3 ms·
The article suggested the reason was the use of insects as a food source. Though, thinking about it fungi is a good food source too, and perhaps there is no rea
by jacobr1 6y ago
The article suggested the reason was the use of insects as a food source. Though, thinking about it fungi is a good food source too, and perhaps there is no reason to choose between them.
- dogma1138 6y agoFungi seems to be easier to grow, has other uses as biomass and quite likely much easier to genetically engineer than insects. Also more energy efficient since it’s only one tier, and quite likely less likely to get out of control and are more stable due to how they reproduce.
- senkora 6y agoIt would still be two tiers, since fungi need an energy source to decompose. Still probably more efficient since fungi don’t move.
- dogma1138 6y agoThe energy source doesn’t have to be sugars, lipids and proteins tho it can survive on ammonia and acetate, and you can literally just feed it astronaut shit and it would love it. Fungi seems to solve a lot of issues, energy efficient as it not dependent on light, can survive and thrive in much harsher conditions than most plants, reproduces very quickly a good source of protein and fatty acids and can be used to process unwanted biomass / organics. Yeast seems to be a very good source of both food, and construction material (you can make plastic out of it and quite a bit of other stuff fairly easily) it can also be used as a bio-reactor by default it makes ethanol and CO2 as the main byproducts but I’m guessing with some clever engineering those can be adjusted to make many other compounds that might be useful. With the looming mars and moon space missions if I were a biologist looking for a startup designer yeast would definitely be it.