The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
- that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating
- that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design.
We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems built into how we approach the design, so like running away from our shadows, it will come up wherever we go.
And, if we are aware of the bad design, why wouldn’t we just fix it while we’re here on this planet?
When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.
There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
I'm not suggesting putting biological organisms anywhere. I'm suggesting that at some point in the future an AI will be able to rapidly modify its own substrate independent of biology, metabolic inputs, and genetic inheritance. That it won't be subject to information loss due to death or other physical constraints. That it will much more quickly be able to build support systems for itself to harness energy and raw materials wherever it goes.
Unless we kill ourselves in the near future, these systems will likely emerge and will likely proliferate faster than us. They're not going to be stuck on earth with us. There are abundant energy resources and building materials in the solar system and greater galaxy beyond.
HN is quite a bubble, and we often form an echo chamber that strongly agrees with itself.
As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy… one thing that will probably happen is that we too will cease to exist as a whole at some point. I wonder what this does to us as a group, not having that perspective.
There are so many possible outcomes.
It can be true that humanity will peak, yet intelligence will continue to grow and expand beyond humans.
Any outcome where humanity is the utmost pinnacle of intelligence likely means that we do not stray beyond our gravity well. That earth-evolved intelligence will never reach the greater galaxy beyond. It falls far short of earth's potential.
I hope humanity is not the peak. There's so much more that lies beyond us. In a greater developmental timeline, we could be just amoebas. That's exciting to contemplate, even though we can barely fathom it.
So what if it was ? I don’t really understand this ultra-intellectual viewpoint.
A planet is just fine being a planet, we don’t need to out glasses on planets and have them reading Shakespeare to make the universe a special place ? I’m sure they will happen on its own anyway if it’s desirable.
In a similar way, an amoeba doesn’t really need intelligence, it just does what it does until it can’t do it anymore and a new one comes a long. Maybe that’s a fine thing and in some ways, it’s own form of intelligence. Doesn’t need to mess with everything and crate ecology crisis for itself.
The way we’re going, the amoebas will likely outlive us and probably any computer systems we produce. So it’s yet to be proven our intellect is really all that valuable longer term.
The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too.
Some cultures attach a lot of importance on travel, associating it with freedom, or mobility (both in the literal sense, and as a metaphor for class mobility). Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, to explore, to hike the wildernesses or enjoy different urban locale and take full advantage of the transport infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it isn’t an illusion.
Then you're just a pastoralist and likely a Malthusian, not talking about ecological sustainability at all.
Walking around my extremely dense city, I see plenty of people growing their own food in their little yards, probably more than I see back in my semirural hometown.
For a while I subscribed to a vegan food delivery service. The food is grown a few towns away and delivered daily by cyclists. There is nothing like that back in my hometown; I'd have to do HelloFresh or something.
People in rural areas like where I grew up, might be more likely to have a garden, but most don't, and they still get most of their calories from the grocery store. I grew up on a cattle ranch and while that might give me more "connection" to my food, we still bought a lot of our beef at the grocery store because finishing and butchering a cow is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of long term freezer storage. Today's modern rural family is pretty similar to an urban one except they drive a lot farther to do anything.
In the modern world, it also means that cities have lower ecological footprint. Moving people around is much more energy intensive than moving food. Makes more sense to do farming across the country and concentrate the produce onto a small place packed with people.
Not necessarily saying this is a great tradeoff for individuals (who wouldn't want a backyard with an apple tree?) but in a sense, the fact that we're picturing a backyard with an apple tree instead of backbreaking work in the rice paddies throughout summer is a testament to how brutally efficient the modern agriculture is.
Relating to energy, one of the coming issues we will need to solve is fertilizer supply. Modern agriculture heavily depends on natural gas (via Haber-Bosch) to juice yields alongside genetic engineering. This isn't great for long-term soil health either, we just haven't been doing it long enough to see the effects of soil depletion.
From the wikipedia:
> Scott then asserts that the reason why hunter-gatherer societies transformed into agro-pastoral societies was due to coercion by the state. He cites research on an archaeological site in Mesopotamia named Abu Hureyra. Scott concurs with other scholars in the field that "'[n]o hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.
there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.
we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.
the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamo....
> When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.
If you need robot arms and computer vision, it sounds then like permaculture is impractical at scale necessary for replacing standard agricultural practices.
Gardening is my hobby, and over the years I found a lot of practices that improve my yield tremendously without depending on chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers. However, I would not dare suggesting to the professional farmers that they should follow my steps. These practices work in my garden, but they simply aren’t practical if you need to feed the entire world.
People who are middle aged and raising children don't have the time necessary (or the good physical shape) to participate in permaculture on any meaningful scale beyond maybe growing some veggies for personal consumption.
It’s like someone saying “java projects get too messy when there are hundreds of developers on them , this new language I’ve invented will be much better, trust me”
Whatever powerful entity that determines the laws has no obligation to the environment.
""" It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for. Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts.
... Here is a link: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm
"""
Isn't this common knowledge?
On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.
I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this.
It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas.
What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology.
With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools.
Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans.
You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.