5 ms·

Let's try to break this problem down to first principles: - Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients. - From a fundamental standpoint

by NickM 8y ago

Let's try to break this problem down to first principles: - Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients. - From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here. - The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat). - Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb. So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan. Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.

daenz 8y ago
I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult? It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  A carbohydrate is not a simple organic structure, the synthesis of molecules like that is quite complicated, and involves a lot of inefficiencies and filtering out of by-products. Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  It's expensive and it tastes awful. It's hard to give an easy answer to "why is this super complicated thing expensive?", and I'm no expert, but you essentially have to replicate the specialized microbiological machinery of multiple plant species.
whitepoplar 8y ago
This sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work given our limited knowledge of food and nutrition. Nutritional scientists have been wrong many times in the past--who's to say a rollout of synthetic "food" couldn't wipe out the human population in the future? I'd cite the Precautionary Principle (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf) when dealing with global ruin problems.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  1. Any transition to synthetic foods would be gradual. 2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1
  - LonelyContext 8y ago
    It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting meat farm subsidies and introducing a meat tax alone already puts you way ahead of decades of scientific funding at perfecting multilayer amorphous silicon to where it’s less than $1000/cm^2. Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.
    - brownbat 8y ago
      > just cutting meat farm subsidies Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops: https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.
strainer 8y ago
> From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here. Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health. There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases. We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Absolutely. We're not only feeding ourselves, we're feeding our gut. Get either one wrong and there's going to be problems.
- slededit 8y ago
  > There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases. There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either. The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.
paulddraper 8y ago
In theory, you're absolutely correct. In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.) It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.
clairity 8y ago
> "Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent ..." a biologist sees that and thinks "wow, a plant only needs 3-6% of the solar energy available to them to thrive!" #perspectives

by NickM 8y ago

daenz 8y ago

I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult? It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.

Brakenshire 8y ago
A carbohydrate is not a simple organic structure, the synthesis of molecules like that is quite complicated, and involves a lot of inefficiencies and filtering out of by-products. Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.
jessriedel 8y ago
It's expensive and it tastes awful. It's hard to give an easy answer to "why is this super complicated thing expensive?", and I'm no expert, but you essentially have to replicate the specialized microbiological machinery of multiple plant species.

whitepoplar 8y ago

This sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work given our limited knowledge of food and nutrition. Nutritional scientists have been wrong many times in the past--who's to say a rollout of synthetic "food" couldn't wipe out the human population in the future? I'd cite the Precautionary Principle (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf) when dealing with global ruin problems.

jessriedel 8y ago
1. Any transition to synthetic foods would be gradual. 2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1
- LonelyContext 8y ago
  It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting meat farm subsidies and introducing a meat tax alone already puts you way ahead of decades of scientific funding at perfecting multilayer amorphous silicon to where it’s less than $1000/cm^2. Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.
  - brownbat 8y ago
    > just cutting meat farm subsidies Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops: https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.

strainer 8y ago

> From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here. Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health. There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases. We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Absolutely. We're not only feeding ourselves, we're feeding our gut. Get either one wrong and there's going to be problems.
slededit 8y ago
> There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases. There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either. The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.

paulddraper 8y ago

In theory, you're absolutely correct. In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.) It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.

clairity 8y ago

> "Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent ..." a biologist sees that and thinks "wow, a plant only needs 3-6% of the solar energy available to them to thrive!" #perspectives