[ExI] - [deepsea farming]

[Keith Henson]

Human eat around 2500 calories per day or around 10,000 kj--which over
24 hours is about 120 watts.  If you take light in to human food out
at1% (which is probably optimistic) then you need about 12kW per
person.  So to feed a billion people on artificial light would take 12
TW, or about the same as current total energy consumption.

Keith

2009/4/11 Dagon Gmail <dagonweb at gmail.com>:
> 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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