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In the spirit of 'science' here is a potential experiment that can be conducted to resolve the debt: 1)Individual 1 is a vegan. he is given 10 acres of land, H

In the spirit of 'science' here is a potential experiment that can be conducted to resolve the debt: 1)Individual 1 is a vegan. he is given 10 acres of land, He is free to grow whatever he wants and eat. The restriction here is he cannot raise any animals whatsoever including insects for food. 2) Individual 2 is a animal products eater, is also is given 10 acres of land, he can raise whatever he wants: pigs, chickens, cows etc. The restriction here is he cannot any eat any vegetation directly. He can eat only meat, eggs, milk etc. Conditions: Both these individuals should be independent, that is there should be no external resources provided to them. For example the person who raises cows, should not be provided with hay. Or the vegan should not be provided with pesticides. Assume that both these farmers have identical resources otherwise: same type of land, access to the same amount of water etc. Questions: 1) Who among the 2 do you think will will be more healthy? 2) Who among the 2 do you think will be more destructive to the environment?

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I think the answer to both is the carnivore. If it were 100 farmers and 10000 acres, the it would be 1) vegan 2) carnivore. This is because you need more diversity to be healthily vegan than you do to be healthily carnivore. Carnivore is more damaging in both cases because however your slice it, you're going to have to dedicate more overall land to farming if you're eating animals, and that's a greater footgun probability re: eliminating a keystone species and disrupting your food supply. If you repeated this experiment until you had no more room on the planet, then I think the carnivores would go extinct because of problems either re: the soil chemistry or re: the pollinators. The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland.
- dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
  >The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland. Are you really sure about the "overall space" part? I mean have you really examined it? Do you have direct experience, as in having lived in a farmland, Or have you talked to a farmer? Or have you closely listen to accounts of farmers on videos or essays?
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    No direct experience, just biology class. This was on the final that I took today :) Given a fixed amount of sunlight and a fixed time window, you've got W available Joules. Only X makes it into plant biomass. If you're eating a consumer, only Y makes it into animal biomass, and then only Z is available to the human. In all known cases W > X > Y > Z, generally by factors of 2 to 20. The vegans are going to need X/Y times less farmland to meet their energy needs. Maybe they need a bit more than that to account for the nutritional diversity they require, but I doubt that'll offset it. The biggest loss is gonna be W, and if you compare crops to grazing land it's pretty clear which one has more sun-facing chlorophyll.
    - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
      And, even if it did offset it, you've still achieved less antibiotics resistance and zoonotic pathogen (like COVID) risk. The closer our food is to us, the closer its pathogens are to our pathogens. Mammals are very close to us, biologically. Plants are about as distant as we can get. They're crawling with viruses, but we don't notice them since they're all designed for plant cells!
    - dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
      __MatrixMan__ , the biology class is a fair start. But isn't one of the core principles of what is considered 'good' science, experimentation, or what happens in practice?
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        Experimentation, yes. Practice, maybe. Are you proposing that there's an ongoing experiment somewhere in practice that might inform my view? I'm open to that, but my impression of actual farmers is that they're bound by so many artificial constraints that their experience is unlikely to align with sound experiment design.
        dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
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__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

I think the answer to both is the carnivore. If it were 100 farmers and 10000 acres, the it would be 1) vegan 2) carnivore. This is because you need more diversity to be healthily vegan than you do to be healthily carnivore. Carnivore is more damaging in both cases because however your slice it, you're going to have to dedicate more overall land to farming if you're eating animals, and that's a greater footgun probability re: eliminating a keystone species and disrupting your food supply. If you repeated this experiment until you had no more room on the planet, then I think the carnivores would go extinct because of problems either re: the soil chemistry or re: the pollinators. The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland. Are you really sure about the "overall space" part? I mean have you really examined it? Do you have direct experience, as in having lived in a farmland, Or have you talked to a farmer? Or have you closely listen to accounts of farmers on videos or essays?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  No direct experience, just biology class. This was on the final that I took today :) Given a fixed amount of sunlight and a fixed time window, you've got W available Joules. Only X makes it into plant biomass. If you're eating a consumer, only Y makes it into animal biomass, and then only Z is available to the human. In all known cases W > X > Y > Z, generally by factors of 2 to 20. The vegans are going to need X/Y times less farmland to meet their energy needs. Maybe they need a bit more than that to account for the nutritional diversity they require, but I doubt that'll offset it. The biggest loss is gonna be W, and if you compare crops to grazing land it's pretty clear which one has more sun-facing chlorophyll.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    And, even if it did offset it, you've still achieved less antibiotics resistance and zoonotic pathogen (like COVID) risk. The closer our food is to us, the closer its pathogens are to our pathogens. Mammals are very close to us, biologically. Plants are about as distant as we can get. They're crawling with viruses, but we don't notice them since they're all designed for plant cells!
  - dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
    __MatrixMan__ , the biology class is a fair start. But isn't one of the core principles of what is considered 'good' science, experimentation, or what happens in practice?
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Experimentation, yes. Practice, maybe. Are you proposing that there's an ongoing experiment somewhere in practice that might inform my view? I'm open to that, but my impression of actual farmers is that they're bound by so many artificial constraints that their experience is unlikely to align with sound experiment design.
      - dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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