clonan wrote:The advantage is the ability to provide exactly the ideal EM frequencey, minimizing wasted fertilizer, increasing CO2 levels, almost zero net water usage and all but eliminating pesticides.
I remember reading a compelling essay to this effect, describing how automation and greenhouses were going to transform the landscape across America within a decade, freeing up resources for space exploration. Then I realized that the article was written in the 80's/90's. Wish I could remember the name so I could share it.
These are good arguments, but they haven't been good enough so far (at least en masse, hothouses do have their place in the present economy). One day I'm sure these forces for productivity will overcome the investment costs of building and maintaining these structures. I'm reasonably optimistic that it could happen even without fusion power. Obviously, cheap power would make it occur much sooner though.
cksantos wrote:Underground is still 2d thinking. Without the sun you can go vertical, like say an aquaponics sky scraper.
For those who want some visuals, check out:
http://www.verticalfarm.com/
I hear they're building one in Las Vegas. They figure that even if it isn't cost effective, it'll be good for tourism.
Whole foods type stores are going to make these things possible by driving consumers away from Food Inc. garbage. Most likely open space farming will be used for GMO plants/synthetic organisms for the poor and for bio-fuel production.(cellulose ethanol, corn, wheat, rice, algae, etc.).
This is an interesting perspective. I've been assuming that the Whole Foods type movement would shun artificial environments for not being "natural" enough. This really is the ultimate in factory farming, though clearly also the cleanest farming. No need for pesticides or pesticidal gene modifications in the sealed farmscraper. I think that people are not rational, and this will cause some internal cultural conflict for our societies.
Another issue is the legal landscape. When sealed environments are economical, I expect that restrictions on GMO use will tighten considerably. This may vary from country to country, but most of Europe will almost certainly ban or severely restrict the use of GMO crops in the countryside.
Also, when it comes to biofuel production, I'd like to point out that yields are astronomically higher with sterile environments. The simpler the organism you use, the less energy it devotes to things other than making product. A stripped down algae that does nothing but make deisel and reproduce is extremely productive, and extremely vulnerable to contamination. So I expect bioreactors for fuel production would happen naturally, especially if the electric bills were low and the manufacturing of components cheaper.
I think this ties into another implication for the social environment. I think that, in general, people don't trust technology, and view it as a force for evil in the world. There was a time when antibiotics were first invented, and people thought science would eradicate all disease. They called it the golden age of pharmaceuticals. Then we had the Thalidomide public relations nightmare, when babies were born with flippers.
Right now, people think of pollution, trans fats, global warming, Chernobyl, all the side effects and unintended consequences. They largely shrug it off when a study says that some natural food product like soy raises your risk of cancer, but they eagerly look for every scrap of data that cell phones might possibly raise our risk of cancer by half a percentage somehow, because they simply expect it to be so. Technology must be bad, look at all the bad stuff it's done already, right?
Safe, cheap nuclear fusion might lead us back into another burst of optimism. We'd be able to clearly see the economic benefits associated with the old fear of the word "nuclear". We'd have choices like clean crops from techno powerhouses played against salmonella ridden crops from the "natural" countryside. I hope things would play out this way, anyway.