4 ms·
"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 thin
by 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 agoMeh. “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 agoYeah, 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.