Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
We're talking space station here, so there's going to be plenty enough headroom for the bamboo to reach its maximum height.
Wait, what?

The level of what a reasonably plausible space station would be varies based on the level of technology and economic development of the setting, but keep in mind that in most realistic settings, space will always be subject to some limits. A space station might give you more room to work with than a ship, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume "plenty of room."

Just some figures to keep in mind, some bamboo species reach nearly 100 feet, and depending on how they're lit/grown, I'm not 100% certain that having the ceiling or lighting located at 100 feet and one inch would necessarily make for optimal growing conditions. Even in more utopian, idealistic settings such as Star Trek (where even the utilitarian Klingon warships featured officers' quarters bigger than my old dorm room), you had space stations such as Deep Space Nine where even the largest space (the maybe three or four story high Promenade) probably wouldn't give you 100 feet of headroom.

In either hard sci-fi or a plausible near future, space carries a real trade off. Would we be able to create a 100 foot high space for plants? Absolutely, especially if we have no alternatives for providing a lasting, economically efficient source of oxygen for the station. Would that be "plenty of headroom" that happens to be built into the station? Absolutely not--if we didn't need that space for something as vital as oxygen generation, we would be using it for something slightly less vital, but still useful.