plants is true or false but either way my final objective is to find a way to stay in that room and never run out of air using just plants so I guess I better build it and this is where things get pretty cool and really convenient you see a few years ago I built a science fiction movie set out of fular board and for some reason I've kept it in storage all this time so not only do I not need to buy these now much more expensive material but I also don't need to paint them because they already look like an old spaceship we'll tape up the seams we'll fill that stupid Gap we'll get the TV screen there I'm building a real spaceship I mean it's not real but it's it's real for our purposes I'm going to be able to seal this thing up and then I'm going to be able to time how long does it take to saturate it with carbon dioxide and then when we have plants in here how much of an effect will it actually have this is really exciting oh I like it I like it a lot so my brother who has built actual houses seemed to kind of approve of the concept and with a massive TV that I repaired a while back I now had a window into space but this airtight room needs to be airtight meaning every little Gap and crack needs to be covered and that's where the Gorilla Tape comes in the only way this works is if we seal up every crack this thing has to be at least 99% I have a feeling I'm going to go through a lot of tape now in the places that needed to stay clear I used heat shrinking window we weatherproofing plastic that includes the light fixtures in the walls my pretend window and my actual window SL emergency exit I think I'm just going to go ahead and seal up the rest of it and we'll see how long it takes to become a truly toxic work environment the Final Touch is a resealable door that has to be taped shut each time and as a quick test I decided to fill the room with fog and then look for fog leaking on the outside not seeing any leaking out oh damn that's fancy and after a bit of ing around it was finally time for us to establish a baseline good thing the smoke alarms work all right bro you ready for test one test one I've got my stopwatch I got my pul socks I got my emergency uh stop button which is this so yeah a baseline test basically means just sitting and waiting under the watchful eye of my brother Charles you going to keep me alive it's day one we're on the surface of Mars and I am waiting for my imminent Doom we're going to wait till we get to about 5,000 parts per million of CO2 and then I think I'm going to call it quits this test will tell us how long I can stay in the room with no plants and somewhat limited Avenues of entertainment and the barrel is just a physical placeholder so that when we bring the plants in we'll still be starting with a similar volume of air and as CO2 level steadily Rose I found myself waxing eloquent optimism is the lifeblood of a spacecraft without optimism you would die and O oxygen is also important now what do these numbers actually mean well the air outside usually sits at around 400 parts per million that means that for every million bits of air 400 of them are CO2 or about .4% to contrast the air that you breathe out sits at around 38,000 parts per million now above 2,000 parts per million is where things start to get really spicy these levels are associated with headaches fatigue loss of Focus nausea increased heart rate and they're often an indicator that there's less oxygen in your home because you're probably just breathing the same exhale breath over and over again now OSHA's personal exposure limit is 5,000 parts per million anything above that and you're basically just slowly dying but back up on Mars it was taking a long time to actually get to 5,000 then I realized yeah why do I need to go to 5,000 I could just go to 2,000 right you see I really just needed something to aim at this was taking longer than I thought and conveniently I was about to hit 2,000 right at 30 minutes smells like wrong dog in here all right I'm going to eat lunch say the word so where do you get a bunch of snake plants well your local orange Home Improvement store has them for about 25 bucks each but that would be $200 for eight what if I need more but what am I going to do it's not like I'm going to just stumble upon a bunch of cheap snake plants from some random dude on Marketplace [Music] so the random dude on Marketplace was named Charles and after showing me his home ecosystem and after paying him a mere $70 I now had a lot of snake plants and since the social media post says as few as six snake plants that's what I decided to start with the bare minimum bro you ready for this very scientific test lock you in a box there we got a bunch of plants going on lights going on a box it's got a window cut into the box yes well it's it's a very scientific box so the post said 6 to8 snake plants in a sealed room I figured it would make sense to test the minimum six right because any random person reading that is going to go huh why' you put six snake plants in a room I'll be fine all right door's closed starting timer we are starting with a base reading of 836 parts per million well last time I was at 670 but we've got we've got six snake plants there's no that these snake plants won't be able to offset that extra amount the the post said this would work and of course we all know the post never lies test number two almost 15 minutes CO2 M freaking out I forgot to turn off the alarm there we go if it's not beeping it's not a problem so the first test started at 670 and then hit 2,000 parts per million at 30 minutes giving us a CO2 saturation rate of 44.4 parts per million per minute or ppmm which is why it was surprising that even with the six plants CO2 was still climbing pretty darn quick I just thought of like a question that I didn't really ask what do I do if I have to poop we're at 30 minutes and we're at 2120 pretty much a wash from the first test six snake plants you're going to die that's right our PPM PM went from 44.4 to 42.8 meaning at most we had like 4% reduction in CO2 but I'm willing to bet that our margin of error is at least 5% so best to get more green give it another try side note I am going to be at Open sauce the weekend of June 14th a place where all your wildest dreams come true in so much as they conform to their scheduled offerings but I am seriously excited and you should definitely check out the website and get some tickets I'd love to see you there and I even have one ticket to give away so leave me a comment let me know what funny thing would you say if you saw me in the crowd and maybe you'll get a chance to say it for real what are your predictions I don't think that 12 snake plants would be like enough you saw the post it said 6 to eight snake plants and yet somehow with now 12 snake plants double the minimum and 50% more than their claimed Max our CO2 saturation rate looked eerily familiar it's full of snake plants how can it still be basically the same rate we know that there's going to be little variances here and there my metabolic rate in the actual volume of stuff taking up plate space in the room right but the point is that like if these things would make you live according to that post with six well then double that should easily easily make up for any variances or at the very least make a dent and I could fit like you know maybe six more snake plants but we already know that adding another 30% of no appreciable difference is is 30% of nothing and think about it this is like who has this many house plants and it's not even enough to make a measurable difference in your own CO2 output isn't that crazy a person with what most would consider a lot of house plants isn't even making the dent we're going to have to seriously re-evaluate just what I'm doing here because I want to be trapped in this room with plants and I want them to keep me alive but they're letting me down that post let me down this is not looking good so what do you do when regular Plants just aren't going to cut it well here's where I may have misled you just a little bit not about plants we're still going to do this with plants but I kind of already knew that snake plants weren't going to be enough you see I try and do a little research before I do a project and I quickly found that you need like a lot of plants to make this work which is why in the background I've secretly been preparing a plan B that fits neatly into this little vial chlorella vulgaris a plant that we've actually already started experimenting with in space to the average person this is just algae the green goo that grows in water it's still a plant but with some very very special attributes you see land plants like the snake plant have a variety of complex structures leaves roots stems and on the resource balance sheet specialized Parts just require more cost and means they take longer to grow and they only really produce oxygen when they're growing algae like chlorella they're just like cells they're like the bacteria version of plants just reproducing over and over again meaning they can produce way more oxygen way quicker and with way less space but not everyone was impressed by the idea or at least not impressed by my first small growing chamber you're just like blowing bubbles into a piss bottle when I came down here I was expecting to see like multiple fish tanks but there's just this one little bucket with a fish bottle in it that's all you have yes you're going to be you're going to die it's not even green it's just like that's after like a week of growth yes one week gave me this yellowed bottle and then I transferred that bottle to an even bigger bottle and after another week that bottle had turned into this bottle that is green which quickly became these bottles and were transferred to these bottles satisfying isn't [Applause] it these five 2 L bottles in a 5G bucket were my first prototype for a portable photo bioreactor now what is a photo bioreactor well it's a fancy word for something really simple photo refers to light bio refers to life and reactor while the life reacts to the light to convert CO2 to oxygen as it grows and we maximize the CO2 that the life is exposed to by pumping air into the bottoms of the bottles but just how powerful is this little glowing bucket well there is a consumer product called the Arium which is basically a photo bioreactor marketed to the average Joe with a tank that appears to be around the size of one 2 L bottle they say that their reactor has the power of 25 plants and that's using less efficient spirulina algae so under optimal conditions this little bucket could theoretically be more effective than 125 plants but will that be enough it's time to go back to space and find out close me in brother all right the door is closed test number four our number one algae test running the algae generator 1000 this is Uncharted Territory for me but I'm excited I got algae in a bucket Mission Log day four I can either look out this lovely window right here or I can look out this one guess this window right here is quite lovely all jokes aside and as I slowly dissociated beyond the surface of Mars I reflected on just how far I had come that is until I noticed a malfunction one of my pumps ain't pumping we're only operating at 80% for this first test that's just the way it's going to be not a big deal um you know that we're doing multiple tests but even with our 80% or 100 plant power the CO2 still steadily Rose in a surprisingly familiar fashion we're approaching 2,000 parts per million and we're approaching 30 minutes dang it yesterday we tested with just four of the tanks bubbling didn't really notice a difference I thought wow this reactor should really be like multiple times stronger than the plants well this time I've taken the a little um that so back before I multiplied my first 2 L bottle I began growing a separate batch using 4 gallon bottles this was a bit of an experiment since my 2 L bottles started with completely pure distilled water and these would use the regular bottled water that they came with from the store I did aate them ahead of time to try and ensure that any potential chlorine or chloramine was fully evaporated and then I meticulously prepped the water with baking soda minerals and plant food the same thing I had done with all the algae water up to this point I then evenly distributed the algae and kept this batch running in the background in case something happened to the primary batch or just in case I needed more and it was pretty clear by test 5 that I needed more here are our five 4G tanks got a lot of light light shining right now got a little fan helping to circulate that I got a fan here helping to circulate little fan here pulling air through these holes even though yesterday the small photo bioreactor was only running at 80% capacity it still didn't show anything so I didn't want to do a test right just ran it at 100% capacity just to show that it still didn't really do anything appreciable so that's why right now we're running both systems if this ends up being more than enough then I'll just back it off and find out exactly how much I need but it quickly became clear that backing off wouldn't be our problem seems like we're on track to have about the same result I just want to get to a point where at the very least there's a measurable amount like instead of being only a half an hour in this room before reaching 2,000 it's 40 minutes that would blow my mind and of course this isn't a laboratory I mean I'm a guy in my basement but I want to demonstrate that it's possible that it's doable and just about how much that would take okay I think something might be happening everything seemed on track but now we're at 27 1/2 minutes and we're only at 1730 no I mean the plants run on co2 so as the CO2 concentration increases in the room maybe they become more efficient they start growing faster I ended that test with 41.6 PPM PM the lowest ever and when I ran the same test again the next day 30 minutes and we're at 1805 that's pretty good I'll check in when we hit 2,000 all right 2,000 at 35 minutes and 50 seconds we were definitely in a downward Trend and this test had averaged an even lower 39.1 PPM PM but these results could still possibly be within my margin of error how could I possibly know without doing way more tests or growing way more algae so remember when I said that I had the second system growing in the background well it wasn't the only other system that I had growing okay so in my reading I saw that the Russians had done something similar to this in the 1970s and it required like a lot of algae so I decided to grow a lot of algae and to try and be smart about it giant clear containers aren't easy to find or cheap but these 55g food grade barrels were less than $10 each yeah that actually just smells like a like a light kombucha yeah exactly now algae needs a lot of light distributed as evenly as possible but these opaque sides rule out an external light source and the only immersive algae light that I could find was $22,000 so I decided to design my own with some Amazon grow lights clear heat shrink and hot glue the materials for two of these cost me only 5% of that 2 Grand and with the addition of some tubing and aquarium air rating stones to produce fine bubbles they could now slide down the middle of the tank and shine out in all directions through the well aerated algae even though these lights are quite bright it didn't take long for the algae to make them much darker the light is barely getting through now or for them to really start scrubbing out the CO2 I did it I now have 100 Gall of algae tomorrow I'm going to try and breathe using just this algae and the algae that's already you know in the room all right we are at test number seven I think this is a very special test now we have 100 4 gallons of algae it's crazy I'm so excited for this one because this is the one where something's going to happen and I have this tube my breath is the most dangerous thing in this room because it has the highest concentration of carbon dioxide so this tube is connected to the intake of the air pumps that way it runs my breath directly through the algae giving them more food and scrubbing out as much CO2 as possible right away we got the beeping going cuz we just crossed into 1,500 territory 1,500 we at almost 24 minutes I think we're doing really well and now for the first time in this whole process I was surprised in a good way wao no way no way it's only gone up 75 parts per million in the last 6 minutes how is that possible 30 minutes and we're at 1588 I'm just going to sit here puffing on this for a while the CO2 increase kept slowing down the higher it got maybe because the algae was getting more efficient or maybe because we were approaching equilibrium but either way I wasn't complaining okay we are at 39 minutes and we're at 1760 the CO2 is crawling it's that 99 we're at 99 I'm not feeling like headit or anything I'm feeling perfectly normal 1,800 we just reached 1,800 parts per million and now we're at 43 minutes and just like that the 40-minute Milestone was in the rear view mirror can't believe I've made it this far like 2 months ago I was like I should probably start growing algae and while I was looking in that rear view mirror I found myself reflecting know I've had a lot of projects lately like my rubber band car that only went you know like not even 5 m hour I'm not going to complain and say it's hard like obviously it's hard it's a it's a ton of work but I'm glad I did this one you know a part of me wonders I don't know if this video will do well it's kind of I think it's really cool I think it's really cool [Music] he said as he breathed into a tube with our over 100 gallons of algae it took us 55 minutes to reach 2,000 parts per million for an insane average PPM PM of 24.5 and I had a plan to do even better I'm going to get more air pumps we're going to let the algae keep growing I'm going to do this again tomorrow I don't even why am I still breathing into this tube I don't just got another pump more tubing in aquarium stones I'm super excited we're going to double the air flow through it certainly there was no way we were maximizing the surface area of that algae this could make all the difference this could be the final brick in the foundation of being able to breathe in space or in this sealed space in my basement I'm excited test number eight got the two air pumps I've got them both hooked up to this funnel that's a weird feeling when this sucks to your face ow we're at 15 minutes and we're at 110 parts per million I don't know it's so nonlinear not even worth really speculating meaning like always we probably wouldn't see a big difference until the levels got higher this thing keeps sucking to my face I just realized that as I get closer and closer to the Finish Line I'm going to have to spend a lot more time in this room you see as a differential approaches equilibrium it slows down big gap big movement small Gap small movement so finding the level where the CO2 who actually stops going up could take a long time I'm the one who devised this whole premise in these experiments it's my decision it's still a long time to sit in a room with a funnel on your face but I had never been this close to Victory and patiently passed the minutes to get there 30 minutes 1363 but since I was only measuring CO2 and not the oxygen in the air I thought it would be a good idea to do a little research let's read the symptoms of hypoxia restlessness headache confusion anxiety rapid heart rate rapid breathing difficulty breathing or shortness of breath so if I get a headache while I'm in here if I start having anxiety while I'm in here a rapid heart rate I'm going to pull the plug difficulty breathing definitely pulling the plug confusion I mean I'm always a bit confused so in good health I pushed forward and man were we going forward we're just about to cross the 60-minute line 1700 parts per million going very slowly but it's not stopping I wish it was sto we're approaching 1 hour 20 minutes 18:31 it was creeping and all a sudden it just shot up 2040 cuz I wasn't breathing in this I was taking a selfie and all of a sudden boo but um so 30 minutes had become an hour and 30 minutes but that's just to 2,000 parts per million and during my next test I realized that my breath after coming out of the algae was being reduced by over 90% meaning the ru might stabilize around 3,500 parts per million the most concentrated anything is what's coming right out of my mouth right now and putting the reading right at the output what I'm going to get is the highest concentration post algae theoretically this room shouldn't get any higher than that reading but getting there could take a very long time so for the next test I came up with a plan yes that is a CO2 tank and the plan is to jump the CO2 into the high 3000s and then wait and see see does it go down it's holding right around 3557 let's see if we can make it go down once the CO2 had mixed evenly into the air and the meter stabilized I started exhaling only into the funnel and waited for 29 minutes it's going up really slowly but it won't go down I didn't dare speak and accidentally leak some CO2 but I checked the meter and timer religiously waiting for the flip then it happened and all I could do was silently freak out out but the battle wasn't over yet I still had to make sure that this was really happening but as the CO2 slowly began creeping up again I checked the output of the algae tank and it wasn't great all right I can talk hey the room has held it's held right around there it's dropped gone up a little dropped it seemed like it's holding steady but I will say that the air coming out of the big algae tanks is it's like 4,100 so it's elevated the success is tenuous at best it's probably just going to slowly Elevate over time this is a system it's just it's underpowered I'm thinking that I probably would need another 50 gon setup so I built another 50g setup the following test seemed to show stability in the high 3000s so I added another 50 Gall which seemed to stabilize in the high 2000s but all of this was with artificially introduced CO2 and each test only took place over the course of an hour or so it was like 29 15 14 13 and then it was 29 17 19 now it's 2910 and you know I just wasn't certain that this really proved that it was working plus up to this point I had still never measured the actual oxygen levels of the room and I realized that there was no way around it I was going to need to get an oxygen gas meter do a new Baseline test all the way to 5,000 with the reactors turned off then turn them back on and settle in for the biggest test of of all and that's what I'm going to do spend a day in the sealed room but I haven't done it yet because it's a big deal to spend an entire day in a sealed room
