[ExI] - [deepsea farming]

Dagon Gmail dagonweb at gmail.com
Sat Apr 11 07:36:53 UTC 2009


In the next decades we need additional sources of nourishment. As it is
right now we only
use a thin layer of surface. What if we used the deep sea better?

The one reason the deep sea sucks is because it is dark. What if -

someone went to a stretch of deep sea a mile deep, dangled a strong cable
down a mile
long, with strong pressure-resistant lights along the length, and whatever
infrastructure to
attract growing plants and animals. You can also do the same with a singing
mesh that
is raised from the seabed every so often for maintenance or harvesting. The
basic idea is
to introduce large amounts of bright light into the deep seabed and
cultivate some sort of
photosynthesis there, and then harvest plants (or fish) that subsist on that
flora.

This is already done on dry land, in greenhouses. All it takes there is
heating, water and
energy. In the sea you would have to deal with the effects of salt, but that
seems to be
managable since we happily eat fish.

We will probably have depleted the top sea levels from fishable edibles in a
couple of
decades. When that happens near 10 billion people will need food. If we can
grow that food
by hydroponics, assuming we figured out the energy question, we can do so
both in
deserts but equally well in the rich environment of deposited silt on the
seabed. If we can
grow the plants that thrive in that rich medium, and we make sure those
plants are lit,
we can grow fertile jungles of crop down there.
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