[ExI] Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 7, 2015 11:33 AM, "Tara Maya" <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:
> > We might not need it for mining at all, as mining might be done in
> space; farming seems a much more likely use of a planet.
>
> That depends on how cheaply greenhouses on non-planetside colonies can be
> set up.  Farming on Earth benefits a lot from vast areas of farmable lands
> having already been set up for free - so far as human effort is concerned -
> but the price is wildly varying climate and soil conditions.  Ask any
> farmer what they would give to be able to control the weather on their
> farm, timing the storms to the minute and setting the temperature to within
> a tenth of a degree Celsius, things that would be trivial (so long as they
> don't use more power and water than available) in an orbital greenhouse.
>

### In the not-too-distant future farming could rely on a standard
bioprocessing organism and a diverse array of energy transducers.
Basically, you design an organism capable of taking in a standard source of
chemical energy (e.g. glucose), and some minerals, and output
human-optimized feed with all vitamins, energy sources, palatants,
texturizers and whatever else you might need to sell it to eaters. Then you
design a set of organisms for energy transduction - e.g. a black algae that
would thrive in tanks in space (black to absorb all the available
radiation) and consume carbon dioxide from an atmospheric scrubber on a
space station. Another energy transducer would be a massive black grass
capable of quickly covering large swaths of land, completely inedible and
poisonous to Terran animals, capable of strangling all existing floral
competitors. Another might be a black algae capable of completely covering
the surface of water, stilling the waves and intercepting all light,
suffocating the life beneath. Another would be a pale mycelium, spreading
in the vicinity of hot and cold ocean-floor vents, strangling.... you know
the drill :)

The future of farming will be black, with huge hearts slowly pumping a
nutritious syrup to nodes making tasty things. If there is still any need
for farming, that is. AIs and EMS might not be interested in it at all.

Rafał
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