Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by Ekaros on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @03:06PM (#36217597)

Could we make sugars or fats straight from CO2 and Water? Just wondering could you theoretically make either from some process that does not involve plants, bacteria, protist or fungi? Enzymes are probably fair game.

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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by horsawlarway on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @03:16PM (#36217730)

Sure - I think there's a possible long game here where we're able to technologically engineer our way back to producer status.

Bio-engineering is one route (KloraDerm), but I could see alternative routes that are essentially just chemical/material sciences.

I think it's probably an incredibly complicated supply chain we'd have to really work through to make sure you can synthesize all the required components without going through something living, but we know that producers exist - so there's hope.

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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by Ekaros on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @03:39PM (#36218051)

Also now that I think about it. Basically anything at all can contaminate the process and include living things...

Probably not realistic on industrial scale. And then how do you get to the clean starting point...

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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by chris_va on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @04:35PM (#36218748)

Sure... CO2 capture => Fischer-Tropsch => wax => fatty acid => food. The CO2 capture part is new, and presumably one would use solar now, but the rest was attempted during WW2.

E-fuel plants do this for synthetic aviation fuel.

You can also do it slightly more indirectly via acetate: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x.pdf

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