5 ms·

I'm imagining a conversation: Scientist: We need a machine that can cheaply and efficiently cultivate animal protein at scale. Universe: We have one. It is ca

I'm imagining a conversation: Scientist: We need a machine that can cheaply and efficiently cultivate animal protein at scale. Universe: We have one. It is called a cow. It took me a few billion years to make an auroch, and you tuned it for your purposes and called it a cow.

PretzelPirate 5y ago
The universe would be equally happy if we ate humans instead.
- Avicebron 5y ago
  This doesn't detract from the argument, this is just highlighting a different shade of gray
lovemenot 5y ago
The universe is of course amoral and wouldn't observe any satire in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal Spoiler alert: impoverished Irish families should be encouraged to sell their surplus children to wealthy Englishmen, as food.
thevardanian 5y ago
Scientist: We need a machine that can fly so we can travel faster. Universe: You have feet. It took me a few billion years to craft the perfect long distance running machine, and tuned it for your purposes and called it human. In other words, what the are you even talking about? Naturalism is stupid. If we were to rely solely on what "God", err rather "universe" has "created" for us we would have been stuck in a stagnant evolutionary pool with little of the modern conveniences most of us enjoy today. Forget spacefaring civilizations, forget even planetary civilizations, actually forget even nation-states we would be happily meandering about the Sahara with little care save for your typical eat-sleep-fuck routine.
- thatcat 5y ago
  Scaling up and replicating the digestive tract and metabolic processes of a cow is so much more complex than a plane, that's a terrible comparison. Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too, because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    > Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain? Sarcasm aside, it is worth exploring. The typical photosynthetic efficiency of crops is only in the 1-2% range. Modern solar panels reach 20%. The electricity can be used to produce hydrogen at 80% efficiency. The hydrogen could be used as energy input for an engineered yeast to produce proteins that we need. I don't know about the efficiency of that last step, but it is at least plausible that the overall process could be more efficient than photosynthesis. Solar Foods[1] is betting that it will be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
    - thatcat 5y ago
      That is actually very cool and a much more promising path than animal cell culture, but tbh even with 10+ years of sustained investment I have serious doubts about whether it would compete with lower yielding sustainable ag efficiency at scale. Glad someone is doing the research though. Seems like there is a two step conversion, step 1 is 40-50% efficient in mass conversion H + co2 to acetate by Clostridium ljungdahlii, then a 25% efficiency conversion by yeast to biomass. So that's already down to 2% overall for .07g/L/h at lab scale. Then additional losses in down stream processing to remove the water. The output is more of a yeast protien meat replacement. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/microbes-and-renewable-energy-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-edible-protein/3010920.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/microbes-and-renewable-e...
    - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
      It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production, on either a per unit solar energy or per unit resources basis (there are two general photosynthesis pathways that optimize for each of these two endpoints). That doesn't mean we can't beat them at other things, of course (as solar panels demonstrate) but this is what they are optimized for, and the competitive advantage of finding a better way to synthesize biomass is huge to the point that it only needs to evolve once to take over a large fraction of the Earth.
odiroot 5y ago
We also have pigs and poultry, which have much smaller footprint than ruminants.

PretzelPirate 5y ago

The universe would be equally happy if we ate humans instead.

Avicebron 5y ago
This doesn't detract from the argument, this is just highlighting a different shade of gray

lovemenot 5y ago

The universe is of course amoral and wouldn't observe any satire in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal Spoiler alert: impoverished Irish families should be encouraged to sell their surplus children to wealthy Englishmen, as food.

thevardanian 5y ago

Scientist: We need a machine that can fly so we can travel faster. Universe: You have feet. It took me a few billion years to craft the perfect long distance running machine, and tuned it for your purposes and called it human. In other words, what the are you even talking about? Naturalism is stupid. If we were to rely solely on what "God", err rather "universe" has "created" for us we would have been stuck in a stagnant evolutionary pool with little of the modern conveniences most of us enjoy today. Forget spacefaring civilizations, forget even planetary civilizations, actually forget even nation-states we would be happily meandering about the Sahara with little care save for your typical eat-sleep-fuck routine.

thatcat 5y ago
Scaling up and replicating the digestive tract and metabolic processes of a cow is so much more complex than a plane, that's a terrible comparison. Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too, because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?
- wcoenen 5y ago
  > Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain? Sarcasm aside, it is worth exploring. The typical photosynthetic efficiency of crops is only in the 1-2% range. Modern solar panels reach 20%. The electricity can be used to produce hydrogen at 80% efficiency. The hydrogen could be used as energy input for an engineered yeast to produce proteins that we need. I don't know about the efficiency of that last step, but it is at least plausible that the overall process could be more efficient than photosynthesis. Solar Foods[1] is betting that it will be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
  - thatcat 5y ago
    That is actually very cool and a much more promising path than animal cell culture, but tbh even with 10+ years of sustained investment I have serious doubts about whether it would compete with lower yielding sustainable ag efficiency at scale. Glad someone is doing the research though. Seems like there is a two step conversion, step 1 is 40-50% efficient in mass conversion H + co2 to acetate by Clostridium ljungdahlii, then a 25% efficiency conversion by yeast to biomass. So that's already down to 2% overall for .07g/L/h at lab scale. Then additional losses in down stream processing to remove the water. The output is more of a yeast protien meat replacement. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/microbes-and-renewable-energy-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-edible-protein/3010920.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/microbes-and-renewable-e...
  - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
    It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production, on either a per unit solar energy or per unit resources basis (there are two general photosynthesis pathways that optimize for each of these two endpoints). That doesn't mean we can't beat them at other things, of course (as solar panels demonstrate) but this is what they are optimized for, and the competitive advantage of finding a better way to synthesize biomass is huge to the point that it only needs to evolve once to take over a large fraction of the Earth.

odiroot 5y ago

We also have pigs and poultry, which have much smaller footprint than ruminants.