[ExI] The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill

Jason Resch jasonresch at gmail.com
Thu May 4 10:14:09 UTC 2023


One way to view Earth is that it's a system for turning sunlight into
conscious experiences.

But it is extremely inefficient at doing so.

Only two parts in a billion of the sun’s light reaches Earth. Of the light
that gets here, less than 2% is captured by plants. Of the energy captured
by plants, even when it's eaten by humans, only a fifth goes to power the
brain.

When we consider how much energy the brain uses (about 20 Watts, vs. how
much land (and sunlight) is needed to grow the food to power a brain, we
find that with current technology, it takes an acre of farmland to feed
each person. Over the 24 hour day, this acre of farmland receives an
average of 663,684 watts of solar energy. If the land grows food to feed
animals which then feed humans, this figure can easily extend to millions
of watts to power each human.

Millions of Watts to power something that uses less energy than a light
bulb.

If we could directly synthesize food from raw chemicals, it should only
take some amount of energy roughly proportional to the caloric energy
provided by said food. NASA funded research that found a way to make sugar
from CO2 using electricity. We could then power tens of thousands of humans
for the energy that today only powers a single human.

But where would all these people fit?

Future technologies, like mind uploading will not only provide each person
unlimited space in virtual reality but also enable people to live anywhere.
For instance: on the moon.

The moon receives 13,000 Terawatts of solar energy. Since the human brains
uses 20 watts of power, this is enough energy to power 650 trillion human
souls. We could leave Earth and allow her environment to heal.

Just some possibilities to consider..

Jason

On Thu, May 4, 2023, 2:51 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> On 04/05/2023 03:45, MB wrote:
> > I'd be interested in the "energy/environmental footprint" of this
> > lab-grown meat.
>
> Well, the problem of it being reliant on Bovine Foetal Serum seems to be
> just about solved, at least:
>
>
> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/scaling-clean-meat-serum-just-finless-foods-mosa-meat
>
>
> https://www.styvalley.com/pub/magazines/torch/read/alternative-to-foetal-bovine-serum-fbs-in-artificial-meat-production
>
>
> https://averyparkinson23.medium.com/alternatives-to-fetal-bovine-serum-for-cellular-agriculture-aec69475f9be
>
> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.01.538513v1
>
> The article about cultured meat being worse from the point of view of
> emissions was just hand-waving 'maybeism'.
>
> We'll just have to wait and see. By the time it's resolved, we probably
> won't need meat ourselves (as in Meat Bodies).
>
> Ben
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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