B5 Procurement Question?

I rewatched "Messages From Earth" today and I found something interesting that I hadn't thought about so far.The episode started with Sheridan,Garibaldi and Ivanova having breakfast when suddenly a worker brought to Ivanova an egg sent by Marcus.Garibaldi said that he hadn't seen a fresh egg for years and that eggs spoil during the long trip between Earth and B5.

OK but in "Matters Of Honour","The Fall Of Night" and other episodes we see that B5 has a large area similar to a greenhouse where we can see that there are a lot of different plants(a part of that area is the Zen Garden).

So my question is what's the problem for the engineers to design animal farms(OK don't laugh) in that green area where B5 can breed chickens,cows and anything else needed for the station personnel.After all it would be much cheaper than bringing all those things from Earth and it is would be a better use of precious space than building a maze made out of bushes for example.

I know that I shouldn't think about solutions for a fictional space station but anyway what is your opinion?

Maybe the quantity of grain needed to feed livestock is prohibitive.

I can well understand why they don't have any large animals, but a chicken farm might be possible for locally-grown protein. One would assume they have some kind of synthesized proteins available, or they would have been a lot less keen to break off from Earth.

The real howler in this setup is that eggs that you buy in the supermarket... have already been sitting on shelves for months and months. An egg doesn't have to be "fresh" that way.

We're told it's a three-day trip from B5 to Earth. Granted that's in a White Star, so let's assume it's ten times longer for commercial haulers: a month. That's still well within an egg's shelf-life. Even at three months they could probably get perfectly good eggs, straight from Kansas!

JMS wasn't at his best with logistics...

Also bacon and eggs for a Jew!

Battery chicken farms smell horrible.

But who in the world would want a chicken farm on B5? I imagine it would become a stalking ground for the Pakmara. =)

Remember Garibaldi trying to import a few cloves of garlic to make bagna cauda? Well, in numerous shots of the zocalo, we strings of whole garlic heads for sale. Even now we can irradiate fresh food, and keep it fresh for months. I think we just have to spot them the minor plot points on things like the scarcity of eggs, garlic, and OJ.

People on B5 have to eat, and everything not grown on the station has to be brought there. I guess I can see dehydrating things to be imported, to save water weight, and space. But I think they would still be eating things that were normal, not synthetics.

Thanks guys you were very helpful.I know the idea sound a little funny for a sci-fi tv show but we all like B5 partly because it's a realistic show and most of the things are explained in a scientific way.And who knows maybe some day a real rotating space station will be constructed considering the harmful effect that 0g has on the astronauts.

I think JMS got the principle but not the reasoning right on this one. It is prefectly reasonable that it would be difficult to import stuff like fresh meat, eggs etc, simply because of the space and weight requirements for stuff that clearly was unnecessary (in the sense that they had acceptable substitutes).

In fact, didn't Garibaldi's contact say exactly that when bringing in his Bagna Cauda ingredient ... that the pilot begrudged every extra ounce?

Sure, eggs are light, but look how much space a few dozen would take up when that space could be allocated for transporting goods that are far more economically viable for the transporter.

Even in 250 years time, space travel will be heavily governed by weight and space restrictions and just because they have the (fictional) tecchnology to make space travel LOOK easy, that doesn't mean they have overcome these things.

I agree that eggs (for one thing) shouldn't go off on the trip from Earth to B5, but would they really use up valuable cargo space transporting something like that into the depths of the galaxy as a matter of routine?

GaribaldisHair said:

I agree that eggs (for one thing) shouldn't go off on the trip from Earth to B5, but would they really use up valuable cargo space transporting something like that into the depths of the galaxy as a matter of routine?

Click to expand...

If B5 were real, they would produce all their own food, or do it on a near-by planet. It wouldn't come from Earth.

And they do that for the most part. All of the food that we see them eating on the station comes from any of the nearby worlds and even Earth, but there are still restrictions on what they can get. In today's world there are heavy restrictions on live/fresh foods being transported across country lines, hell even state lines. I can only imagine that in the future these restrictions would be even more cumbersome for transporting such stock across planetary lines. So while canned foods and processed foods would be readily attainable live stock such as eggs would be far more expensive and take far too long to pass through all the custom restrictions to be worth the effort of transporting.

Ah, bureaucracy... now that I can believe.

Yes, it is what makes the world go round, or the universe in this case, unfortunately.

Have you ever smelled an animal farm? Now that is on a planet, just think what it would be like on a space station. The Pak'ma'Ra would be circling like Vultures.

james