Anyone here read Artemis by Andy Weir? Yeah...
I have it's a great book!
I feel like this kinda thing is a bit of a trope in sci-fi and cyberpunk, where one staple crop is used to cheaply feed a large number of people. In some works the staple crop is algae, in some it's soy, etc. Arguably, in the real world US it's corn.
Can't we do this in vertical farms, industrially, and not only take no more land from nature, but give land back. The more land we can return to nature the better.
Vertical farming is not sustainable with our current power options, we need every wh to replace fossil right now, we can’t add the energy needs of farming to the equation
It won't be tomorrow, but I think it will happen. It could start in regions baking in too much solar.
I’m always hoping fusion will do a major leap… I’ve been waiting for a while… but you’re right, there are niches, like places where nothing grows, where water is in short supply, etc.
Fusion is very hard. There's been some intriguing progress and I do believe we'll get there – and maybe sooner than many think – but to have a real effect on the climate change timeline I think we'd need to be just about finished with the experimental phase now (if not several years ago) and moving into widespread scale-up. That's just not realistic at this point, unfortunately. So while promising in the long view, I wouldn't bet on it solving any of our near-term problems.
(Edit: and that's ignoring the practical issues of sourcing the required amounts of deuterium / tritium and beryllium, which would rapidly exceed the entire world output under any kind of real scale-up)
Ugh don’t make me think about the tritium issue… I think we’ll get there too, but it should have been yesterday as you said…
Well at least we got voice controlled lights before the end of the world, that’s something… /s
From what I understand vertical farming really only works out economically for high value crops. Using artificial light instead of the sun takes a lot of energy, and tall buildings are expensive and require maintenance. Algae tanks would also be SUPER heavy, which is a whole other problem.
It's not ready, yet. But it could get started in places baking in too much solar.
Buildings are still SUPER expensive, both up front and in an ongoing way. Personally I think it's a bit misguided to promote vertical farms when we are currently wasting so much space to create e.g. parking lots, or to grow corn to burn in cars.
Tall buildings are good for housing people though.
Use old mines and go down. 😃 But yes, there are other land wastes we can go for right now.
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