We literally cannot imagine what the future will bring. I'm still waiting on my flying atomicar.
I think it will end up being necessary to make food this way, and that we'll figure out how to do it (Soylent Green, anyone?).
We also seem to think that no one learned from all that experience. We can see the things that made something once thought impossible work at scale. We all know these stories. So we’re more primed to be wary of just being negative.
I’m all for spending money on this, but it could turn out certain breakthroughs are needed and we don’t know when or if they will come.
I'm no fan of lab growing anything because or banning people from raising animals or having food plots because those that make the food make the rules. That being said... I wouldn't be suprised to see, in 2-3 decades, something taking off in that regard. All it takes is one stroke of genius and a ton of elbow grease to change it all.
I can remember the urban legend, but there seems to be no solid evidence that it was ever actually said, let alone believed by anyone. The saying is normally attributed to Bill Gates, but he denies ever saying it, and tells how he was pushing computer makers to include even more RAM.
There’s no question that the attitude was prevalent, though; whether or not Gates said anything like it.
“Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
—Abraham Lincoln
People looked at past results and thought we would live forever by now, but we still die and there is no end in sight of that.
People looked at past energy use and saw the future of fusion solving all human energy needs, but energy use has been flat for the past 50 years as no new efficient enough energy sources was found.
People looked at the innovations of transportation and assumed we would all have flying cars today, yet we still drive cars on the ground just like 70 years ago. They are a bit safer and more efficient today, but they are still just cars.
I just figured the physics symposium lecture would be more interesting given the deep-dive details and allusions to why ITER "failed" to achieve the desired breakthroughs.
Still I wont bother to check the physics, if they are right it is great, but I wont change my life based on them making it. I know the problems with ITER, it will be too expensive to really revolutionize much, but I haven't done physics in a while and wont bother with more now.
Both of those are of course complete science fiction currently, but they're not "thermodynamically impossible" like he seems to suggest. They're 'just' conditioned on a significantly deeper understanding of biochemistry and genetic engineering than we currently have.
Given the current state of the technology and the implications of meat for global warming, I suspect that meat might just become more expensive until it stops being eaten entirely. And when the technology exists to produce it artificially, there won't be a market for it anymore. Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.
> I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.
If you were really hungry I think you'd figure something out.
But then you're talking about re-engineering complex animal life, which is nowhere close to happening any time soon. Plus once you add those systems back in, you may loose most of the energy savings that make "lab grown meat" look attractive. This comment when into more detail and did some back of the envelope calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28623349.
> Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.
To be fair, you're a human: you had to learn all your survival skills. You wouldn't have independently invented the idea of eating plants either, let alone picking the ones that would give you a nutritionally complete diet without poisoning you.
Maybe rather than chlorine or UV or whatever, give the clean rooms immune defenses?
But I don't see how there could be any kind of insurmountable problem here. Animals "solve" this problem for us right now, so there is a way. I just think that the solution has to be quite different than how we grow cell cultures in the lab right now.
Short term I'd be really skeptical on the prospects of replacing meat in this way. But long term is an entirely different question.