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As someone who has zero stakes in this (well beyond the planet) and limited knowledge in the biological sides of this. This feels incredibly dismissive? Sure I

As someone who has zero stakes in this (well beyond the planet) and limited knowledge in the biological sides of this. This feels incredibly dismissive? Sure I will concede that most likely the 9 year timeline mentioned in that article is incredibly optimistic and very likely will not come to fruition. But I think it is also naive to think, regardless of how much you know on a particular subject, that there are not solutions to problems that have not been developed yet or that there are already examples to those problems that are not public knowledge (it even mentions that the paper was written with NDA knowledge). Then it is even more naive to try to paint a "wall of no" seemingly in a way to shut down research on this subject. Just look at the silicone chips allowing us to have what once would have been considered a super computer in our pockets compared to when computers were tubes. Of course at that time anyone suggesting that a personal computing device would even be possible would likely be laughed out the room, the core technology didn't even exist to think that maybe some day it would be possible. Are these companies and that paper making lofty promises that may be borderline lying to investors, maybe. But I don't think we should be saying it is impossible at this point in time.

Ekaros 2y ago
Fusion might be good comparison here. Yes we can make it happen, yes we have multiple solutions. But still even with decent investment we are not near economical energy production. And it is not like we have not tried reasonably. Somethings are just rather complicated at scale and both cultured meat and fusion belong to this category.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  That I agree with, which is why I mentioned that the 9 year timeline is likely too ambitious. But there is a difference between it being very complicated and likely relying on technology (or a fundamental understanding of something we don't know about) we don't have yet, and a "big no" and "never". Which is what this paper seems to be saying (reinforced by the comment I was replying to also saying "never"). That is the part of this that bothers me. Yeah we should admit that it is going to be very hard (if not impossible) and we should examine the reality of the timeline claims. But we should not be discouraging the research on both of these topics at this time by making claims that it will never happen.
vikramkr 2y ago
I wouldn't bet against it ever happening, mainly because there is already a pretty advanced highly scalable meat manufacturing biotechnology process called, you know, the actual animal. Wouldn't recommend betting against a thing that already exists, it's not like fusion where we don't have small viable energy producing reactors yet (the sun doesn't count). Timeline though? Who the hell knows. Progress in biology has been unbelievably fast over the past few decades in a really unpredictable way (sometimes rapid improvements in existing technologies, sometimes unexpected breakthroughs that open up new horizons). Maybe the core challenges to replicating what animals do will take another 30 years to figure out, maybe a breakthrough will happen in the next two months, who knows. But a bunch of random chemical reactions kicking around for 3 billion years figured out how to make meat so don't think it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to figure it out too.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  Right, and I think thats why the article bothered me and I made this comment. We can criticize the timeline and the promises made to investors, that is incredibly valid. But "never" is naive. The only time I am really comfortable with saying "never" is something like, we will never travel faster than the speed of light. That seems to be fairly well proven at this point in time and if we ever fight a loophole around it, likely the core law will remain true.
  - vikramkr 2y ago
    Yeah, and it's especially naive when in addition to animals existing, the tech involved happens to be an area of enormous societal importance for health reasons (plenty of investment), the problem happens to be somewhat existential (climate change is getting tons of funding right now), and the science of biology is advancing at a frankly extraordinary rate. Even GFI, the tech hype bros in that article that's being responded to, is showing a pretty big lack of vision. "This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing. Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension." <- pretty comfortable saying that under those constraings, 100% agree on the fractal of nos. But like, yeast and other things we grow in bioreactors aren't that picky. The hype bros want to try and convince people it's happening now so they're pitching some nonsense vision of mass manufacturing based on tech that obviously can't scale, and taking their vision of how things are going to work as ground truth is kinda silly. Almost by tautology, a successful bioreactor based approach is going to be one that uses bioengineering to create cells that don't need that sort of pickiness. It doesn't exist yet, sucks for the hype bros, but how sure are you that nobody will ever figure out how to engineer yeast to work as meat so you can use bioreactors from defunct breweries or something? The first cow genome was only published 15 years ago - at least wait for biology and medicine to plateau and for the incentive of fixing climate change to go away before convincing yourself it's never gonna happen!

Ekaros 2y ago

Fusion might be good comparison here. Yes we can make it happen, yes we have multiple solutions. But still even with decent investment we are not near economical energy production. And it is not like we have not tried reasonably. Somethings are just rather complicated at scale and both cultured meat and fusion belong to this category.

nerdjon 2y ago
That I agree with, which is why I mentioned that the 9 year timeline is likely too ambitious. But there is a difference between it being very complicated and likely relying on technology (or a fundamental understanding of something we don't know about) we don't have yet, and a "big no" and "never". Which is what this paper seems to be saying (reinforced by the comment I was replying to also saying "never"). That is the part of this that bothers me. Yeah we should admit that it is going to be very hard (if not impossible) and we should examine the reality of the timeline claims. But we should not be discouraging the research on both of these topics at this time by making claims that it will never happen.

vikramkr 2y ago

I wouldn't bet against it ever happening, mainly because there is already a pretty advanced highly scalable meat manufacturing biotechnology process called, you know, the actual animal. Wouldn't recommend betting against a thing that already exists, it's not like fusion where we don't have small viable energy producing reactors yet (the sun doesn't count). Timeline though? Who the hell knows. Progress in biology has been unbelievably fast over the past few decades in a really unpredictable way (sometimes rapid improvements in existing technologies, sometimes unexpected breakthroughs that open up new horizons). Maybe the core challenges to replicating what animals do will take another 30 years to figure out, maybe a breakthrough will happen in the next two months, who knows. But a bunch of random chemical reactions kicking around for 3 billion years figured out how to make meat so don't think it's unreasonable to think we'll be able to figure it out too.

nerdjon 2y ago
Right, and I think thats why the article bothered me and I made this comment. We can criticize the timeline and the promises made to investors, that is incredibly valid. But "never" is naive. The only time I am really comfortable with saying "never" is something like, we will never travel faster than the speed of light. That seems to be fairly well proven at this point in time and if we ever fight a loophole around it, likely the core law will remain true.
- vikramkr 2y ago
  Yeah, and it's especially naive when in addition to animals existing, the tech involved happens to be an area of enormous societal importance for health reasons (plenty of investment), the problem happens to be somewhat existential (climate change is getting tons of funding right now), and the science of biology is advancing at a frankly extraordinary rate. Even GFI, the tech hype bros in that article that's being responded to, is showing a pretty big lack of vision. "This gradual progression is necessary; you can’t just throw a small amount of cells into a large bioreactor and hope they’ll start dividing. Cells are “fastidious,” Hughes told me, and have strict metabolic requirements for growth, including oxygen tension." <- pretty comfortable saying that under those constraings, 100% agree on the fractal of nos. But like, yeast and other things we grow in bioreactors aren't that picky. The hype bros want to try and convince people it's happening now so they're pitching some nonsense vision of mass manufacturing based on tech that obviously can't scale, and taking their vision of how things are going to work as ground truth is kinda silly. Almost by tautology, a successful bioreactor based approach is going to be one that uses bioengineering to create cells that don't need that sort of pickiness. It doesn't exist yet, sucks for the hype bros, but how sure are you that nobody will ever figure out how to engineer yeast to work as meat so you can use bioreactors from defunct breweries or something? The first cow genome was only published 15 years ago - at least wait for biology and medicine to plateau and for the incentive of fixing climate change to go away before convincing yourself it's never gonna happen!