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> Do not worry about the decrease in arable land... Apply more technology: agroforestry combined with Boston Dynamics-type robots. Look into published materia

> Do not worry about the decrease in arable land... Apply more technology: agroforestry combined with Boston Dynamics-type robots. Look into published material from/by Ernst Götsch, F. H. King, and Masanobu Fukuoka among others on principles. The techniques they worked out and published can be used to rebuild, reclaim, and build de novo arable land. Main criticism of these techniques is they are too labor-intensive. There isn't a law of physics that enforces wheeled farm machinery, so robotics-based farm machinery can assist with capturing scale. It's a new frontier, so no established player wants to pursue it at this time as long as our backs aren't against the wall when it comes to available arable land. > shortages of drinking water... Apply more technology: potable water supply is roughly a derivative function of available energy. Push comes to shove, we as a species are going to widespread nuclear power if necessary instead of the leadership dying by dysentery. > decline in biomass in fisheries... Apply more technology: mega-scale research and engineering to build fish sanctuaries/breeding grounds in the relative marine deserts of the open oceans. We're still in the relative hunter-gatherer phase of our aquaculture tech. When we have vast farms in the deep open water ocean that grow algae, then plankton, and upwards, raising an entire tower of consumption, instead of catching wild fish to feed domesticated fish, then I'd say we are relatively progressing into true aquaculture. Wouldn't hurt to develop at the same time genetically modified sponges and coral to capture and entomb mercury, and start millennia long filtration while we work out how to stop dumping it into our ecosystem. > scarce minerals, or any of that stuff. It's all in your head! Apply more technology: von Neumann mining while at the same time sending out starwisps to scout nearby star systems. Hundreds and even millennia-long timelines here, but not constrained by the known laws of physics, only by our species' own will to overcome our internal dissension. The question I'm unsure of is will capital allocate to the "more technology" solution space before we as a species run out of time? I'm not entirely convinced capital markets actually understand the timelines, scales, and civilizational risks we are working with here, and even if individual people within the markets understand them, there is an argument to be made that the incentive structures of the markets combined with people's natural lifespans combine to create perverse incentives for funding Long Now-scale tech. The dominant thesis the markets have embraced thus far is "the tech will become available when the threat becomes clear and present", which is outright faith and not based upon any settled science. Once the timeline to develop and deploy the tech to solve or even mitigate the challenges you outlined above exceed the timeline to catastrophic civilization-wide impacts, the capital markets have failed their anticipation function.

emodendroket 9y ago
I find it hard to believe that individual actors acting in their own Rational Self-Interest will ever do what you are proposing. Governments, or private actors working hand-in-hand with the government, could do probably do so, even on the framework of a capitalist system, but you'd have to completely reverse the trend of privatizing and selling off everything.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  Agreed, and I'm not even certain governments within capitalist systems can handle these challenges. At issue is the presence of scales that our species have not worked with before, both time and populations. We don't even have a good framework to judge relative difficulty between current and past technological eras, except perhaps coarse-grained energy per capita per annum metrics. The time scale is a real killer IMHO. Many of the challenges involve timescales that are very vulnerable to abandonment by political processes, as progress is achingly slow for our current perceptions. We might be able to grow in bioreactors Memphis Meats-style protein, especially with CRISPR-powered advancements, but even that is a solid 4+ decades away before we see Neal Stephenson-envisioned sashimi for the masses. I don't see any kind of speculative investment trying to solve basic, low-margin deployments like that, on that kind of timescale. And even then, I don't really see sustainability built into the design and research from the beginning; it is like we rarely see security built into general business software from the beginning. So for the protein availability challenge, I don't see an emphasis on creating the entire "stack" in a sustainable manner, starting from solar energy, building through to the feedstocks into the processes being researched. This perniciously binds us to legacy energy and materials production supply chains for those feedstocks, and creating more externalities into undesirable positive feedback loops.

emodendroket 9y ago

I find it hard to believe that individual actors acting in their own Rational Self-Interest will ever do what you are proposing. Governments, or private actors working hand-in-hand with the government, could do probably do so, even on the framework of a capitalist system, but you'd have to completely reverse the trend of privatizing and selling off everything.

yourapostasy 9y ago
Agreed, and I'm not even certain governments within capitalist systems can handle these challenges. At issue is the presence of scales that our species have not worked with before, both time and populations. We don't even have a good framework to judge relative difficulty between current and past technological eras, except perhaps coarse-grained energy per capita per annum metrics. The time scale is a real killer IMHO. Many of the challenges involve timescales that are very vulnerable to abandonment by political processes, as progress is achingly slow for our current perceptions. We might be able to grow in bioreactors Memphis Meats-style protein, especially with CRISPR-powered advancements, but even that is a solid 4+ decades away before we see Neal Stephenson-envisioned sashimi for the masses. I don't see any kind of speculative investment trying to solve basic, low-margin deployments like that, on that kind of timescale. And even then, I don't really see sustainability built into the design and research from the beginning; it is like we rarely see security built into general business software from the beginning. So for the protein availability challenge, I don't see an emphasis on creating the entire "stack" in a sustainable manner, starting from solar energy, building through to the feedstocks into the processes being researched. This perniciously binds us to legacy energy and materials production supply chains for those feedstocks, and creating more externalities into undesirable positive feedback loops.