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You're ignoring what might be the most important part - energy input Cows are self-motivating bioreactors that vaguely maximize inputs as possible. You don't n

by xorbax 3y ago

You're ignoring what might be the most important part - energy input Cows are self-motivating bioreactors that vaguely maximize inputs as possible. You don't need to hire a tech or buy freezers or buy pipette tips or clean an industrial reactor for a cow to make grass into beef. Evolution has provided us a method which has reached some local thermodynamic minima. Not so much with Impossible patties. And anyway, afaik, lab beef still has BSA as a necessary component, so you need cows to make fake cows. Eat a goddamn bean, dorks.

regularfry 3y ago
But also, methane. Maximised inputs, some very bad externalised costs. (Yes, fixable, no, not fixed yet at any sort of scale)
- xorbax 3y ago
  Plenty of processes required for artificial beef produce methane as well, it's just externalized from cells growing in a petri dish, so it's handwaved
xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
Cows are not optimal, not remotely. This is a horrible argument to make. Cows produce a _ton_ of waste, are brittle and require a lot of care and energy. A lot of that energy is subsidized in some form or another, in places where cattle are produced in large quantities. They are very resource intensive. Our ability to iterate and optimize with technology is comically faster than evolution. Cows are, more or less, unchanged in the modern era, and will likely stay as they are for the considerable future. Conversely, if we produced convincing synthetic beef in a lab today, do you think that process would go unchanged for a decade, two decades, a century, without improvements in energy and other resource consumption? If you produce beef in a lab, you don't require farmers, or farm hands, or truck drivers, or veterinarians, or butchers, and so on. A tech and freezers and pipette tips and an industrial reactor sounds like a step up to me. (Also arguably beef cattle likely require more refrigeration than artificial beef ever could.)
- xorbax 3y ago
  "Local minima" It's not a horrible comparison. It's an obvious one. Pardon me if I'm not swayed by your proclamation. The important point is that I don't think anybody's actually broken down the difference As it is, artificial beef requires more shepherding than co-produced. It requires consumable goods and equipment and human intervention and specialized equipment. Yes, these will all get better. Maybe it'll get better. But I suspect that biology will always be more efficient at specific manufacture than human industry unless it's for small molecules. Human innovation is faster than evolution. An order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude is a huge advance hard-on through cleverness and huge capital investment, but cutting down a zero or two still leaves a long path compared to hundreds of millions of years of evolution. So it's only a million years or a hundred thousand years or a thousand years to find something. Refrigeration of artificial beef will only remove the energy required to cool bones, not the initial need. I'm sure you could sterilize and shrinkwrap a cube of lab meat and shelf-stock it like a carton of soy milk, but I don't see it happening. Eat a goddamn bean.
  - jychang 3y ago
    Meh. “We will never produce artificial beef more efficiently than natural beef” is not a hill most people are willing to die on. I’m not even fully willing to say “we will not make a room temperature superconductor” or “we will not make cold fusion” as a hill I’m gonna die on. Efficient artificial beef seems downright likely in comparison.
    - xorbax 3y ago
      Yeah, it is easier to just say it'll happen Artificial meat isn't going to get around shipping or storage. Maybe they'll figure out how to obtain the necessary growth media from something other baby cows. I don't think fake meat will go away. I think the trick is whether we can offset enough energy via renewables. But I don't think it can ever require less input energy than a cow in a field. You have to replace it with human labor or constructed machinery, and both will always require more than water and grass. It will always take more energy to make a bean burger than to eat the bean, but people will still do it I suspect. RTSC and CF haven't happened yet. The latter is a hill that seems fit to die on, as it's pretty far from physics. The former seems plausible enough, but maybe other high temp SC's point to ambient conditions on Earth being completely unfavorable.
civilitty 3y ago
> You're ignoring what might be the most important part - energy input You're making the same mistake! Most of the energy that goes into cows is used to maintain their homeostasis and move them around from one patch of grass to the next. Best case scenario, 20% of the energy makes it down the line - 5:1 calories consumed to calories provided. Compare to shrimp where the numbers are more like 2:1 and we've got a huge range of efficiencies just within the animal kingdom. The problem isn't that the cow eats free from photosynthesizers, it's that they've had several hundred million years to evolve together. The dream is to eventually short circuit the process via engineering by feeding energy from solar inputs directly into producing edible muscle fiber. It "just" that engineering something as efficient as evolution is really, really, REALLY hard.
- xorbax 3y ago
  Yes! But you can't dismiss the techs require to culture meat, process the BSA, drive to work, buy pipette tips, clean the glasswear, etc. That's what replaces the cow's metabolism and the wasted energy of it flapping its tail. I understand the point of lab meat. I'm not convinced that the engineering required to produce it will thermodynamically be more efficient than a cow in a field. So, again: eat a goddamn bean.

by xorbax 3y ago

regularfry 3y ago

But also, methane. Maximised inputs, some very bad externalised costs. (Yes, fixable, no, not fixed yet at any sort of scale)

xorbax 3y ago
Plenty of processes required for artificial beef produce methane as well, it's just externalized from cells growing in a petri dish, so it's handwaved

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

Cows are not optimal, not remotely. This is a horrible argument to make. Cows produce a _ton_ of waste, are brittle and require a lot of care and energy. A lot of that energy is subsidized in some form or another, in places where cattle are produced in large quantities. They are very resource intensive. Our ability to iterate and optimize with technology is comically faster than evolution. Cows are, more or less, unchanged in the modern era, and will likely stay as they are for the considerable future. Conversely, if we produced convincing synthetic beef in a lab today, do you think that process would go unchanged for a decade, two decades, a century, without improvements in energy and other resource consumption? If you produce beef in a lab, you don't require farmers, or farm hands, or truck drivers, or veterinarians, or butchers, and so on. A tech and freezers and pipette tips and an industrial reactor sounds like a step up to me. (Also arguably beef cattle likely require more refrigeration than artificial beef ever could.)

xorbax 3y ago
"Local minima" It's not a horrible comparison. It's an obvious one. Pardon me if I'm not swayed by your proclamation. The important point is that I don't think anybody's actually broken down the difference As it is, artificial beef requires more shepherding than co-produced. It requires consumable goods and equipment and human intervention and specialized equipment. Yes, these will all get better. Maybe it'll get better. But I suspect that biology will always be more efficient at specific manufacture than human industry unless it's for small molecules. Human innovation is faster than evolution. An order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude is a huge advance hard-on through cleverness and huge capital investment, but cutting down a zero or two still leaves a long path compared to hundreds of millions of years of evolution. So it's only a million years or a hundred thousand years or a thousand years to find something. Refrigeration of artificial beef will only remove the energy required to cool bones, not the initial need. I'm sure you could sterilize and shrinkwrap a cube of lab meat and shelf-stock it like a carton of soy milk, but I don't see it happening. Eat a goddamn bean.
- jychang 3y ago
  Meh. “We will never produce artificial beef more efficiently than natural beef” is not a hill most people are willing to die on. I’m not even fully willing to say “we will not make a room temperature superconductor” or “we will not make cold fusion” as a hill I’m gonna die on. Efficient artificial beef seems downright likely in comparison.
  - xorbax 3y ago
    Yeah, it is easier to just say it'll happen Artificial meat isn't going to get around shipping or storage. Maybe they'll figure out how to obtain the necessary growth media from something other baby cows. I don't think fake meat will go away. I think the trick is whether we can offset enough energy via renewables. But I don't think it can ever require less input energy than a cow in a field. You have to replace it with human labor or constructed machinery, and both will always require more than water and grass. It will always take more energy to make a bean burger than to eat the bean, but people will still do it I suspect. RTSC and CF haven't happened yet. The latter is a hill that seems fit to die on, as it's pretty far from physics. The former seems plausible enough, but maybe other high temp SC's point to ambient conditions on Earth being completely unfavorable.

civilitty 3y ago

> You're ignoring what might be the most important part - energy input You're making the same mistake! Most of the energy that goes into cows is used to maintain their homeostasis and move them around from one patch of grass to the next. Best case scenario, 20% of the energy makes it down the line - 5:1 calories consumed to calories provided. Compare to shrimp where the numbers are more like 2:1 and we've got a huge range of efficiencies just within the animal kingdom. The problem isn't that the cow eats free from photosynthesizers, it's that they've had several hundred million years to evolve together. The dream is to eventually short circuit the process via engineering by feeding energy from solar inputs directly into producing edible muscle fiber. It "just" that engineering something as efficient as evolution is really, really, REALLY hard.

xorbax 3y ago
Yes! But you can't dismiss the techs require to culture meat, process the BSA, drive to work, buy pipette tips, clean the glasswear, etc. That's what replaces the cow's metabolism and the wasted energy of it flapping its tail. I understand the point of lab meat. I'm not convinced that the engineering required to produce it will thermodynamically be more efficient than a cow in a field. So, again: eat a goddamn bean.