The tree · Biology · Happens to the world · Could be decided within 1 to 5 years
A staple crop is grown from seed to harvest off Earth
Leafy greens have been grown and eaten on the space station; calories have not. Wheat, potato, or rice grown from seed to a harvest worth eating, off Earth, is the first evidence that a site can feed itself rather than garnish shipped food, and it is a cheap, near-term step that the year of recycled food, water, and air under the settlement tier needs. Small numbers of seeds have completed a life cycle in orbit; a harvest is the next thing.
The test: what counts as it having happened
At a site off Earth (a station, the Moon, Mars, or a spacecraft), a staple crop (wheat, rice, potato, or another crop grown for its calories) is grown from seed or tuber to a harvest of at least one kilogram of edible dry grain or tuber, reported by the operating agency or company or in a peer-reviewed publication. A few plants brought to seed for a life-cycle experiment do not count; the harvest does.
Settled by: The operating agency's or company's report, or the peer-reviewed publication
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 75% | 82% | 90% | 95% | 96% |
Each column is a different guess at how long I live, from current trends (baseline) to open-ended. The number is the chance this happens before that deadline, assuming everything it depends on happens first. As of September 20th, 2026.
Why these numbers: Rice and wheat have completed life cycles in orbit at experiment scale and every lunar and Mars base plan includes a greenhouse, so a kilogram harvest within forty-five years is likely; the residual is that nobody bothers while shipping food stays cheap. Proposed by Claude September 20th, 2026 with the node's addition, I accepted.
What this one is worth
If this happened tomorrow and nothing else changed, the chance that I live and work off Earth by 2071 goes from 0.5% to 0.6% (+0.1 points). If it turned out no, the same number goes to 0.0% (−0.5 points).
| Longevity scenario | baseline2071 ± 8 | moderate2080 | strong2095 | radical2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The headline as it stands | 0.5% | 1.2% | 3.8% | 11% | 15% |
| If this settled yes now | 0.6% | 1.2% | 3.9% | 12% | 15% |
| If this settled no now | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
This is what the site says in advance, before the thing happens. When it does, the
ledger entry that records it quotes this figure beside what actually followed, so a
reader can see whether the prediction held. Worked out at the run
2026-10-11-scan by holding this step at each outcome in turn and
playing the whole tree out again, 20,000 times per
scenario. That is a throw of the dice, so a move smaller than about
0.10 points is inside the noise rather than
a finding.
The last 3 checks
Once a week the tree is read against the news, node by node, against the test above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every check ever made on this node is on the Radar page.
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2026-11-01 Nothing new
No kilogram-scale harvest reported in the past week. The Shenzhou-23 crew harvested experimental rice samples and began a second generation around August 3rd, 2026, which is an experiment-scale life-cycle result and outside the one-week window.
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2026-10-25 Nothing new
No harvest of one kilogram of edible grain or tuber off Earth has been reported. The newest Tiangong coverage is still the Shenzhou-23 rice sample harvest of about August 4th, 2026, with no yield weight published.
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2026-10-18 Nothing new
No harvest of one kilogram of edible grain or tuber off Earth has been reported. The newest Tiangong coverage is the Shenzhou-23 rice sample harvest of about August 4th, 2026 and a wheat second generation nearing maturity, with no yield weight published in the results.
Revisions
| Date | Field | From | To | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-12 | verify | One claim to check, written from memory 2026-09-20: rice completed a full seed-to-seed life cycle aboard China's Tiangong station in 2022 (about 120 days), as reported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. | The list is cleared. The claim is confirmed and now stands in the notes with its source. | The weekly scans of October 8th, 2026 and October 11th, 2026 checked the claim against the record and flagged it as settled (data/scans/2026-10-08.toml and 2026-10-11.toml): the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported in December 2022 that rice completed a 120-day life cycle aboard Tiangong, and its report of November 7th, 2024 repeats the 120 days. The second scan read that report's 'over 100 days' as the orbital figure; it is the time the returned seeds' ears took to mature on Earth, so the claim's 120 days stands. Both scans' source addresses had moved on the CAS site; the archived copies are linked in the notes. The scan may not edit the list itself. Proposed by Claude October 12th, 2026, I approved at the merge. Words only: criterion and probabilities unchanged, and the 2026 reports give no harvest mass, so the one-kilogram test is still not met. |
Notes
Added September 20th, 2026 under step 27, item 3 (docs/reviews/2026-09-19-rulings.md, decided September 19th, 2026): raised by Gemini as a missing node; a hard dependency of B-closed-loop-life-support-year-off-earth. Astra's twenty-percent-of-calories node (item 39) was declined as covered by the closed-loop node, with this leaf filling the earlier-rung slot. The one-kilogram floor is there so that a life-cycle experiment with a few plants does not resolve a node about calories. Claim checked by the weekly scans of October 8th, 2026 and October 11th, 2026 and cleared October 12th, 2026: rice completed a 120-day seed-to-seed life cycle aboard China's Tiangong station in 2022, started July 29th, 2022 in the Wentian module, six seeds sown and fifty-nine harvested in orbit, reported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences on December 7th, 2022 (https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/news--archives/2022/cas-in-media/202212/t20221207_1126440.shtml) and again on November 7th, 2024 (https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/news--archives/2024/cas-in-media/202411/t20241107_1130326.shtml); the 'over 100 days' in the 2024 report is the time the returned seeds' ears took to mature on Earth. The Shenzhou-23 crew collected first-generation rice seeds on Tiangong in about August 2026 with no yield weight published, and a 2026 tomato harvest was likewise reported without a mass, so the one-kilogram test is still open.
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The record itself is data/B-biology.toml in the public repository.