It went without saying that, in the long run, the Cloud Ark as a whole was going to have to be self-sustaining in terms of food production. Water would have to be recycled. Carbon dioxide exhaled by humans would have to be used to sustain plants, which would produce oxygen for the humans to breathe and food for them to eat. All of this had been the subject matter of science fiction stories and practical experiments for decades. Those experiments had produced mixed results that were now getting a lot of attention from people who understood such things a lot better than Dinah. But she gathered that she had better get used to a low-calorie vegetarian diet, and occasional oxygen shortages.