As a result of that conversation, I have plans to insert tiny scrubbing robots (with composters inside instead of vacuum bags) to roam the surfaces of the next big starship I write. Think, Roombas on the Enterprise!

(You may want to revise the piece on the relationship between ambient pressure and time to reach boiling – if you were not cooking inside the pressurised habitat on Mars then your water would boil very easily at the low ambient pressure, whereas if you were in a habitat pressurised above 1 Bar you will have to put more heat into the water to boil it…)

Do you actually want to boil water though?

I think the problem is actually to reach 100 deg C, for tea and pasta, but only 85 deg C or so for coffee.

This is quite distinct from making bubbles, is it not?

So cook under pressure, perhaps more than 1 Bar, and control temperature directly. And that is an incidental and probably irrelevant detail that I’ve neither seen in any SF nor really need to.

Saturn is not nearly so explosive as you think. Saturn’s composition, more or less is about 96% hydrogen, 3% helium, 1% other stuff.

Most significantly, the “other stuff” category doesn’t include oxygen. Hydrogen doesn’t explode by itself. It explodes in the presence of sufficient oxygen (at the classic 2:1 ratio), when you give it a spark. You could spark the crap out of Saturn’s atmosphere and it isn’t going to explode because there’s just no oxygen floating around to combine with the hydrogen.

You can, indeed, forget about bringing a gas cooker to Saturn. But not because you’ll blow up the planet. Rather, because there’s no oxygen to help you burn the gas in your cooker!

As far as boiling water in zero-g, there’s a difficulty you haven’t explored. When we boil water on Earth, the water boils at the bottom of the pot, the steam bubbles up to the top and escapes in the atmosphere. It does this, of course, because gravity creates a pressure differential from the top to the bottom of the pot, and being less dense than liquid water, the pressure differential pushes the steam up to the top. That is, the steam escapes because it floats.

In zero g, there’s no pressure differential running through the water, and thus, no reason why the steam should escape at all. What is likely to happen is that the water will stay liquid for a while, but then as it reaches the boiling point, steam bubbles will form more or less well distributed throughout the volume of water. These bubbles will expand rapidly (explosively), because they add surface area through which other water molecules can transition from liquid to vapor phase: every molecule that vaporizes makes it easier for other molecules to do the same, so you get a runaway effect.

Basically, in zero-g the water will do nothing for a long time, and then explode in a foam of steam and hot water that rapidly converts to all steam. Ouch.

As an engineering problem, though, the answer is pretty straightforward. The water just needs some artificial gravity, which you can get by boiling it in a container that is rotating at the end of a bar of sufficient length, perhaps counter-balanced by a heavy weight. That will create a pressure differential which will allow the steam to escape safely by floating “up” in the normal manner.

I somehow doubt that Klingons only saw three colors. Their clothes alone suggest they see the entire spectrum that Humans did (so does the fact that the two can interbreed).

More of this, if you’re curious in my book To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek.

I believe Klingons only saw three colors. What would that do to food appreciation? How does that play with the preparation of gaah?

Tom