Have an upvote too - I think a combo of mushrooms and algae would probably be successful. I don't think just mushrooms would work - they'd both drain the oxygen reserves, and lose energy - something that photosynthesizes is pretty vital, I'd guess. Otherwise, each time the mushrooms are eaten and waste used to grow more, energy gets lost.

Mushrooms are not producers, they're heterotrophs like humans. They can be used to recover some energy from waste and turn it into food but that's all. You need autotrophs.

I agree with Jack. I don't think mushrooms can use UV light at all.

Soylent Green was made in part from humans.

@JackAidley some fungi have evolved to do radiosynthesis, which is similar to photosynthesis but they extract energy from gamma radiation. The pigment they use is melanin, so they could hypothetically use UV radiation as well.

@TheSquare-CubeLaw Wait really?! Thats awesome! Didn't know that, but I will remember it!

@SamKitsune Check this out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus scientists in real life are proposing the use of such fungi as shielding against space radiation as well.

@TheSquare-CubeLaw Radiosynthesis is supercool but it's also pretty modest in effect, especially compared to photosynthesis. For example, check out figure 7 in this paper ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1866175/#!po=38.2759 - even an hint of sugar makes much difference than applying radiation.

@JackAidley I agree, plants are more efficient. Fungi would require a lot of engineering to become even feasible, but then again OP was not clear about tech involved and UV is better absorbed by melanin than most plant pigments.

When I was in grad school (about 1985) I heard this from another guy who was working at Fermi Lab. The detector kept drifting, requiring recalibration every few weeks. Eventually they could not compensate and had to take it off line. They opened it up and found mushrooms. Pure Argon filled chamber exposed to constant high energy radiation and it grew mushrooms. The failed detector didn't produce many PhDs in physics, but it produced some wild PhDs in biology.

@BobaFit Woah, the hell?! I bet there were some confused physicists there.

@BobaFit I used to work at a botanical garden with a fungarium (place that dried species of mushroom are stored) - it might (in a couple of years) be the only fungarium to have a new species discovered growing in it - turns out the back wall had a leak, and the fungus found growing there might be new to science - it has a bunch of review to go through first, though! But fungi are wild, weird things!

@BobaFit I guess it really isn't much of a long shot for some moss or fungus to eventually become the equivalent of space barnacles on starship hulls. Nature is awesome.

@JustinThymetheSecond please consider using the SPOILER tags before giving away crucial plot points like that. (I know, its like 50 years old :)

Using algae as a shield against xrays would almost certainly kill them. Regarding the comments, I also want to note that so far, it is not sure that any fungi use radiation as an energy source, it is more likely that they just produce melanin to protect themselves, which still gives them an advantage against other species when exposed to radiation.

Mushrooms don't produce food. They transform some inedible molecules into edible ones (and even there the efficiency is not all that good compared to microorganisms). So this is a terrible answer. Even combination of algea and mushrooms is a horrible idea. If you need different nutrients that algea can produce, you modify algea, not introduce another link in a production chain that would just decrease the efficiency.

@BobaFit A pure argon-filled chamber would not be able to grow mushrooms. There would be no source of carbon and other materials to build the mushroom with. They can't make themselves out of argon. I assume the chamber walls are not made of dirt. Sorry but it sounds like an urban legend.

@ user253751 See public.wsu.edu/~sjwang/argon%20pressure-mushroom.pdf regarding mushrooms in a pure argon environment for storage. The mushrooms improved over time.

Also see sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304423820300571

Mushrooms take more calories to digest then you get out of them... The bulk of mushrooms is chiram. Which is not digestible by humans. You will starve to death on a diet of mushrooms