[extropy-chat] A world without agriculture?

Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc. megao at sasktel.net
Sun Jun 27 21:35:38 UTC 2004


About 10 years ago I attended a "no-till" meeting.  No-till uses continous
cropping.
Continuous cropping utilizes  supplemental inputs to enable efficient
conversion of water and sunlight to crops independant of the usual ambient
capacity of micronutrients, nitrogen and phosphate etc to
bio-accumulate in soil.

One speaker was the contrarian, Dr Wes Jackson of the Land Institute of
Salina Kansas.  They have been breeding perennial variants of conventional
crops.
Every time energy costs increase conventional agriculture is pushed to
change its form.
With the energy crisis of the 70's and increase of gas from 25 cents to the
current $3.50/Canadian gallon cropping using a bare fallow and crop
"organic" or low input
chemical method has dramatically declined.
Continuous cropping still requires dessication of pre-seeding, in-crop and
sometimes pre-harvest states for weeds or off-types or harvest uniformity.
This monoculture system has its own limiting factors.

However if energy continues to increase, this  too must again change.

Dr Jackson spoke of a divergence from using all lands for  conventional
cropping.
He said that land could be segregated into 2 types.  Highly productive
annual cropping and low input perennial  poly-cropping systems.
That would enable the whole permaculture senario to evolve.
A permaculture system with highly managed, interdependant bio-evolved
perennials could evolve.  The multiple uses of food, bio-fuels,
bio-pharmaceuticals
could co-exist and create another value chain all the way to the farm gate.

I am one of those who look forward to the melting of the poles over the
next 40 years  and integration of the resultant water into the bio cycle
with all available carbon put into use.

This could produce  a substantial  increase in  productive bio-capacity.

Not  that we need more people, but to sustain perhaps 12 billion with a
singulatarian standard of living may require this first effort at
terraforming the globe back to its Jurassic state.

>From there , biodiversity can be re-created.

Perhaps the first Micro-Jupiter brain AI's  will be DNA based and propagate
an  integrated  convergent biosphere.  From this base, new species adapted
to new planets and ways of living can be created.

Essentially, the earth will at some time be converted into a sentient
organism supporting both  posthumans and non-human AI's.  All form a useful
interactive matrix.  The Borgian cubes of Star trek conceptualization are
simplistic compared to a  Ghia Lifeform. The mechanical Matrix vision
also is overly mechanical, simplistic and unsustainable.

However a composite of the two with the proviso that
perhaps 20-2000 billion individual mobile posthuman  sentient individuals
spread throught the solar system would then be  possible.  The terraforming
of the remainder of the solar system will support
this.

Morris






"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:

> 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
>
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