5 ms·

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

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.
sn9 3y ago
If you produce beef in a lab at scale, you need an immune system (or something at least as effective). One pathogen can ruin an entire isolated mass of tissue. If you want to grow meat at scale, this becomes a lot harder and is currently an unsolved problem. And it isn't trivial. https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

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.

sn9 3y ago

If you produce beef in a lab at scale, you need an immune system (or something at least as effective). One pathogen can ruin an entire isolated mass of tissue. If you want to grow meat at scale, this becomes a lot harder and is currently an unsolved problem. And it isn't trivial. https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...