Thanks Or in keeping with the theme perhaps that should be muchas gracias!

Someone called Dipi4pinoy made a pun in the yt comments about PHOTOsynthesis...

That's what I call "photo" synthesis.....
I'll show myself out

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Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

If you did high school bio, think about what you covered that has any sort of influence on medicine... =)

Frog or rat dissection? Covered that in Bio 101 in the first year of my Applied Chemistry degree (and yes, you can give a rat a Columbian necktie... . Photosynthesis? Mating?

Yeah, Bio was pretty much introducing you to broad concepts and it's nothing that doesn't get rehashed in the first 6 months of Uni via intro subjects. I think of it more as a way to dip the toe in the pool and see if the subject matter excites you enough to try and turn it in to a career.

eg. At 40 now (and having forgotten my chem degree and gone in to IT as a sys admin after working as a chef, bouncer etc), I could go back to uni barely remembering anything about chemistry and start from scratch and be none the worse for it. The keystones you talk about are literacy and numeracy, that's about it. And they are learned in primary school.

Oh sure, it helps if you can do some higher math, but English lit? Physics? Drama? Almost nothing you do at high school has any real defining affect on most of what you do as an adult. It's more like a sampler platter, and of course a way of grading students (on a curve of course, we can't have people's scores based on their own merit) to distinguish what tertiary studies they should be eligible for.

School should be about igniting curiousity as much as practical skills for life. I did "Home Economics" (ie. cooking/sewing/budgets etc) and typing (on real mechanical typewriters no less) as opposed to wood/metal shop ( I was awful at shop). My home ec teacher was always interested in making different food, so we tried some pretty out there things in grade 8 (~13 years old), and I've always been interested in cooking since. Similarly, learning to touch type has made my life radically simpler, particularly in IT (try writing a 40 page instruction manual hunting and pecking).

Most of the high school grads we see as cadets or trainees are essentially useless and have to be taught from scratch anyway. Most of the codified BS we have these days doesn't prepare kids for life, doesn't encourage critical thinking or creativity, it a self justification to keep schools open.

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Lasers, light, and the universe... 2012 will be amazing as predicted. I'm glad Obama couldn't stop all progress, despite his efforts... right QM?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/12/more-evidence-found-for-quantum-physics-in-photosynthesis.ars

Quantum coherence in antenna-protein chlorophylls from green sulfur bacteria:

"A team led by Engel and Shaul Mukamel of the University of California, Irvine analyzed the fluctuation of lasers as they passed through antenna proteins. Depending on how they shifted, the researchers could track what happened inside.

They found a clear mathematical link between energy flows and fluctuations in chlorophyll coherence. The link was so clear it could be described in derivative sines and cosines, mathematical concepts taught in college trigonometry."

"The mounting evidence that quantum effects can be seen in natural systems when excited by lasers is compelling" - Greg Scholes, University of Toronto biophysicist

In other startling news - human beings require the respiration of oxygen for survival, and sunlight powers photosynthesis! The system is corrupt? Who knew?!? :eyeroll:

For a professor he sure gets a lot of basic stuff wrong.
For starters he doesn't seem to know (or care) that energy and power is not the same thing. That makes it really difficult to figure out wtf he's talking about in the first half.
Then he proudly claims they discovered artificial photosynthesis only it's not photosynthesis but some kind of electrolysis (or it wouldn't need photovoltaic panels).
Sure, efficient super high density energy storage using water would be pretty awesome if it becomes widely available and cheap but it won't solve "The Energy Problem™" mostly because solar panels still suck. Even in the most sunny parts of the world covering your house with cheap-ish solar panels will probably not be enough to power everything in your house during the day without using part of the power to split water. Good luck if you live somewhere that doesn't get a lot of sunlight or if you don't own a house.
And no, water is not an energy source, energy storage maybe but not a source.

If you invent something good then talk about it, don't just make bullshit claims that you'll save the world and barely mention the actual invention/discovery like this guy does. "I'm not gonna tell you what it is." wtf?

@Sniper007

Eating locally won't help you when you have a local disaster. You missed the point. If everyone is using the maximum available land, nobody has extra food to help when someone else has a shortage.

As to deforestation, and climate change, the whole planet's system is self balancing. More CO2, means faster and stronger the vegetation growth which in turn produces more O2 at a faster rate. More CO2 for humans means shorter life spans, which means less population growth. There is no ability for human intervention to change this global balancing act.


CO2 has more than one effect on the planet. Even if you assume that plants grow faster and stronger with more CO2 (which is bullshit since they need nutrient food in the soil as well...CO2 is just one part of photosynthesis), CO2 is still a greenhouse gas. Furthermore, when the atmosphere is heavy in CO2, it also causes the ocean to become more acidic, which affects all sorts of ocean life, and therefore the food chains which we rely on. You're right to say that the world is self-balancing, but wrong to assume that human survival is automatic no matter what we do.

Maybe the world's limit is 30 billion if people are, as you say, crammed into cities, and the rest of the world is farmed. MAYBE, just MAYBE, that's NOT the most efficient way of living! Maybe people have minds of their own, that they can put to good use to produce their own food on their own land with their own hands as they desire.


No, look. Of course people have minds of their own. I don't see anyone saying anything to the contrary. You talked about it taking 1/5 of an acre earlier to support a family with a vegetarian diet. It's more like 1/2 acre per PERSON. Some land is not suitable for farming, but is suitable for livestock pastures.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm

So, say we supplement our vegetarian diet with some dairy and a little meat to efficiently use all the available land to feed more people. Check out the math:

http://one-simple-idea.com/Environment1.htm

It doesn't work out. There isn't enough land to support a trillion people...not even close. Not even 1/10th of a trillion. Even your revised number is laughable with current practices. So, say we throw in some urban farming...vertical farming in the form of skyscrapers that produce food. Cool...we've got a shitload of people now. Who even says that's a worthy goal? How can you morally argue that more people is always better? You've said a bunch of stuff indicating that's what you believe, but you haven't provided any reasons other than something to the effect of "human brains are amazing and can figure stuff out".

I don't think the speaker in the video is advocating global planning...at least not in the form of a world government. I don't think he's assuming that he's smart enough to know how to plan everyone's lives, nor do I think I am.

What he's pointing out is that populations naturally slow their growth as education and health increase. When you're pretty sure your children will survive, you don't feel the need to have 6-8 in order to have 2 that survive. When conditions are good enough to allow the survival of 80-90% of children born, parents also feel like they can provide a better life for their kids if they're dividing their resources between 1-2 instead of 6-8.

So, you don't need a global government to reduce population growth, you simply need to assist people in improving their health and education levels. Charities and individual countries can do this on their own. So what if they organize their efforts? It doesn't have to be central planning on a global level.

Personally, I think it's better to live within our means. Even if we could grow to the trillions on our little planet, why not do it slowly and carefully? Why do we need a giant population? Why do we all need to be "blessed" with giant families? Why can't we enjoy other peoples' families? As a country, we don't even need large populations for wars anymore. Nuclear weapons and conventional weapon technology ensure that future wars will be fought with very small numbers of people compared to the masses needed in the past.



If you didn't read all that, just answer this: What's the overall purpose of a huge world population? How does it benefit me or anyone else to be born into a crowded world?

I'll quickly add that the question of gravity is pretty much set. Newtonian physics works, as long as we're in greater than atom size, and Space Curvature works for the rest (and the newtonian part) basically. (As far as I know, I'm not a physicist.)
>> ^Psychologic:

I definitely question those things... not whether they exist, but what their underlying mechanics are. As far as I am aware, the exact nature of gravity (for example) is still uncertain.
Likewise, I am not proposing that the climate is not changing. I do want to understand why it changes though, and I have to get beyond that before I can even begin to know whether or not I agree with projections for the future.
If I had to pick sides for some reason, then I would side with the consensus. I have no reason to doubt it. That wouldn't satisfy my intellectual curiosity though... I like to know how stuff works. If someone asked me whether or not I could explain how much of an effect humans have on the climate then I would have to answer "no", and that bothers me.
Disagree with the video all you want, but don't think that it represents me. It's just something I posted to start a discussion.

>> ^dystopianfutu
retoday:
You don't question gravity, or plate tectonics, or photosynthesis, or the reality of the ozone layer, do you?
Why defy science on this lone issue?