[ExI] Farming, in space, on land, and in the sea/was Re: Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 12:28 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.
>>
> I imagine there'd be a huge initial investment. The thing to ask is how
> soon -- if ever -- it would be profitable afterward. I'm optimistic it
> would pay off in a matter of decades, but that's just me being optimistic.
> Don't have any numbers or analysis to back up my hunch here.
>

I suspect, if it were to be done, minimum viable product and return on
investment would not be the way to best do it.  Instead, overkill -
splurge, with the same sort of safety factors one puts on other man-rated
space infrastructure.  Adjust on the fly as population in space, and
on-the-scene refinements, tease out exactly how much is needed, but never
run near capacity if you can help it, just like everything else life
support.

(Save in rare cases, the first priority of any organism is to survive.
This includes human organisms in a space colony: they will naturally put a
high priority on anything they perceive as part of their life support.  If
there is a self-replenishing food supply, such as greenhouses or farms,
that is likely to be included.  This is one reason why giveaways to large
food corporations tend to be less challenged than giveaways to large
corporations in other industries, and why any large stable government
believes that food security is part of how that government stays large and
stable.)

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.
>>
> I think there are vast inefficiencies now in agriculture, especially
> because of policies regarding farming and land use. In the US, this amounts
> to farming areas that probably wouldn't be farmed, keeping prices high
> (under the rubric of stabilization), and exporting surplus (often in a way
> that disrupts markets elsewhere, especially in Africa). I'm not saying
> eliminating all this would turn farming into a paragon of efficiency,
> shaking out all problems. But it would help much and give a clearer idea of
> the costs farming on Earth versus in space.
>

In theory, you're right.  In practice, even just excluding data for
purposes of a study, removing these problems may be impossible with
Earth-based agriculture.  Soil & climate are just the easiest ones to
visualize, and as such the most widely agreed upon.

By the way, kind of tangential, but have you read about sea vegetables?
> That might actually a better way to get food than land farming -- for those
> who can stand kelp and seaweed. (I don't much like the stuff, but the taste
> can be hidden.:)
>

I have.  Those have some of the problems of the universal bioprocessor I
mentioned: starting with a very limited base product and trying to use it
to substitute for a wide array of highly refined specialized product
doesn't work so well, at least for food.

Though if I'm wrong about that - if this problem can be overcome -
aquaculture may be the way to develop solutions to this.
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