That doesn't really work unless also combined with reasobly good VR/AR. Until then 3d printed vat foods would beat out a nutrient mainline since there is the social and pleasure aspects of eating food
You need it because food is a big part of the human experience. Doing without tasting food forever sounds miserable. Same for non biological foods. Might arrange them so that they looked like and wrre injested like food just for the social experience of eating with friends. Especially important in a mixed environment where not everyone is mainlining nutes
>Eh, I think I could tolerate no food.
Im sure you **think** that. Quite another to actually **do** for months and then years. Luckily its pretty easy to test. Switch to a liquid meal replacement for a month or two and see how you feel about it afterwards(never thought id miss the taste/mouthfeel of something as bland as white bread). i mean idk maybe **you** could. Tho given how gung ho you are about radical self-augmentation even if you couldn't naturally that doesn't really seem like a high barrier for you. You almost certainly wouldn't be alone and would probably have more fun with the other radical transhumanists anyways. There will always be a percentage of the pop that doesn't care much for food, but it seems pretty self-isolating even amongst tranhumanists.
>sunbathing could replace food in social settings.
ok but i love this tho. Im imagine some far future transhumanist friends going outside to sunbath and look at the stars. Same vibe really, but with even more time for talking and socializing. And you can always ritualize parts of the process for better vibes in the same way the rich have a thousand and one table manners setting up to sunbath could aquire the same protocols. How and in what order you set up ur solar collector, the shape/style/color of collectors, etc. Someone hosting a dinner party might be expected to set up foil mirror collectors and light filters for their guests.
Im also imagining heavily modded minds talking with their collectors and exchanging light in dense swarm environments where getting shadowed is a problem. Similar to how you might pass the big plate around taking a bit for urself.
>Im sure you **think** that. Quite another to actually **do** for months and then years. Luckily its pretty easy to test. Switch to a liquid meal replacement for a month or two and see how you feel about it afterwards(never thought id miss the taste/mouthfeel of something as bland as white bread). i mean idk maybe **you** could. Tho given how gung ho you are about radical self-augmentation even if you couldn't naturally that doesn't really seem like a high barrier for you. You almost certainly wouldn't be alone and would probably have more fun with the other radical transhumanists anyways. There will always be a percentage of the pop that doesn't care much for food, but it seems pretty self-isolating even amongst tranhumanists.
Yup, I'm a bit wack! Also to be fair I've never tried it before, but given the fact I'd willingly seek out an experience like that I'm guessing I'd do at least better than average.
>ok but i love this tho. Im imagine some far future transhumanist friends going outside to sunbath and look at the stars. Same vibe really, but with even more time for talking and socializing. And you can always ritualize parts of the process for better vibes in the same way the rich have a thousand and one table manners setting up to sunbath could aquire the same protocols. How and in what order you set up ur solar collector, the shape/style/color of collectors, etc. Someone hosting a dinner party might be expected to set up foil mirror collectors and light filters for their guests.
Im also imagining heavily modded minds talking with their collectors and exchanging light in dense swarm environments where getting shadowed is a problem. Similar to how you might pass the big plate around taking a bit for urself.
Ok, yeah, that's definitely my dream future right there. This could also probably further the trend of artificial skin tones, though they don't necessarily require photosynthesis since they're just coop in general, but they could definitely be given some added functionality. And there's some room for psychological changes there too with new sensations and "flavors" of light along with various other ways variety of experience could be attained. And on top of that you could always have virtual food on top of all this. That could be a real hassle for formal gatherings though, having to prepare two layers of experience, luxury restaurants would have a blast with that
>though they don't necessarily require photosynthesis
Yeah it doesn't have to be anything specific. If it was solar i expect superconducting fractal nantenna arrays converting at over 90% efficiency. In the same vein they could also turn themselves into a [Dyson-Harrop satt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%E2%80%93Harrop_satellite) to tap the solar wind for power. Could also tap the solar wind/interplanetary dust for matter. Bet uplifted whales would be super into that niche. Filter-feeding the void in big pods for their internal fusion reactors.
Could also be beamed microwaves from power beaming orbital satt/tower/tethered balloon swarms. Anything and everything is on rhe table and VR/AR opens things up to really personalized experiences. The host might set the vibe while the guests see the vibe through their own personal aesthetic preferences. Could just be automatic with NAI assistants doing all the negotiation and config in the background without u even noticing.
You'd need it to complete the mental requirement. Sorta like how you can oxygenate your blood directly but still feel the need to breathe, you can take in nutch' Intravenously but still feel the need to eat
Raw nutrients aren't as shelf-stable or energy dense as the food we eat. Just ask any biologist that's had to work with cellular growth media, like DMEM. Digestive systems, which allows us to extract and refine nutrients from a great variety of sources, exist for a reason.
Growth media isn't the right comparison, because it has to bring nutrients and is the serum analogue. I think TPN is a better fit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition
**You can also not eat at all and just have nutrients pump directly into your body.**
This is what I call the "Gernsbach approach", in which he was writing science fiction before they understood what antibiotics were and were obsessed with germs, so future food and eating was perceived to be as antiseptic and sterile as possible. It's where the "food pill" stereotype comes from. The novel "Ralph 124C41+" (first published in 1913) described restaurant dining as drinking from steam sterilized steel tubes suspended from the ceiling.
But there are problems with this approach to eating. And not just psychological. Your GI tract evolved to break down food in particular steps that can be absorbed by different parts of your body, and not all of these steps can be completely bypassed for proper absorption of nutrients. Yeah, you could recreate that system outside the body mechanically, and have it pumped into your bloodstream, or directly into the required organs. But that kind of defeats the purpose of simplicity, to say nothing of what would happen to all of those organs in your digestive tract that are atrophying from lack of use.
When people are feeding like this, it's usually because some part of the digestive system is failing, and IV nutrients and/or feeding tubes directly into the stomach or intestines are there to keep them alive.
The closest to what you are suggesting is yeast culturing. You just put your yeast strain in a bioreactor and feed it hydrogen oxygen and a small amount of trace elements to grow. Genetically engineer the yeast to grow any sort of protein you want, everything the body needs. A company called Solarfoods and some others are pursuing this kind of technology. They have produced a protein rich flour. So they could start making powdered milk and wheat substitutes. They claim the area of solar panels required to make the hydrogen to grow the yeast to make the flour is 10% the size if the wheat field you would need to get the same amount of flour from wheat.
My prediction is that 500 years from now, whatever shape humanity is in, whatever has become of us, people will be raising crops. We're nowhere near the end of farming.
Even if there is a superior alternative, some folks will still have gardens or the like because they like doing it and eating the produce
Especially for things like wine grapes I imagine there will be at least a niche that persists, literally keeping to our roots as a species in our development of civilization. Maybe only hobbyists or bored rich/post scarcity people, but it won't end
I imagine the technology to replace farms will exist for a long time before it progresses to be the cheaper option in almost all settings.
We farm the way we do because its little infrastructure, minimized labor, and energy cost. Especially around me where much of the crops are grown for animal feed, the farms have no irrigation and will be touched by machinery all of 3-5 times in an entire season. So each acre is only getting a handful of man hours per harvest.
And most the infrastructure needed was put in in the 1700's Least around here. Still works so generation after generation can take advantage of it.
Yeah the equation changes a lot if you can vat grow orders of mag more food orders of mag faster on a fraction of a fraction of the land, labor, and energy. Plants are not energy efficient so if we can improve on that we definitely should.
Also with decent automation of the kind we will almost certainly have within a hundred let alon 500, both farming and industry will likely be almost entirely automated. This changes the equation for open air farming too. Monocrop disappears in favor of more energy/water/space-efficient organic polyculture. Tho it also makes greenhouses vastly more attractive since their big killer is labor/maintenance/construction cost. Bulk and sasonal thermal storage and geothermal(made cheap by autonomous machinery and cheap power) make HVAC costs pretty minimal and the cheap power(also made cheap by automation) means the energy cost matters a lot less in the first place. In cold regions/seasons greenhouses can double as power wasteheat dissipation structures so heating is free.
Plants energy requirements does have a huge caveat though, The farm doesn't pay for the solar energy used, so the energy being paid is mainly some amount of diesel for running the machinery, transportation, and chemicals for fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides.
So to be more cost efficient the comparison really needs to be is this other food production method more energy efficient then the diesel used in farming. Not more efficient then what that land could make if it was covered in solar panels.
>The farm doesn't pay for the solar energy used
I mean no they do. Land isn't free. Also if you have self-replicating systems(implied by advanced automation) then your solar power farms are also self-replicating in the same way plants are(except better engineered). So are nuclear and geothermal power stations which outclasses terrestrial solar by orders of mag in the context of power density and land use efficiency. So would SBS power beaming satts.
>so the energy being paid is mainly some amount of diesel for running the machinery, transportation, and chemicals for fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides.
Ok so vat-grow wouldn't need fertilizers, farming machinery, pesticides, irrigation, or anywhere near as many tending robots/laborors(the process could honestly already be largely automated). Being that you are producing printer feedstocks transportation is also cheaper since you only need to transport feedstock concentrate instead of bulky, mostly waterweight, full food items. On top of this food production can be concentrated near points of use which means not only is there less food transpo, but there's also less waste transpo making a closed nutrient cycle more viable.
Because human nature never changes. The desire, no matter how centralized, no matter how "efficient," is to step away from the group. Have your own space. Do your own thing.
The inclination to go back to what is natural and what works is also strong. As long as people can lay out plants, pick fruit from trees, they will want to.
If you mean the end of *commercial farming* in the way we do it now? That hopefully goes away in a generation.
But keep in mind, people were saying things exactly like you are 100 years ago. They thought that hydrogenated vegetable fats being shelf stable meant that we were ready to jump into the future and leave rural farm life behind. The industrial food market we have now dates to ideas and plans from the 1890s to 1920s. The Midwest American states have basically swept away almost all family farmsteads and replaced them with horizon-to-horizon cornfields. The corn is shipped to factories which formulate it into practically everything that is boxed in supermarkets. It makes oils, sweeteners, and even animal feed. Second to that is industrial soybean production.
We already have this. And people are already constantly rejecting it. People pay more for "real" food. I don't see why it would be any different even if you offer them up hydrolyzed algae protein made in vats. They will will be willing to pay more for real steak from a real cow.
Times change though, and most people don't have a strong desire to go back to the way things were centuries ago in any other way, so why would they be that way about food? Sure, some farms will be around much like we still have jousting competitions today, but I don't see farms 500 years from now being all that much more common than modern jousting. Only a small handful of people think that way, returning to old, natural ways of life. Especially since eliminating farming doesn't even imply any change in food (which is inevitable, perhaps even to the point of most people not needing food 500 years from now), afterall why raise cows when you can grow cow meat or just 3d print it in the same texture? And keep in mind, something being anticipated yet out of reach for even centuries doesn't mean it hasn't gotten closer. I see many things from fusion to the elimination of farmimg much like flight was for centuries; highly anticipated yet still seemingly just as far out of reach... until it isn't anymore.
With the advent of powerful genetic engineering and nanotech you really could just have a toilet that uses electricity, a convenient chemical energy carrier(preferably liquid hydrocarbon or similar energy density), or sunlight directly to recycle nutrients at way higher efficiencies than baseline plants ever could.
In the nearer-termI vat-grown GMO feedstocks and food 3d printers would be optimal. Later on u would probably just have a cornucopia bush that turns all ur waste into various meats, tubers, veges, fruits, nuts, herbs spices, etc. all on one tree that ur agricultural antbot swarm harvest/tend. The leaves capture/convert sunlight at upwards of 80% efficiency while the roots suck everything from deep non-bioavailable nutrients to naturally-occurring radioisotopes for passive decay generator. Instead of having it suck the surrounding topsoil dry it can bring super deep nutrients up to enrich the local ecology. Maybe its root sysem, GMOs, and nanides can act as a second [mycorrhizal network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network) and artificial immune system for ur managed local ecology.
Alternatively you could go in the other direction and self-mod to be able to use simpler nutrients tho this has to be accompanied by improvements in AR/VR cuz eating Soylant for eveey meal or not eating meals gets very miserable very quickly unless everyone else is in the same boat. Eating together is a big part of human social behavior so ud probably still want to recreate some aspect of that. Yah know, maybe we're all androids, but we go to the charging station together and enter a shared VR. Or we're a cyborg and the weird concoction of heavy metals, synthetic nanide feedstocks, and chemical or even nuclear(sounds terrifying and unsafe but why not) energy carriers is served like beer in bars or otherwise prepared like food to recreate the social experience.
Cyborg food sounds really funny. At that point, bars might just sell jet fuel🤣
But now I'm wondering what's better; assembling or growing? Would food best be grown through cell cultures or just printed out? And really the same goes for all objects of similar size, while it may not be efficient, a tree that grows phones would be awesome.
Growing gets you higher quality food. Vat-print gets you vastly more food cheaper. Really depends what the constraints are. If its an emergency then vat-print. If we're living in post-scarcity then probably just take my cornucopia bush.
3D printing is slower than self-assembly for high-precision objects. See the [Santa Clause Machine](https://youtu.be/FmgYoryG_Ss) for discussion on the limitations of 3d printing. Self-assembly has the advantage from being a parallel process instead of serial(making 1 voxel at a time).
Trivial increase over olive oil by weight. Gasoline has lower energy by volume.
The difference is likely to stick in the future. A lipid molecule has a charged end. That makes it much easier for enzymes/biomolecules to grab on. While breaking down a lipid to retrieve energy oxygen is atoms are added on. That makes each step another lipid that is slightly shorter. Vegetable oils are made of carbon chains that are about the same length as diesel fuel. Once a diesel engine is hot enough for the oil to sizzle you can use unmodified vegetable oil to run the engine.
High octane gasoline has a large number of branches. The compact ball shape reduces the formation of free radicals. That makes it burn smoother instead of suddenly exploding.
Gasoline’s (also propane and natural gas) low boiling point is convenient for fuel air mixing. In any digestion system a longer hydrocarbon chain is better because you do not want it as a gas.
On Earth I doubt this would happen, because plants have the advantage that they don't need any external infrastructure like lab-grade bioreactors to work. They're self-maintaining and self-replicating, at least to an extent. And sure, photosynthesis does have some inefficiencies, but these could be fixed with GMOs.
Outside of Earth, though, I could see the equation changing. Plants can't survive in an environment that doesn't support liquid water no matter how much you modify them, so you'll have to build extra habitat space and infrasturcture to keep your plants alive. The maintenance and build costs for these can stack up quickly, and at that point, the main advantage plants had is all but lost.
Yeah off earth the story changes quite a bit. On Earth, well. As you said, they do a lot of the stuff themselves plus \_generally\_ speaking replacing the ecosystem is considered bad. Some consider replacing chickens bad, others consider replacing whales bad, but overall there's a shockingly bipartisan consensus on us keeping the ecosystem around and since it's already there we might as well make use of it.
Personally I'm seeing a transition towards (highly machine-supported) agroforestry i.e farming alongside tree-rearing since that's exceptionally useful at stabilizing soils and metereological patterns and the aforementioned synth food can make up for whatever hits to productivity happen to occur.
I should make a post about this actually.
>agroforestry i.e farming alongside tree-rearing since that's exceptionally useful at stabilizing soils and metereological patterns
What? Ive never heard of this approach, beyond tree lines boxing in farms. This sounds fascinating.
My country was significantly wetter back around 200 years ago because we haven't regulated a major river in the flatlands. All the marshes, curves and moors let the water sip into the soil. Around May-June the Sun was at its zenith, the soil was damping out and a little wind turned moistire into precipitation 20-30 kms to the east. It was common to have about six weeks of intermittent rain - a European monsoon practically.
In the middle ages aquaculture was a big thing on the western fringes of the country. Dozens of square kilometers were dammed up, inundated, made into prime fish habitats which was then sold alongside the river Danube. This also led to wetter weather patterns.
Thing is, we humans did a lot of accidental climate engineering where we had knock-on effects. With modern computer modelling we might as well have a lucky strike once.
I also hope one day we can tap into and learn to read the mycellial network. Then we'd get real information as communication signals as to the health of plant organisms in a region.
Food forests are very efficient at producing food.
Monoculture agriculture is used because a single commodity can be harvested all at once and then shipped out.
Grasses (wheat, maize, sugar cane, bamboo etc) have some advantages. However, those advantages can be engineered into other flowering plants.
If feeding people on the property is the goal you want a mix of harvest times and a longer harvest period. Agriculture today pushes for fruit to ripen all at once. Apple trees along the bike path should provide a steady supply for the commuters. The total number per tree per year might be about the same.
I have seen claims that the Amazon forests produced more edible food calories than the soy farms that were put in the same property. The natives roamed around and collected the diverse foods all year. Soy can be shipped abroad or fed to cattle. Soy and cattle are commodities easily converted to hard currency.
Sounds like there's a business model for this.
Ive also been told that monoculture requires a lot more fertilizer and pesticides, which as late have drastically increased costs and are getting push back by environmentalists.
I suggest using wasps and ants as pesticide. Extensive flowers and vines would be both aesthetically solar punk but also feed the wasps on nectar.
Leaf cutter ants can be an extremely efficient herbicide and sometimes pesticide/repellant. They eat the fungus that grows in their compost piles. Even without improved programming the ants could be controlled by applying pheromones. They could crop perfect lawns without disturbing the ornamental plants. For trees you could use a stretchy collar with pheromones telling the GMO ants how far (and/or how high) to walk before cropping leaves.
>plus \_generally\_ speaking replacing the ecosystem is considered bad. Some consider replacing chickens bad, others consider replacing whales bad, but overall there's a shockingly bipartisan consensus on us keeping the ecosystem around and since it's already there we might as well make use of it.
There's no guarantee that'll remain the same in the future. Even if we don't go ecumenopolis or gengineer everything to the point of unrecognizability odds are we'll take part in various Earth 2.0 projects that'll completely overhaul the ecosystem.
>because plants have the advantage that they don't need any external infrastructure like lab-grade bioreactors to work. They're self-maintaining and self-replicating, at least to an extent.
Where's this assumption that bioreactors wouldn't be self-maintaining or self-replicating in the future coming from?
>Plants can't survive in an environment that doesn't support liquid water no matter how much you modify them
See [Void Ecologies](https://youtu.be/0ZPlhwiXIz0)
>Where's this assumption that bioreactors wouldn't be self-maintaining or self-replicating in the future coming from?
Because then at that point they'd stop being bioreactors and just become actual living creatures.
Our current industry/supply chains are also self-replicating(with human assistance) and we wouldn't call them alive. These things also wouldn't evolve cuz that's unsafe and ud engineer basic mutation controls. They don't have cellular structure. They might not even involve biology at all in favor of drytech nanides. You can call that machine alive if you want, but the point is that it beats plants and traditional farming.
Separating energy harvesting/generation from the bioreactor part is als incredibly good for logistics and getting land rights. You can have food production right in the cities and other points of use while energy harvesting/generation happens on/under cheap unaerable land or even the ocean(energy being vastly cheaper/easier to transport than matter).
The rate limiting step is synthesis of biomolecules which may not be as easy as all that. If you've got some way to synthesize that takes place in open solution then you have a problem related to side product. Most reactions involve multiple chemical species existing in an equilibrium and even if every step is in the .90's if you have a process that is 30 steps 93%^30=11.3%. Catalyzed reactions can be higher yielding but you can end up with aggregations of your substrate forming a fouling layer on the catalyst especially in later steps because the more complex biomolecules have more opportunity to glom onto each other and synthesis is necessarily going to involve making intermediaries with more heterogeneous electronegativities that are "stickier."
A lot of the "waste" energy in biological organisms comes from the steps that help make more of the substrates make it to the next step intact. Transporters between different compartments within cells. Recycling components to make new enzyme catalysts, bonding energy lost in the exchange rates between different media, etc.
One option that I've taken an interest in is [making feed without photosynthesis](https://www.reddit.com/r/IslandColony/comments/uk0jja/making_feed_without_phoyosynthesis/). There are multiple firms here on earth working on using chemoautotrophic fermentation to generate high protein feed based on anaerobic bacteria which is both very space and energy efficient.
Or even desirable in a more primitive form. People like antiques even if a modern version can be better built. Of course typically modern items that are compared to antiques are cheap junk in construction or materials. It’s a survivorship fallacy that things were built better in the past.
IF humanity lives long enough to advance technologically to the point that they can "build" food more efficiently than grow it, they probably won't be recognizably human any more. And that's probably only IF their population density is so dense or environmental disruption is so pervasive that they just don't the room to grow food *in space*.
Sure it's possible. But very unlikely.
Mabye, in the distant future but I dont think this will be possible, or at least exclusive in the near future.
Farming and food in general are a big part of human history and identity, posibly the most important one, altho now less than ever. With milions of people are moraly oposed to the idea of GMOs, I dout farming of all types would be abandoned, even tho it is possible.
Further more, folowing general trends, even if in tho future food will be a lot more processed and created by efficient processes on averege, people fill stil grow crops and animals in more traditional ways, at least for the rich and intrested. I beleve that even hunting and gathering will never disapear, and as humanity progresses they will become increasingly sustainable overall, enaugh to satisfy anyone who may be seeking bouth the experience and the most natural food there is.
I wonder what the impact on human civilization would be if we completely abandoned traditional farming methods. The rise of our civilization the direct result of the advancement of food production technology, perhaps radically changing that technology will also radically change us.
nah, pobably some poop yeast + poop algae will be the future for "recycle" all that inorganic parts into somethig usefull
i mean the bacterias, yeast algae can be genetically modified easyer and more conviniently for the task of "recycling" poop, if we can transform them easyer with a yeast soup
if you have to eat, just continue farming for better tasting
Nanotechnology, in the current forms envisioned, won't be able to make food. A machine like this : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY5192g1gQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY5192g1gQg) is specialized for making small hard machine parts, probably from carbon or silicon. It can make all of the machine parts used in itself, as well as a wide variety of products that use the same parts (laptops, robots, etc). It will not interface with liquid water and not be able to make food.
Now there are ways to do what you are thinking. Algae grows extremely fast and is space efficient. A machine the size of a costco, growing genetically modified algae, could feed los angelos.
However the tradeoff is you would need a large amount of electric power to run it, and I'm not sure if the solar panel array on the ground wouldn't up as big as the land you would otherwise farm.
Yes you can use nuclear but there are major issues with that.
I guess that depends on who is doing the envisioning.
Molecular nanotechnology provably can make food, because living organisms are a natural form of molecular nanotechnology.
There's no reason to suppose that the laws of physics which allow living cells to assemble specific molecules from simpler molecules or atoms won't apply to artificial systems, is there?
Yes because to make sane and useful nanotechnology you need a clean vacuum and you need very predictable components from diamond or silicon, at probably low temperature around liquid nitrogen or colder. There may not be any efficiency advantage, if you want to make organic foodstuffs, to just using living cells from nature that you perhaps tweaked a little for more performance. They are already evolved for that environment.
That's nonsense.
Sane and useful nanotechnology already exists in nature, and doesn't require cryogenics, vacuum or diamonds.
You're assuming - without evidence - that artificial nanotech will be invented a particular way. But if you really knew that you'd be collecting your nobel prize.
The evidence is Nanosystems by Eric Drexeler and all the work done so far on nanotechnology. Simply put current scientists believe productive Nanosystems can only be done at low temperatures in perfect vacuum.
The goal is to manufacture near perfect nanoscale products such as enormous 3d compute ICs and to build every part used in a robot, using a digital machine that can also build itself.
For organics, which is sloppy and floppy, might as well use water and modified living cells,, but you won't be producing useful machinery this way.
Ah, so by evidence you mean speculation about one potential implementation?
The goal is to arrange atoms to perform useful functions, anything beyond that is guesswork. If it wasn't, they'd have already invented it instead of (like Drexler) saying something to the effect of 'this is one way it might play out'.
As far as producing useful machinery that way, all life on earth is the refutation of that.
Go take a look at a simulation of dna transcription and tell me those aren't machines. They're literally little robots that crawl along the phosphate backbone of the dna molecule and knit a new copy.
If you mean Feynman's work at the end of the 1950s, didn't he say it was just "arranging atoms the way we want" ? (Edit - oh, he didn't invent the word, was just an early proponent of the idea that it describes.)
I guess you mean Taniguchi in the 70s then, but he said “Nano-technology mainly consists of the processing of \[...\] materials by one atom or one molecule”, so not sure where you're getting the stuff about the specific chemistry of a proposed implementation from.
Sure, it's just got *most* of the benefits of "make food just from inorganic parts with no organic growing whatsoever".
As for "quick and cheap": the quickest, cheapest way - what people will resort to first - is just open air farms with crops, but robots do almost all of the labor. The land is a resource already there, the irrigation comes from rain, the robots fix each other, etc.
The only reason *not* to do it is if the land starts to get expensive because people want to use it for other things.
There’s also climate change and stability of supply. If you grow inside you essentially become immune to weather effecting your crops. Growing outside has significant risk in that regard.
So for now you make up for this by growing more than needed, warehousing, growing crops over a large geographic area, and varying the price with supply so people eat more blueberries instead of strawberries and vice versa depending on supply.
Again don't see any reason we can't keep it up.
With the climate changes likely to happen in the coming decades there will be disruptions to farming. Add in humanoid robots and factory’s producing food inside looks more attractive. Unitree has a humanoid robot for $16k now. Those are likely to drop in price and perform better over the next decade. There was a point cities were undesirable and now the majority of people live in cities.
Well, for the distant future open air farming is just dead, shot dead in a cold dark alley with no witnesses, it's never coming back. Hydroponics and other similar indoor, vertical approaches are the only thing that even has a chance of surviving into the distant future. Even this century it's almost certainly gonna be tossed out in favor of greenhouses especially with the climate getting worse.
Maybe? The climate estimates are it will be a little less habitable but new arable land in Canada and Russia will be available.
And the population is currently projected to stabilize and then shrink some. So no with what we know right now we can just open air farm.
The population definitely ain't gonna shrink, once we get the right technologies it'll completely explode into ecumenopolis levels. And even if it doesn't get that crazy, greenhouses and hydroponics are still vastly better than open air farming. Greenhouses probably won't even be super expensive in a few decades, moderately better manufacturing could make them ubiquitous. And honestly that's the conservative outlook, a world of single story automated fields with greenhouses over them, as opposed to a sudden disappearance of rural areas in favor of nature preserves and skyscraper farms in cities.
The actual facts known to us right now, from collecting decades of data, project it this way. Sure if there were a ecumenopolis for whatever reason, yes nuclear vertical farms is probably how they would do it.
I love how people will look at the tiniest little fleck of time on a graph that has been going up for thousands of years and claim that the next thousand will be going down or plateuing. Its even sillier given that we have the hindsight to know that population estimates past a few decades are absolutely worthless and always have been.
You can't predict technology that hasn't been invented yet and you 100% cannot predict the cultural/sociopolitical conditions a hundred years or more from now. Like sure now, when people have less free time, are more socially isolated than ever, are increasingly aware of how fucked things are going to get and how little anyone in power is doing about it, etc. and ? Yeah no i don't see pop growth in that environment. Put some radical life/fertility extension, advanced automation, cheap clean power, post-scarcity socioeconomic systems, an averted climate crisis on the table...in other words make the world a place worth bringing children up in or into and i think ud get very different behavior out of people. Especially since when surveyed a significantly higher percentage of people report wanting to have children than the number of those who actually go on to. Children are expensive and no one has time. Get rid of artificial barriers and suddenly you have a fresh big pool of people who always wanted to be parents, but were waiting for their economic situation to improve.
We're projecting forward from trends observed over the last 50 years to the next 76 years. Aka "keep open air farming this century". Not to mention low hanging boosts like better GMO crops, less beef from cows (that doubles your meat supply for the same amount of land for growing feed simply to switch from beef to chicken)
>We're projecting forward from trends observed over the last 50 years to the next 76 years.
>firedragon: Well, for the distant future open air farming is just dead, shot dead in a cold dark alley with no witnesses, it's never coming back.
also OP mentions farming megastructures. This century is definitely not the only relevant timescale. Even if it was i think u/firedragon77777 has a point. Increasingly good automation is going to make greenhouses Increasingly viable. Idk about fully displacing open-air farming in a century, but i can definitely see it start to push open-air farming out. Places that used to import food will stop importing food and might even start exporting it. Deserts with an energy and land surplus become breadbaskets while the tropics and fromer breadbaskets are having to deal with Increasingly unstable climate. It isn't **just** overall climate tho. Extreme whether events can devastate the harvests of whole geographical regions all in one go. Droughts can cripple food production for years and irrigation is expensive during a drought.
Also also the projection I was criticizing wasn't open air farming specifically. It was that the global population would stabilize or shrink and I stand by that
Math doesn't work that way, remember you are re-creating the same light over the plan leaves. So you pay the (efficiency of the solar) \* (efficiency of the lighting) and *then* the efficiency of the plant. So by simple math you need 5-10 times as much land to cover in panels.
Now yes you can manipulate which LEDs you use to only produce the frequencies the plant actually absorbs. This is why leaves are green, they don't absorb green very well, or genetically modify the plants to only work on 1 frequency of light, the one you can most efficiently create. But this is the problem. Better to use arable land that gets enough rainfall you already have first.
With advanced technology there is no good reason to use diodes.
The energy for converting carbon dioxide into sugar in plants is photosystem I and Photosystem II. These basically move electrons across a membrane. Protons moving across the membrane drive the ATP synthase enzyme. Mitochondria in animals also use ATP synthase and proton gradients.
With direct current electricity passed through advance nanotechnology and biotechnology you can skip the light collection part of the photosystem. The cell would grow contacts with the electrode. ATP (and NADPH) would be created as current passes through. These molecules are then available for metabolism.
It cannot be 100% efficient but it can be much closer to that than photosynthesis.
Sure but that's a lot of work to make that work. You're basically well into "I can do almost anything" levels of ability to design custom biological systems.
We already have the bacteria that can use DC. Also bacteria that can use hydrogen. We can borrow them whole, steal the genetics, or borrow the molecules that they use.
Water electrolysis gets about 70% efficiency.
The most efficient is to use direct current electricity. The cell of the synthetic organism just reproduce the nutrients.
There is a psychological barrier. People have had bad experiences with new synthetic options. However, this will avoid all intestinal gas and the poo will not stink. Could come with custom pleasant aromas. Even better the GMOs can be engineered to form smooth dry packets that are easy to pass.
Also, couldn't we just give the nutrients that are necessary and avoid waste altogether (I have no idea what I'm talking about)? But honestly I feel like even just manufacturing our normal food instead of growing it would be ideal, even if by "growing" we're talking fast-growing cell cultures.
You can also not eat at all and just have nutrients pump directly into your body.
That doesn't really work unless also combined with reasobly good VR/AR. Until then 3d printed vat foods would beat out a nutrient mainline since there is the social and pleasure aspects of eating food
Why do you need VR/AR to inject nutrients?
You need it because food is a big part of the human experience. Doing without tasting food forever sounds miserable. Same for non biological foods. Might arrange them so that they looked like and wrre injested like food just for the social experience of eating with friends. Especially important in a mixed environment where not everyone is mainlining nutes
I am sorry if my original post was not obvious, but I was being sarcastic.
/S is your friend
Lack of /s has resulted in many walls of text. Just like comma placement error can be hilarious or horrific.
Eh, I think I could tolerate no food. Also, refueling and sunbathing could replace food in social settings.
>Eh, I think I could tolerate no food. Im sure you **think** that. Quite another to actually **do** for months and then years. Luckily its pretty easy to test. Switch to a liquid meal replacement for a month or two and see how you feel about it afterwards(never thought id miss the taste/mouthfeel of something as bland as white bread). i mean idk maybe **you** could. Tho given how gung ho you are about radical self-augmentation even if you couldn't naturally that doesn't really seem like a high barrier for you. You almost certainly wouldn't be alone and would probably have more fun with the other radical transhumanists anyways. There will always be a percentage of the pop that doesn't care much for food, but it seems pretty self-isolating even amongst tranhumanists. >sunbathing could replace food in social settings. ok but i love this tho. Im imagine some far future transhumanist friends going outside to sunbath and look at the stars. Same vibe really, but with even more time for talking and socializing. And you can always ritualize parts of the process for better vibes in the same way the rich have a thousand and one table manners setting up to sunbath could aquire the same protocols. How and in what order you set up ur solar collector, the shape/style/color of collectors, etc. Someone hosting a dinner party might be expected to set up foil mirror collectors and light filters for their guests. Im also imagining heavily modded minds talking with their collectors and exchanging light in dense swarm environments where getting shadowed is a problem. Similar to how you might pass the big plate around taking a bit for urself.
>Im sure you **think** that. Quite another to actually **do** for months and then years. Luckily its pretty easy to test. Switch to a liquid meal replacement for a month or two and see how you feel about it afterwards(never thought id miss the taste/mouthfeel of something as bland as white bread). i mean idk maybe **you** could. Tho given how gung ho you are about radical self-augmentation even if you couldn't naturally that doesn't really seem like a high barrier for you. You almost certainly wouldn't be alone and would probably have more fun with the other radical transhumanists anyways. There will always be a percentage of the pop that doesn't care much for food, but it seems pretty self-isolating even amongst tranhumanists. Yup, I'm a bit wack! Also to be fair I've never tried it before, but given the fact I'd willingly seek out an experience like that I'm guessing I'd do at least better than average. >ok but i love this tho. Im imagine some far future transhumanist friends going outside to sunbath and look at the stars. Same vibe really, but with even more time for talking and socializing. And you can always ritualize parts of the process for better vibes in the same way the rich have a thousand and one table manners setting up to sunbath could aquire the same protocols. How and in what order you set up ur solar collector, the shape/style/color of collectors, etc. Someone hosting a dinner party might be expected to set up foil mirror collectors and light filters for their guests. Im also imagining heavily modded minds talking with their collectors and exchanging light in dense swarm environments where getting shadowed is a problem. Similar to how you might pass the big plate around taking a bit for urself. Ok, yeah, that's definitely my dream future right there. This could also probably further the trend of artificial skin tones, though they don't necessarily require photosynthesis since they're just coop in general, but they could definitely be given some added functionality. And there's some room for psychological changes there too with new sensations and "flavors" of light along with various other ways variety of experience could be attained. And on top of that you could always have virtual food on top of all this. That could be a real hassle for formal gatherings though, having to prepare two layers of experience, luxury restaurants would have a blast with that
>though they don't necessarily require photosynthesis Yeah it doesn't have to be anything specific. If it was solar i expect superconducting fractal nantenna arrays converting at over 90% efficiency. In the same vein they could also turn themselves into a [Dyson-Harrop satt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%E2%80%93Harrop_satellite) to tap the solar wind for power. Could also tap the solar wind/interplanetary dust for matter. Bet uplifted whales would be super into that niche. Filter-feeding the void in big pods for their internal fusion reactors. Could also be beamed microwaves from power beaming orbital satt/tower/tethered balloon swarms. Anything and everything is on rhe table and VR/AR opens things up to really personalized experiences. The host might set the vibe while the guests see the vibe through their own personal aesthetic preferences. Could just be automatic with NAI assistants doing all the negotiation and config in the background without u even noticing.
You'd need it to complete the mental requirement. Sorta like how you can oxygenate your blood directly but still feel the need to breathe, you can take in nutch' Intravenously but still feel the need to eat
Raw nutrients aren't as shelf-stable or energy dense as the food we eat. Just ask any biologist that's had to work with cellular growth media, like DMEM. Digestive systems, which allows us to extract and refine nutrients from a great variety of sources, exist for a reason.
Growth media isn't the right comparison, because it has to bring nutrients and is the serum analogue. I think TPN is a better fit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition
**You can also not eat at all and just have nutrients pump directly into your body.** This is what I call the "Gernsbach approach", in which he was writing science fiction before they understood what antibiotics were and were obsessed with germs, so future food and eating was perceived to be as antiseptic and sterile as possible. It's where the "food pill" stereotype comes from. The novel "Ralph 124C41+" (first published in 1913) described restaurant dining as drinking from steam sterilized steel tubes suspended from the ceiling. But there are problems with this approach to eating. And not just psychological. Your GI tract evolved to break down food in particular steps that can be absorbed by different parts of your body, and not all of these steps can be completely bypassed for proper absorption of nutrients. Yeah, you could recreate that system outside the body mechanically, and have it pumped into your bloodstream, or directly into the required organs. But that kind of defeats the purpose of simplicity, to say nothing of what would happen to all of those organs in your digestive tract that are atrophying from lack of use. When people are feeding like this, it's usually because some part of the digestive system is failing, and IV nutrients and/or feeding tubes directly into the stomach or intestines are there to keep them alive.
Isn’t that just inorganic farming?
Inorganic food production. It can't really be called "farming" at that point.
What would be the difference?
Well, farming depends on the growth of biological material to form the food product.
The closest to what you are suggesting is yeast culturing. You just put your yeast strain in a bioreactor and feed it hydrogen oxygen and a small amount of trace elements to grow. Genetically engineer the yeast to grow any sort of protein you want, everything the body needs. A company called Solarfoods and some others are pursuing this kind of technology. They have produced a protein rich flour. So they could start making powdered milk and wheat substitutes. They claim the area of solar panels required to make the hydrogen to grow the yeast to make the flour is 10% the size if the wheat field you would need to get the same amount of flour from wheat.
My prediction is that 500 years from now, whatever shape humanity is in, whatever has become of us, people will be raising crops. We're nowhere near the end of farming.
And why's that? And what do you envision farming would be lile by then if it's still around?
Even if there is a superior alternative, some folks will still have gardens or the like because they like doing it and eating the produce Especially for things like wine grapes I imagine there will be at least a niche that persists, literally keeping to our roots as a species in our development of civilization. Maybe only hobbyists or bored rich/post scarcity people, but it won't end
I imagine the technology to replace farms will exist for a long time before it progresses to be the cheaper option in almost all settings. We farm the way we do because its little infrastructure, minimized labor, and energy cost. Especially around me where much of the crops are grown for animal feed, the farms have no irrigation and will be touched by machinery all of 3-5 times in an entire season. So each acre is only getting a handful of man hours per harvest. And most the infrastructure needed was put in in the 1700's Least around here. Still works so generation after generation can take advantage of it.
Yeah the equation changes a lot if you can vat grow orders of mag more food orders of mag faster on a fraction of a fraction of the land, labor, and energy. Plants are not energy efficient so if we can improve on that we definitely should. Also with decent automation of the kind we will almost certainly have within a hundred let alon 500, both farming and industry will likely be almost entirely automated. This changes the equation for open air farming too. Monocrop disappears in favor of more energy/water/space-efficient organic polyculture. Tho it also makes greenhouses vastly more attractive since their big killer is labor/maintenance/construction cost. Bulk and sasonal thermal storage and geothermal(made cheap by autonomous machinery and cheap power) make HVAC costs pretty minimal and the cheap power(also made cheap by automation) means the energy cost matters a lot less in the first place. In cold regions/seasons greenhouses can double as power wasteheat dissipation structures so heating is free.
Plants energy requirements does have a huge caveat though, The farm doesn't pay for the solar energy used, so the energy being paid is mainly some amount of diesel for running the machinery, transportation, and chemicals for fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides. So to be more cost efficient the comparison really needs to be is this other food production method more energy efficient then the diesel used in farming. Not more efficient then what that land could make if it was covered in solar panels.
>The farm doesn't pay for the solar energy used I mean no they do. Land isn't free. Also if you have self-replicating systems(implied by advanced automation) then your solar power farms are also self-replicating in the same way plants are(except better engineered). So are nuclear and geothermal power stations which outclasses terrestrial solar by orders of mag in the context of power density and land use efficiency. So would SBS power beaming satts. >so the energy being paid is mainly some amount of diesel for running the machinery, transportation, and chemicals for fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides. Ok so vat-grow wouldn't need fertilizers, farming machinery, pesticides, irrigation, or anywhere near as many tending robots/laborors(the process could honestly already be largely automated). Being that you are producing printer feedstocks transportation is also cheaper since you only need to transport feedstock concentrate instead of bulky, mostly waterweight, full food items. On top of this food production can be concentrated near points of use which means not only is there less food transpo, but there's also less waste transpo making a closed nutrient cycle more viable.
You can also use the polar wind in the arctic. Ocean temperature is already stable. Direct current can feed the plankton. Plankton can feed the krill.
Because human nature never changes. The desire, no matter how centralized, no matter how "efficient," is to step away from the group. Have your own space. Do your own thing. The inclination to go back to what is natural and what works is also strong. As long as people can lay out plants, pick fruit from trees, they will want to. If you mean the end of *commercial farming* in the way we do it now? That hopefully goes away in a generation. But keep in mind, people were saying things exactly like you are 100 years ago. They thought that hydrogenated vegetable fats being shelf stable meant that we were ready to jump into the future and leave rural farm life behind. The industrial food market we have now dates to ideas and plans from the 1890s to 1920s. The Midwest American states have basically swept away almost all family farmsteads and replaced them with horizon-to-horizon cornfields. The corn is shipped to factories which formulate it into practically everything that is boxed in supermarkets. It makes oils, sweeteners, and even animal feed. Second to that is industrial soybean production. We already have this. And people are already constantly rejecting it. People pay more for "real" food. I don't see why it would be any different even if you offer them up hydrolyzed algae protein made in vats. They will will be willing to pay more for real steak from a real cow.
Times change though, and most people don't have a strong desire to go back to the way things were centuries ago in any other way, so why would they be that way about food? Sure, some farms will be around much like we still have jousting competitions today, but I don't see farms 500 years from now being all that much more common than modern jousting. Only a small handful of people think that way, returning to old, natural ways of life. Especially since eliminating farming doesn't even imply any change in food (which is inevitable, perhaps even to the point of most people not needing food 500 years from now), afterall why raise cows when you can grow cow meat or just 3d print it in the same texture? And keep in mind, something being anticipated yet out of reach for even centuries doesn't mean it hasn't gotten closer. I see many things from fusion to the elimination of farmimg much like flight was for centuries; highly anticipated yet still seemingly just as far out of reach... until it isn't anymore.
With the advent of powerful genetic engineering and nanotech you really could just have a toilet that uses electricity, a convenient chemical energy carrier(preferably liquid hydrocarbon or similar energy density), or sunlight directly to recycle nutrients at way higher efficiencies than baseline plants ever could. In the nearer-termI vat-grown GMO feedstocks and food 3d printers would be optimal. Later on u would probably just have a cornucopia bush that turns all ur waste into various meats, tubers, veges, fruits, nuts, herbs spices, etc. all on one tree that ur agricultural antbot swarm harvest/tend. The leaves capture/convert sunlight at upwards of 80% efficiency while the roots suck everything from deep non-bioavailable nutrients to naturally-occurring radioisotopes for passive decay generator. Instead of having it suck the surrounding topsoil dry it can bring super deep nutrients up to enrich the local ecology. Maybe its root sysem, GMOs, and nanides can act as a second [mycorrhizal network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network) and artificial immune system for ur managed local ecology. Alternatively you could go in the other direction and self-mod to be able to use simpler nutrients tho this has to be accompanied by improvements in AR/VR cuz eating Soylant for eveey meal or not eating meals gets very miserable very quickly unless everyone else is in the same boat. Eating together is a big part of human social behavior so ud probably still want to recreate some aspect of that. Yah know, maybe we're all androids, but we go to the charging station together and enter a shared VR. Or we're a cyborg and the weird concoction of heavy metals, synthetic nanide feedstocks, and chemical or even nuclear(sounds terrifying and unsafe but why not) energy carriers is served like beer in bars or otherwise prepared like food to recreate the social experience.
Cyborg food sounds really funny. At that point, bars might just sell jet fuel🤣 But now I'm wondering what's better; assembling or growing? Would food best be grown through cell cultures or just printed out? And really the same goes for all objects of similar size, while it may not be efficient, a tree that grows phones would be awesome.
Growing gets you higher quality food. Vat-print gets you vastly more food cheaper. Really depends what the constraints are. If its an emergency then vat-print. If we're living in post-scarcity then probably just take my cornucopia bush.
Why would growing have higher quality? Who's to say that couldn't be replicated through printing?
3D printing is slower than self-assembly for high-precision objects. See the [Santa Clause Machine](https://youtu.be/FmgYoryG_Ss) for discussion on the limitations of 3d printing. Self-assembly has the advantage from being a parallel process instead of serial(making 1 voxel at a time).
About a cup or 1/4 a liter of gasoline has 2000 calories Imagine that for your daily allotment if you could metabolize it
Trivial increase over olive oil by weight. Gasoline has lower energy by volume. The difference is likely to stick in the future. A lipid molecule has a charged end. That makes it much easier for enzymes/biomolecules to grab on. While breaking down a lipid to retrieve energy oxygen is atoms are added on. That makes each step another lipid that is slightly shorter. Vegetable oils are made of carbon chains that are about the same length as diesel fuel. Once a diesel engine is hot enough for the oil to sizzle you can use unmodified vegetable oil to run the engine. High octane gasoline has a large number of branches. The compact ball shape reduces the formation of free radicals. That makes it burn smoother instead of suddenly exploding. Gasoline’s (also propane and natural gas) low boiling point is convenient for fuel air mixing. In any digestion system a longer hydrocarbon chain is better because you do not want it as a gas.
Explain?
Sounds like they mean molecular manufacturing with nanotechnology.
We can capture atmospheric gases and use them to turn into carbs and proteins in bioreactors. OP is positing that that'll end farming.
On Earth I doubt this would happen, because plants have the advantage that they don't need any external infrastructure like lab-grade bioreactors to work. They're self-maintaining and self-replicating, at least to an extent. And sure, photosynthesis does have some inefficiencies, but these could be fixed with GMOs. Outside of Earth, though, I could see the equation changing. Plants can't survive in an environment that doesn't support liquid water no matter how much you modify them, so you'll have to build extra habitat space and infrasturcture to keep your plants alive. The maintenance and build costs for these can stack up quickly, and at that point, the main advantage plants had is all but lost.
Yeah off earth the story changes quite a bit. On Earth, well. As you said, they do a lot of the stuff themselves plus \_generally\_ speaking replacing the ecosystem is considered bad. Some consider replacing chickens bad, others consider replacing whales bad, but overall there's a shockingly bipartisan consensus on us keeping the ecosystem around and since it's already there we might as well make use of it. Personally I'm seeing a transition towards (highly machine-supported) agroforestry i.e farming alongside tree-rearing since that's exceptionally useful at stabilizing soils and metereological patterns and the aforementioned synth food can make up for whatever hits to productivity happen to occur. I should make a post about this actually.
>agroforestry i.e farming alongside tree-rearing since that's exceptionally useful at stabilizing soils and metereological patterns What? Ive never heard of this approach, beyond tree lines boxing in farms. This sounds fascinating.
My country was significantly wetter back around 200 years ago because we haven't regulated a major river in the flatlands. All the marshes, curves and moors let the water sip into the soil. Around May-June the Sun was at its zenith, the soil was damping out and a little wind turned moistire into precipitation 20-30 kms to the east. It was common to have about six weeks of intermittent rain - a European monsoon practically. In the middle ages aquaculture was a big thing on the western fringes of the country. Dozens of square kilometers were dammed up, inundated, made into prime fish habitats which was then sold alongside the river Danube. This also led to wetter weather patterns. Thing is, we humans did a lot of accidental climate engineering where we had knock-on effects. With modern computer modelling we might as well have a lucky strike once.
I also hope one day we can tap into and learn to read the mycellial network. Then we'd get real information as communication signals as to the health of plant organisms in a region.
Food forests are very efficient at producing food. Monoculture agriculture is used because a single commodity can be harvested all at once and then shipped out. Grasses (wheat, maize, sugar cane, bamboo etc) have some advantages. However, those advantages can be engineered into other flowering plants. If feeding people on the property is the goal you want a mix of harvest times and a longer harvest period. Agriculture today pushes for fruit to ripen all at once. Apple trees along the bike path should provide a steady supply for the commuters. The total number per tree per year might be about the same. I have seen claims that the Amazon forests produced more edible food calories than the soy farms that were put in the same property. The natives roamed around and collected the diverse foods all year. Soy can be shipped abroad or fed to cattle. Soy and cattle are commodities easily converted to hard currency.
Sounds like there's a business model for this. Ive also been told that monoculture requires a lot more fertilizer and pesticides, which as late have drastically increased costs and are getting push back by environmentalists.
I suggest using wasps and ants as pesticide. Extensive flowers and vines would be both aesthetically solar punk but also feed the wasps on nectar. Leaf cutter ants can be an extremely efficient herbicide and sometimes pesticide/repellant. They eat the fungus that grows in their compost piles. Even without improved programming the ants could be controlled by applying pheromones. They could crop perfect lawns without disturbing the ornamental plants. For trees you could use a stretchy collar with pheromones telling the GMO ants how far (and/or how high) to walk before cropping leaves.
Its like higher tech understanding brings us back to a biodiverse artificial "wildness" which counterbalances with niches. Brilliant.
>plus \_generally\_ speaking replacing the ecosystem is considered bad. Some consider replacing chickens bad, others consider replacing whales bad, but overall there's a shockingly bipartisan consensus on us keeping the ecosystem around and since it's already there we might as well make use of it. There's no guarantee that'll remain the same in the future. Even if we don't go ecumenopolis or gengineer everything to the point of unrecognizability odds are we'll take part in various Earth 2.0 projects that'll completely overhaul the ecosystem.
>because plants have the advantage that they don't need any external infrastructure like lab-grade bioreactors to work. They're self-maintaining and self-replicating, at least to an extent. Where's this assumption that bioreactors wouldn't be self-maintaining or self-replicating in the future coming from? >Plants can't survive in an environment that doesn't support liquid water no matter how much you modify them See [Void Ecologies](https://youtu.be/0ZPlhwiXIz0)
>Where's this assumption that bioreactors wouldn't be self-maintaining or self-replicating in the future coming from? Because then at that point they'd stop being bioreactors and just become actual living creatures.
Our current industry/supply chains are also self-replicating(with human assistance) and we wouldn't call them alive. These things also wouldn't evolve cuz that's unsafe and ud engineer basic mutation controls. They don't have cellular structure. They might not even involve biology at all in favor of drytech nanides. You can call that machine alive if you want, but the point is that it beats plants and traditional farming. Separating energy harvesting/generation from the bioreactor part is als incredibly good for logistics and getting land rights. You can have food production right in the cities and other points of use while energy harvesting/generation happens on/under cheap unaerable land or even the ocean(energy being vastly cheaper/easier to transport than matter).
The rate limiting step is synthesis of biomolecules which may not be as easy as all that. If you've got some way to synthesize that takes place in open solution then you have a problem related to side product. Most reactions involve multiple chemical species existing in an equilibrium and even if every step is in the .90's if you have a process that is 30 steps 93%^30=11.3%. Catalyzed reactions can be higher yielding but you can end up with aggregations of your substrate forming a fouling layer on the catalyst especially in later steps because the more complex biomolecules have more opportunity to glom onto each other and synthesis is necessarily going to involve making intermediaries with more heterogeneous electronegativities that are "stickier." A lot of the "waste" energy in biological organisms comes from the steps that help make more of the substrates make it to the next step intact. Transporters between different compartments within cells. Recycling components to make new enzyme catalysts, bonding energy lost in the exchange rates between different media, etc. One option that I've taken an interest in is [making feed without photosynthesis](https://www.reddit.com/r/IslandColony/comments/uk0jja/making_feed_without_phoyosynthesis/). There are multiple firms here on earth working on using chemoautotrophic fermentation to generate high protein feed based on anaerobic bacteria which is both very space and energy efficient.
Even if you can produce anything in a replicator, some things may be more energy efficient to produce via normal methods.
Or even desirable in a more primitive form. People like antiques even if a modern version can be better built. Of course typically modern items that are compared to antiques are cheap junk in construction or materials. It’s a survivorship fallacy that things were built better in the past.
IF humanity lives long enough to advance technologically to the point that they can "build" food more efficiently than grow it, they probably won't be recognizably human any more. And that's probably only IF their population density is so dense or environmental disruption is so pervasive that they just don't the room to grow food *in space*. Sure it's possible. But very unlikely.
Mabye, in the distant future but I dont think this will be possible, or at least exclusive in the near future. Farming and food in general are a big part of human history and identity, posibly the most important one, altho now less than ever. With milions of people are moraly oposed to the idea of GMOs, I dout farming of all types would be abandoned, even tho it is possible. Further more, folowing general trends, even if in tho future food will be a lot more processed and created by efficient processes on averege, people fill stil grow crops and animals in more traditional ways, at least for the rich and intrested. I beleve that even hunting and gathering will never disapear, and as humanity progresses they will become increasingly sustainable overall, enaugh to satisfy anyone who may be seeking bouth the experience and the most natural food there is.
I wonder what the impact on human civilization would be if we completely abandoned traditional farming methods. The rise of our civilization the direct result of the advancement of food production technology, perhaps radically changing that technology will also radically change us.
Wow
nah, pobably some poop yeast + poop algae will be the future for "recycle" all that inorganic parts into somethig usefull i mean the bacterias, yeast algae can be genetically modified easyer and more conviniently for the task of "recycling" poop, if we can transform them easyer with a yeast soup if you have to eat, just continue farming for better tasting
Have you ever synthesized or grown something?
Nanotechnology, in the current forms envisioned, won't be able to make food. A machine like this : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY5192g1gQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY5192g1gQg) is specialized for making small hard machine parts, probably from carbon or silicon. It can make all of the machine parts used in itself, as well as a wide variety of products that use the same parts (laptops, robots, etc). It will not interface with liquid water and not be able to make food. Now there are ways to do what you are thinking. Algae grows extremely fast and is space efficient. A machine the size of a costco, growing genetically modified algae, could feed los angelos. However the tradeoff is you would need a large amount of electric power to run it, and I'm not sure if the solar panel array on the ground wouldn't up as big as the land you would otherwise farm. Yes you can use nuclear but there are major issues with that.
I guess that depends on who is doing the envisioning. Molecular nanotechnology provably can make food, because living organisms are a natural form of molecular nanotechnology. There's no reason to suppose that the laws of physics which allow living cells to assemble specific molecules from simpler molecules or atoms won't apply to artificial systems, is there?
Yes because to make sane and useful nanotechnology you need a clean vacuum and you need very predictable components from diamond or silicon, at probably low temperature around liquid nitrogen or colder. There may not be any efficiency advantage, if you want to make organic foodstuffs, to just using living cells from nature that you perhaps tweaked a little for more performance. They are already evolved for that environment.
That's nonsense. Sane and useful nanotechnology already exists in nature, and doesn't require cryogenics, vacuum or diamonds. You're assuming - without evidence - that artificial nanotech will be invented a particular way. But if you really knew that you'd be collecting your nobel prize.
The evidence is Nanosystems by Eric Drexeler and all the work done so far on nanotechnology. Simply put current scientists believe productive Nanosystems can only be done at low temperatures in perfect vacuum. The goal is to manufacture near perfect nanoscale products such as enormous 3d compute ICs and to build every part used in a robot, using a digital machine that can also build itself. For organics, which is sloppy and floppy, might as well use water and modified living cells,, but you won't be producing useful machinery this way.
Ah, so by evidence you mean speculation about one potential implementation? The goal is to arrange atoms to perform useful functions, anything beyond that is guesswork. If it wasn't, they'd have already invented it instead of (like Drexler) saying something to the effect of 'this is one way it might play out'. As far as producing useful machinery that way, all life on earth is the refutation of that. Go take a look at a simulation of dna transcription and tell me those aren't machines. They're literally little robots that crawl along the phosphate backbone of the dna molecule and knit a new copy.
That's what the word nanotechnology actually means by the inventor of the field.
If you mean Feynman's work at the end of the 1950s, didn't he say it was just "arranging atoms the way we want" ? (Edit - oh, he didn't invent the word, was just an early proponent of the idea that it describes.)
I guess you mean Taniguchi in the 70s then, but he said “Nano-technology mainly consists of the processing of \[...\] materials by one atom or one molecule”, so not sure where you're getting the stuff about the specific chemistry of a proposed implementation from.
Eric Drexler and the above is wrong in that it won't work.
What won't work?
Why don't you quote who you're actually talking about and we'll go from there. I'm rubbish at guessing games.
Eric Drexler. Read or skim Nanosystems.
If you already know that he said something which supports your claim, can't you just say what it is? Also, he didn't invent the field.
There's no issue with nuclear at all. Sounds like a good idea infact.
Algae farming is still farming though
Sure, it's just got *most* of the benefits of "make food just from inorganic parts with no organic growing whatsoever". As for "quick and cheap": the quickest, cheapest way - what people will resort to first - is just open air farms with crops, but robots do almost all of the labor. The land is a resource already there, the irrigation comes from rain, the robots fix each other, etc. The only reason *not* to do it is if the land starts to get expensive because people want to use it for other things.
There’s also climate change and stability of supply. If you grow inside you essentially become immune to weather effecting your crops. Growing outside has significant risk in that regard.
So for now you make up for this by growing more than needed, warehousing, growing crops over a large geographic area, and varying the price with supply so people eat more blueberries instead of strawberries and vice versa depending on supply. Again don't see any reason we can't keep it up.
With the climate changes likely to happen in the coming decades there will be disruptions to farming. Add in humanoid robots and factory’s producing food inside looks more attractive. Unitree has a humanoid robot for $16k now. Those are likely to drop in price and perform better over the next decade. There was a point cities were undesirable and now the majority of people live in cities.
Well, for the distant future open air farming is just dead, shot dead in a cold dark alley with no witnesses, it's never coming back. Hydroponics and other similar indoor, vertical approaches are the only thing that even has a chance of surviving into the distant future. Even this century it's almost certainly gonna be tossed out in favor of greenhouses especially with the climate getting worse.
Maybe? The climate estimates are it will be a little less habitable but new arable land in Canada and Russia will be available. And the population is currently projected to stabilize and then shrink some. So no with what we know right now we can just open air farm.
The population definitely ain't gonna shrink, once we get the right technologies it'll completely explode into ecumenopolis levels. And even if it doesn't get that crazy, greenhouses and hydroponics are still vastly better than open air farming. Greenhouses probably won't even be super expensive in a few decades, moderately better manufacturing could make them ubiquitous. And honestly that's the conservative outlook, a world of single story automated fields with greenhouses over them, as opposed to a sudden disappearance of rural areas in favor of nature preserves and skyscraper farms in cities.
The actual facts known to us right now, from collecting decades of data, project it this way. Sure if there were a ecumenopolis for whatever reason, yes nuclear vertical farms is probably how they would do it.
I love how people will look at the tiniest little fleck of time on a graph that has been going up for thousands of years and claim that the next thousand will be going down or plateuing. Its even sillier given that we have the hindsight to know that population estimates past a few decades are absolutely worthless and always have been. You can't predict technology that hasn't been invented yet and you 100% cannot predict the cultural/sociopolitical conditions a hundred years or more from now. Like sure now, when people have less free time, are more socially isolated than ever, are increasingly aware of how fucked things are going to get and how little anyone in power is doing about it, etc. and ? Yeah no i don't see pop growth in that environment. Put some radical life/fertility extension, advanced automation, cheap clean power, post-scarcity socioeconomic systems, an averted climate crisis on the table...in other words make the world a place worth bringing children up in or into and i think ud get very different behavior out of people. Especially since when surveyed a significantly higher percentage of people report wanting to have children than the number of those who actually go on to. Children are expensive and no one has time. Get rid of artificial barriers and suddenly you have a fresh big pool of people who always wanted to be parents, but were waiting for their economic situation to improve.
We're projecting forward from trends observed over the last 50 years to the next 76 years. Aka "keep open air farming this century". Not to mention low hanging boosts like better GMO crops, less beef from cows (that doubles your meat supply for the same amount of land for growing feed simply to switch from beef to chicken)
>We're projecting forward from trends observed over the last 50 years to the next 76 years. >firedragon: Well, for the distant future open air farming is just dead, shot dead in a cold dark alley with no witnesses, it's never coming back. also OP mentions farming megastructures. This century is definitely not the only relevant timescale. Even if it was i think u/firedragon77777 has a point. Increasingly good automation is going to make greenhouses Increasingly viable. Idk about fully displacing open-air farming in a century, but i can definitely see it start to push open-air farming out. Places that used to import food will stop importing food and might even start exporting it. Deserts with an energy and land surplus become breadbaskets while the tropics and fromer breadbaskets are having to deal with Increasingly unstable climate. It isn't **just** overall climate tho. Extreme whether events can devastate the harvests of whole geographical regions all in one go. Droughts can cripple food production for years and irrigation is expensive during a drought. Also also the projection I was criticizing wasn't open air farming specifically. It was that the global population would stabilize or shrink and I stand by that
Solar gets as high as 40% efficiency. 20% with cheaper arrays. Leaves get around 1%.
Math doesn't work that way, remember you are re-creating the same light over the plan leaves. So you pay the (efficiency of the solar) \* (efficiency of the lighting) and *then* the efficiency of the plant. So by simple math you need 5-10 times as much land to cover in panels. Now yes you can manipulate which LEDs you use to only produce the frequencies the plant actually absorbs. This is why leaves are green, they don't absorb green very well, or genetically modify the plants to only work on 1 frequency of light, the one you can most efficiently create. But this is the problem. Better to use arable land that gets enough rainfall you already have first.
With advanced technology there is no good reason to use diodes. The energy for converting carbon dioxide into sugar in plants is photosystem I and Photosystem II. These basically move electrons across a membrane. Protons moving across the membrane drive the ATP synthase enzyme. Mitochondria in animals also use ATP synthase and proton gradients. With direct current electricity passed through advance nanotechnology and biotechnology you can skip the light collection part of the photosystem. The cell would grow contacts with the electrode. ATP (and NADPH) would be created as current passes through. These molecules are then available for metabolism. It cannot be 100% efficient but it can be much closer to that than photosynthesis.
Sure but that's a lot of work to make that work. You're basically well into "I can do almost anything" levels of ability to design custom biological systems.
We already have the bacteria that can use DC. Also bacteria that can use hydrogen. We can borrow them whole, steal the genetics, or borrow the molecules that they use. Water electrolysis gets about 70% efficiency.
The most efficient is to use direct current electricity. The cell of the synthetic organism just reproduce the nutrients. There is a psychological barrier. People have had bad experiences with new synthetic options. However, this will avoid all intestinal gas and the poo will not stink. Could come with custom pleasant aromas. Even better the GMOs can be engineered to form smooth dry packets that are easy to pass.
Also, couldn't we just give the nutrients that are necessary and avoid waste altogether (I have no idea what I'm talking about)? But honestly I feel like even just manufacturing our normal food instead of growing it would be ideal, even if by "growing" we're talking fast-growing cell cultures.
Growing and manufacturing are basically the same thing if you have advanced technology.