[extropy-chat] A world without agriculture?

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004, Steve Davies wrote:

> In one of the posts I made recently I mentioned the idea of replacing
> agriculture with some kind of biotechnology and how beneficial this
> would be.

You could definitely do much better than agriculture.  I'm fond of
the idea of growing strawberry yogurt in solar ponds.  But there
are many things that could be produced once one is able to engineer
whole genomes (which I wrote a business plan for 4 years ago but
could never get funded).  Most of the information required is
public knowlege in genomic databbases.  Part of the problem however
is that we still don't have robust knowledge regarding what many
of the genes/proteins in simple genomes do.

Its worth noting that agricultural solar energy harvesting efficiency
(plants typically) is only ~2%.  With engineered organisms you should
be able to push that up to at least 8%.  If you really leaned on things
you might get it to 15-20%.

Then Steve cited:

> http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/start.asp?P_Article=12702

An interesting article, though I need to look at it more closely.
I tracked the author back to the New America Foundation
(http://www.newamerica.net).  It looks to have an interesting
group of researchers/writers and multiple articles and/or
books that may be of interest to many people on the list.

Robert