Vegan sh*t does not really help to prevent the upcoming apocalypse.
I am wondering if any of those startups is working on band-aid solutions for this? Personal isolated bunkers, satellites that would allow living on the orbit, etc..?
There ought to be serious R&D towards ways to survive a global agriculture outage at scale (supervolcanos aren't the only threat) -- maybe mushrooms could save humanity then, I don't know.
I'm going to plug a charity here, Allfed, working to develop technologies to let us survive the loss of conventional agriculture for a period of years by working out efficient and economical ways to convert things like, e.g., dead trees into digestible calories and the plans to deploy them in the event of a large volcanic interruption or asteroid strike or nuclear exchange.
What time frame are you thinking? Might as well be planning self-sustaining orbital colonies; and afaik there's not realistic "sealed biosphere" possibilities yet, you'd need fairly large inputs of stuff thats only available on earth still.
The closest long-term information we have comes from Biosphere 2. They spent a lot of time managing their ecosystem, and I think that would be true of any similar attempt for the next few decades. They had about 1500m2 per person, which included "water treatment / recycling and humanure." By comparison, ISS is 837 cubic meters, so assuming 2m for z gives a bit over 400m2 total.
We have a long way to go before getting that sort of volume. (Which, yes, is precisely what you said. I just wanted to work out the details for myself, out loud. :)
BTW, there's many people who have gone their lives without animal products in their diet, so I don't know what literature and research you are talking about.
I strongly doubt it will be economically viable to think of building (near) self-sufficient colonies for many decades. Brin's essay was very influential on me; it's much easier to build a self-sufficient colony in the Gobi desert (or the Sahara) than in space, so I would expect to see those first, if there's an economic need for the space.
If asteroid mining, or He3 mining of the moon, gives the economic impetus for a long-term off-earth location, then I look to oil platforms or McMurdo base as more relevant example.
But those don't have much to do with creating sustainable ecosystems (farming, direct atmospheric management, etc). They help, to be sure! But most of the innovations in robotics, batteries and solar panels aren't coming out of the space program these days, AFAIK.
I'm pretty excited about Solar Foods; since it's "just" an industrial-grade biological process, you could set it up in any suitable industrial facility.
My hope is that this would let us disconnect nutrition from crop-failure-due-to-weather (well, normal weather like drought or unseasonal rains) and (maybe) become post-scarcity with respect to nutrition. Just as solar, wind and batteries allow us to create reliable electricity sustainably and reduces energy prices, I hope this technology allows us to reduce the risk of famine and reduce the base cost of a (healthy) calorie.
Plus in theory this could be used to support space colonies, which I think would be a nice addition to humanity's skillset.
Another competitor in this space is the California-based company Air Protein.
Until we can get close to self sustaining infrastructure sending people into space seems really pointless. If we could even get something like Biosphere 2 to actually work that seems like a solid first step.
BIOS-3 seemed to work, but Dried meat was imported into the facility, and urine and feces were generally dried and stored, rather than being recycled.
Food, power, shelter and air are essentially the big issues for space colonization. With the lab protein I was speaking of the possibility of shipping a close to self sustaining bio reactor in a box to a colony to solve for the food issue. I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time at the same time as the solar panels concept the article mentioned.
Don't forget the 3 million acres of farmland you need to support your 1 million city folk. We might be able to breed radiation-resistant corn -- not so confident about radiation-resistant chickens. The martians will all be vegan. Good for them.
I don't think anyone would expect that - but the goal in space is not to replicate as much of the Earth biospheres variety in a closed system, but to feed a couple people for as long as possible (but not necessarily indefinitely) with the materials at hand.
I think a vat-grown culture of highly nutritious fungi (or algae or whatever, I'm no expert and I don't pretend to have even an SF writer's level of understanding of the subject) would be a much more viable solution.
Shame to hear this actually, even though ideas like "using solar panels to generate power for growing crops" sounds silly, the idea of isolating the farming business to a controlled environment w.r.t insects/pesticides/etc..., as well as grow more in less land area, sounds so attractive. Plus, those who want to live long term in space stations will need some tech like this.
* multi-storey farms, with "JIT" food production: lots of our food production is wasted, what if we streamlined it, by locating food production centers closer to population centers? Homeless people/other "undesirables" could be given some work maintaining a food production source they can be proud of (availability high tech solutions for various problems, lunch and learns with power point presentations and fancy marketing speak, rapid solution iteration by close interaction between (think, same office) engineers and green-collar food workers)
* traditional farms will keep their roles as is, but will have attached to them food preservation facilities, so that they can build stockpiles for when JIT fails us (natural disasters, etc.), and also be able to sell preserved stockpiles in general as special foods in supermarkets (bunch of "culinary engineering" will have to be done to take traditional preservation methods which have tasty output, and mass-produce it, or better yet, come up with new methods (with tastier output))
* public washrooms with automated cleaning facilities (janitors who maintain the washrooms are inducted into a 24 month MOS on mechanical design and robot construction---they don't need to be become experts on the physics, just aware of the possibilities so that they can combine their experience with this knowledge to come up with designs for engineers to construct, and are then responsible for testing in the field, and iterating on design)
* people who are willing to take risks exploring (maybe again, many "homeless" people/undesirables) could be recruited into fancy programs with the goal of most expansive deep sea exploration to date: mountains of geological, biological, meteorological data for scientists to explore; plus, an excellent training ground for deep space exploration (hostile outdoor environment, massive pressure differentials making structural design complicated)
* programs which involve the "mentally disabled" (think Down's syndrome, or other "obviously mentally deficient" illnesses) not in order to study them as "specimens" to be kept in the confines of their home, or a nursing home, but by involving psycholgists/neuroscientists to work with them in order to figure out the answer to: "sure, they suck at XYZ, is there anything they truly excel at? are there jobs/work/problems that other humans dislike doing which the "disabled" enjoy doing extremely, and are particularly well suited for? are there surprises regarding their capabilities (i.e. could it be that certain illnesses make you extremely good at certain types of mental tasks, which we don't know of because we simply don't interact with such people enough)?
* similar to last point, except for elderly, rather than treating them as old junk---figuring out ways to take advantage of their experience, for their benefit, and that of humanity
Maybe massive move to hydroponic farming done on sea rafts or something. Or on those whirling space stations with artificial gravity . 3d - printing food (if you believe in bioenergies first print some living tissue then kill it u done) is an option. Harvesting plankton is an option. Cultivating airborne plankton and such for protein is an option.
The guy is right (I know nothing about the guy himself): if the current trend continues we're left with desertation. We need soil - producing agriculture and
the current one is soil - destroying. It doesn't need to be economically viable in itself. It could be subsidized for common interest by the public sector.
This is my nightmare scenario, where we literally cannot produce enough food for everyone.
That's why I'm hopeful that artificial methods of food synthesis (e.g. startups like Solar Foods or Air Protein, or NASA's CO2->glucose prize) will be successful and allow us to begin to decouple food production from weather or soil fertility problems.
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