I wish I'd seen this and had a chance to reply earlier. I think a lot of commenters are missing some key points. First, this is still pretty early-stage stuff,

I wish I'd seen this and had a chance to reply earlier. I think a lot of commenters are missing some key points. First, this is still pretty early-stage stuff, and it's quite likely that almost everyone working in this field right now is not going to get rich any more than most of the people working on gasoline-powered horseless carriages got rich. My personal prediction is that this kind of thing is going to be a lot more common in 40 years regardless of whether the current stuff is going to be used for growing pot - and pot itself will become a much less profitable crop with legalization, though the security advantages of this kind of indoor volume growing (fields and fences? why bother?) may prolong that. What's going to be a bigger factor over time is climate change - not in the form of "zomg we're all going to cook and the plants will all die!" but in the form of increased atmospheric water and energy and extreme weather events. How many monsoon-style torrential rains per decade does it take to have a significant impact on farming? Growing up in the Midwest I used to regularly hear "farm reports" on the radio about crop damage due to hailstorms and heavy thunderstorms; for a lot of farmers it won't take a lot of damage to make their farms economically unviable. Some of this may disproportionately impact areas where a lot of food is grown[1], but it's not going to be isolated to those areas [2]. The water carrying capacity of air increases by more than 38% between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius (20g/kg to 27.7g/kg), and while a 5 degree change might be extreme, we're certainly going to blow right past a 2 degree change. That extra water (and the heat energy it holds) are going to be seen in weather. There may also be some significant changes in building - for example, an all-glass skyscraper (if unobstructed) might well have an outer "shell" 5 feet from interior windows, with vertical plantings of some sort within that space - plants/greenery either for or just visible to the occupants, and if you go more extreme you might see exteriors covered with transparent photovoltaics [3] that pass through frequencies of light that are used by plants while simultaneously powering LEDs that convert the other frequencies into something the plants can use. Remember, the folks working on this stuff right now are the Apple Newton developers of their industry. What are the iPads of the industry going to look like? [1] http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wkshop_jan2012-MikeDettinger131.pdf http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wksh... [2] http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.php http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.ph... [3] http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells