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>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium

by lsc 12y ago

>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies. It might be the most important challenge, but it's certainly one of the challenges we seem to be rising to. People have been predicting mass starvation with population growth forever; From the seventeen hundreds to the seventies, Malthus has been a huge influence on the hippies, and he's been wrong for most of that time, too. Our ability to grow food is growing faster than the population; apparently arable land isn't the limit people thought it was. At this point in history, famine is generally a political problem, not a resources problem.

sukilot 12y ago
Starving people don't care why they don't have access to agriculture.
- lsc 12y ago
  Baby steps, man. I'm just saying that we have solved the "produce enough food for everyone" problem, and that's pretty great, even if we have other problems that have to do with hunger that we still haven't fixed. Certainly, our ability to produce cheap food is vastly reducing the number of starving people out there, and that's good, even if there are still problems to solve in that arena.
ceras 12y ago
We can produce enough now, but at a cost to future production. We're increasingly cutting down forests, draining non-renewable water supplies, and reducing the quality of arable land. In other words, at the current usage levels places like California will not be arable forever.
- lsc 12y ago
  Eh, perhaps sometimes? I think we are vastly more conscious of this sort of thing than we were, say, in the '20s and the '30s, and that consciousness is going to help us screw up less. Which isn't to say we aren't screwing up some things now; I'm just saying that we're getting better at this sort of thing, in the two steps forward, one step back kind of way that humans as a whole seem to get better at things.

by lsc 12y ago

sukilot 12y ago

Starving people don't care why they don't have access to agriculture.

lsc 12y ago
Baby steps, man. I'm just saying that we have solved the "produce enough food for everyone" problem, and that's pretty great, even if we have other problems that have to do with hunger that we still haven't fixed. Certainly, our ability to produce cheap food is vastly reducing the number of starving people out there, and that's good, even if there are still problems to solve in that arena.

ceras 12y ago

We can produce enough now, but at a cost to future production. We're increasingly cutting down forests, draining non-renewable water supplies, and reducing the quality of arable land. In other words, at the current usage levels places like California will not be arable forever.

lsc 12y ago
Eh, perhaps sometimes? I think we are vastly more conscious of this sort of thing than we were, say, in the '20s and the '30s, and that consciousness is going to help us screw up less. Which isn't to say we aren't screwing up some things now; I'm just saying that we're getting better at this sort of thing, in the two steps forward, one step back kind of way that humans as a whole seem to get better at things.