Unless we get into lawyering about hydroponics being a form of agriculture, he may not be entirely right.
A vertical farm equipped with blue-red LEDs and fed from a nuclear reactor can provide food for quite a number of people.
2 Likes
I think the fact I had to look up the term “longpig” helped me enjoy this comment even more.
1 Like
I wonder how well those kind of systems scale. they are a lot more efficient in terms of resource and land use but how much of that is lost in terms of increased infrastructure? Can they be scaled up to feed millions of people without being a) prohibitively expensive or b) cause more harm from all the material they require to be built.
Just some initial thoughts. Definitely something to look into.
2 Likes
There must be somewhere a figure how many cubic meters of space of such food production facility are needed for sustaining one person. From that we can back-of-the-envelope the rest of the questions.
We should also take in account the impact of conventional agriculture - the soil depletion, the inefficient use of fertilizers and pesticides (which in properly robotized vertical greenhouse can be applied with high accuracy)…, to compare with the impact of building and running the new structures. Modern agriculture is somewhat harsh to the environment.
1 Like
Yea the more I think about it, the damage to the nitrogen cycle alone is worth seeking almost any alternative (grow it all on mars and ship it back?) It seems to me that the biggest drawback/challenge is the lighting. You would have a drop off in the available light with each consecutive row down the tower. And powering it from lamps would be costly. Perhaps mirrors aimed along the sides?
Also, phosphorus cycle. A lot of phosphorus is being wasted and the supplies are limited.
The lighting is of course a potential problem. But that’s where the mirrors come, and where nuclear reactors coupled with high-efficiency solid-state lighting may be of great help (as solar energy density is rather lousy).
…how much thorium would it take to feed one person for one year?
1 Like
Ocean acidification, large species die off, ocean plastic patchs, extreme global climate change, depletion of natural resources- peek oil peek phosphorus, peek peek. These are all symptoms of exponential human population growth. It’s the nasty harsh truth of nature that no one wants to discuss.
Exponential growth in a closed system nearly always follows the same model:
2 Likes
These data do take biofuels into account. The map/data are from this open source publication: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034015
Clarity on how these data were calculated can be found here in the original study: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034015
The National Geographic article is clearly about promoting vegetarian diets than it is about discussing feeding everyone. That nifty little slide show of theirs does not even mention the food crops being used for biofuels and other things. […]
From the article
On diet change
Today only 55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly;
the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into
biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent).
On waste reduction
Of all of the options for boosting food availability, tackling waste would be one of the most effective.
Clearly the article does discuss other means than changing dieat and even label one of them as more effective. It also mention biofuel and give the % of crop used for it. Before judging an article value after a quick glance at its infographics and quickly go for a rant, read it completely.
How do you figure that? any of that?
I figure that with industrial agriculture, excessive meat consumption, etc. we’re already destroying the soils we depend on.
At one point the Tripolye culture had the largest towns in the world in the Buh valley. And then they abandoned the Buh valley but continued to exist elsewhere. At one point southern Mesopotamia had the largest towns. At one point the Roman Empire built vast walls for their towns in southern Gallia. And a few centuries later they built much smaller walls within the old ones. And generally speaking, there’s a lot of evidence of population booms and busts, and of soil erosion, throughout the Roman world in paticular, and of similar patterns through the rest of the world. High population, overuse of the soil, destruction of the soil, starvation, low population.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
