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The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvatio
by jtlienwis 7y ago
The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvation.
Haber-Bosch process.
- ajuc 7y agoBasically there would be ~2 times less people on Earth and over half of them would work in farming if not for this one invention.
- dnautics 7y agoSadly, in my professional opinion as a chemist, I would say that the the haber process, is not actually that simple, either in its original conception or as implemented now.
- ajuc 7y agoWell it's better than Mościcki's process :)
- BrandoElFollito 7y agoWhat a coincidence, I passed today in front of his house and the chemical plant he was in charge of. The whole area is named after him too. I did not expect to see his name in HN.
- kragen 7y agoThe description on Wikipedia makes it sound trivial if you have high-pressure, high-temperature plumbing, and a lot of risk tolerance. What is it leaving out?
- plutonicks 7y agoI think those 3 things are the complexity
- colechristensen 7y agoDevelopment and discovery of appropriate catalysts and ability to organize the large industrial scale needed to produce meaningful amounts of product.
- kragen 7y agoCan't you just use finely divided magnetite, or am I thinking of the wrong process? That sounds like "you can build it yourself" to me.
- colechristensen 7y agoLab demo scale, sure. The research and testing of catalysts for the industrial scale was a significant part of the development effort. Lifetime of the catalyst, temperature and pressure of the reactor, input energy, and output rate were all considerations and the result was much more than just throwing some magnetite powder in a reaction chamber. There's a great book on the development of the process The Alchemy of Air https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793 https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discove...
- kragen 7y agoThank you very much!
- rriepe 7y agoFor anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bottleneck because it's so much less ubiquitous than the other three, which are three of the four most common elements in the universe.
- aaronblohowiak 7y agoless ubiquitous in a bio-available way. Nitrogen is most of the atmosphere.
- rriepe 7y agoI meant it in an "elements occurring in the universe" sort of way, but this is a great point too. If we could get at atmospheric nitrogen naturally, there'd be no bottleneck.
- frutiger 7y agoSurely the three most common elements (by any measure) are hydrogen, helium and lithium?
- rriepe 7y agoIt's complicated. Helium does make the list, but lithium doesn't. Carbon and oxygen are higher than you'd expect if you're just going by atomic weight.
- frutiger 7y agoI remember from my astrophysics course that Lithium was formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang. I would imagine that interstellar space is full of Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium. I can imagine that stable nuclei such as carbon or iron would form as a result of stellar fusion but I would be hard pressed to imagine that these outmass the more primordial elements. I would be interested to see references if you have any.
- etangent 7y agonow imagine being someone who dislikes being around lots of people, and especially dislikes being around city people...
- 6nf 7y agoImagine you could move to a small farm town population 62
- robbrown451 7y agoYeah but some people enjoy being miserable, so simple solutions like that won't work. :)
- etangent 7y agoImagine thinking one's choices are completely independent of status games played in the society.
- new2628 7y agoWould the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?
- ajuc 7y agoIt eliminated one bottleneck (regular mass starvations) and allowed us to get to the next one faster (global warming). Choose your poison :) Both result in wars and death of millions of people.
- jpttsn 7y agoThanos, is that you?
- antepodius 7y agoMay as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route. There's more people living better lives, so things are better. There are new problems caused by our previous success that we solve next.
- ajuc 7y agoGrading the state of the Earth is subjective, what's good for plants or bacteria may be bad for mammals or fungi, and there's a few mass extinctions every million years anyway. If you don't care about homo sapiens, then global warming isn't really "bad" - the ecosystems will adapt.
- oska 7y ago> May as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route. No, that most certainly doesn't follow. It's entirely usual and normal for an amount of something in a system to be fine but then an excess of the same thing to be not fine. This is a very common situation in medicine, for example.
- robotastronaut 7y agoIt's also a common situation in the rest of population and community ecology. For instance, removing wolves as a predator here in Michigan has caused an explosion in the deer population. That, in turn, changed the makeup in undergrowth as they eat more now, which has all kinds of extended effects. Not to mention the propagation of diseases in a more sense population.
- Aperocky 7y ago> over half of them would work in farming Why would throwing more people at the problem solve or mitigate lack of fertilizer?
- derefr 7y agoMore land would necessarily be farmland (i.e. there'd be less land "free" to dedicate to other things); so there'd probably need to be more farmers to work the additional land. Even in the modern world where a farm is mostly robots, one person can only manage so much land and so many robots (essentially the amount of land they can easily traverse in a few hours to check up on.)
- 80386 7y agoAnd large-scale automated farming is less productive per acre than small-scale labor-intensive farming.
- AngryData 7y agoYeah I think he is wrong there. More people would work in farming than now but only like 1% of the population are farmers right now. 2% farmers covering atleast if not more than double the land area is not crazy. Not to mention relying on natural processes and top soil health and would be extremely sustainable long term and be a huge carbon sink.
- ajuc 7y agohttps://blog.resourcewatch.org/2019/05/30/map-of-the-month-how-many-people-work-in-agriculture/ https://blog.resourcewatch.org/2019/05/30/map-of-the-month-h... > The chart below shows data from the World Bank on employment in agriculture over time. Globally, about 1 billion people* work in the agricultural sector, about 28% of the population employed in 2018. This is down from 44% in 1991. Currently 1/7th of the global population works in agriculture, and 28% of the employed population. If that doubles it would be over 50%. World isn't just USA.
- rizzom5000 7y ago
- AngryData 7y agoYeah but it is also a mixed bag because in order to satisfy the massive energy requirements we cheat by using fossil-fuel derived hydrogen which contributes to pollution and global warming. Without cheap fossil fuel hydrogen the energy costs of fertilizer production would rise multiple times over and likely dwarf every other industry in the world. Currently fertilizer production takes 1.2% of total world energy generation, but 10% or more without fossil fuel reagents is not unreasonable. 60% of the world's total crop yield is the direct result of fossil-fuel derived artificial fertilizer.
- core-questions 7y agoAt some point we have to decide if the goal of humanity is continued population expansion or some other project. Of course, good luck with the latter.
- narrator 7y agoNot to mention Norman Borlaug's development of dwarf wheat which kicked off the green revolution and saved billions from starvation.
- AareyBaba 7y agoAn almost unbelievable life history is Dr Pandurang Khankhoje who came to San Francisco from China in 1906, got a PhD in agriculture from UC Berkeley and ended up in Mexico helping the farmers develop high-yielding varieties of corn and wheat before Dr Norman Borlaug. https://www.livehistoryindia.com/cover-story/2020/02/09/dr-pandurang-khankhoje-the-ironic-revolutionary https://www.livehistoryindia.com/cover-story/2020/02/09/dr-p...