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Is DIY Algae Farming the Future?
hex0D points to this "interview with Aaron Baum explaining why people growing algae at home for food can help the environment and their health, and what he's doing to facilitate this. 'We'd like to create an international network of people growing all kinds of algae in their homes in a small community scale, sharing information, doing it all in an open source way. We'd be like the Linux of algae – do-it-yourself with low-cost materials and shared information.' And one of the low-cost materials is your household urine."
Although I wouldn't consume algae as a food source, I could certainly use it as a fuel source.
I even make LED panels for growing specific species of algae, for this very purpose.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Does this article really suggest feeding algae urine and then using it as a food product?
I'm skilled at cultivating mold on the floor, shower curtain, and walls of my shower. Perhaps these moldy efforts can help the environment and health.
Problem with standing water and algae is that they attract mosquitoes. How is this issue normally addressed?
Life is not for the lazy.
Somehow I think this business is it's own worst enemy. Perhaps they should omit that little part of the plan, at least until they start making some progress with the rest. How could they think this was a good way to promote a new food source?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I suggest genetically engineering ourselves, such that algae and us develop some kind of symbiotic relationship. We will then only need water and light to survive, thus solving all of the world's food shortage problems.
Then we worry about charging our iphonies.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
We'd be like the Linux of algae – do-it-yourself with low-cost materials and shared information.' And one of the low-cost materials is your household urine.
So, like I start going down on the bitch, and complain that she tastes like algae and household urine. And then she quips, "But it runs Linux!"
Can't argue with that . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The algae in my bathtub? I'll be rich!
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
... a great way to give yourself the shits in whole new and exciting ways previously unknown to mankind.
It's cryptosporidi-yummy!
Maybe if they coated the outsides of buildings in it but I dont think people want an algae tank in their windowsill. Also I dont think people want to eat it, as a fuel maybe but not as food..
Absolutely.
This year I grew some tomatoes on the balcony. Its about half a snack..
I wonder what his angle is...
You might want to reconsider growing algae for food, one research group at my university is investigating growing algae to produce sugar, so we don't have to cut down forests to grow sugarcane. Also, I really hope those LED panels are solar powered. As solar powered LED panels emitting light at frequencies the algae uses can be far more efficient than growing algae in direct sunlight(even cheap solar panels are more efficient at solar conversion than algae).
Sell his LEDs?
nice nickname btw
Is shooting yourself in the head to avoid a pointless and severely unpleasant (but "sustainable") existence in a dystopian ecologically green world "the future"? Can we deprive ourselves of everything good about life so our children can inherit a world where they'll also have to deprive themselves of everything good about life? Is this wise?
Why wouldn't we choose to strive for a good outcome rather than the worst possible outcome where we all (sort-of) survive?
Do you have the blueprints to the Discovery Channel building?
I'd love for there to be some sort of automatic control system that takes measurements and makes optimal adjustments in titration, temperature, etc. I imagine that this would potentially be a cheap part with a USB plug. But even with this, who will invite people to their house for algae and crackers? And when guests ask for the bathroom, the answer is "Are you sure you don't want to just fertilize the algae? Anyway, want more crackers?"
I think that here is a case where the hippies really have it wrong. If algae is ever going to become a regular part of our diet, it will be grown in factory-scale facilities, not in aquariums that block our windows. Also, I'd like geneticists to engineer a better flavor for it than "seaweed".
Oh, I'm feeling so sorry for Ed Begley, Jr.'s neighbors right now.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
DIY, No. Commercial maybe.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I'm already doing this simply by abstaining from cleaning my toilet bowl. I haven't figured out the harvesting phase yet, though.
Yay! The pool I don't clean is the FUTURE!
The reason people don't eat algae is that it tastes bad. The author himself says he can only eat 15 grams a day, which comes to about 60 calories. Gee, that's only 3% of his daily energy needs. Now, if he could splice in some genes to make his spirulina taste like beef or chicken, he'd have a lot more success.
Personally, I'd like it if somebody worked on engineering trees instead. A tree growing potatoes with sugarcane's photosynthesis efficiency could feed the world.
We'd be like the Linux of algae
So they're going to grow algae in their neckbeards?
This year I grew some zucchini on the balcony. I've made almost $600 at the farmer's market.
So far...
Food is only a small part of enjoyment. Our children in this dystopia will see food eating as a mundane but necessary task like drinking water and will focus on all the other joys of life instead.
It's made from algae as far as you know.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Like driving or flying to a nice vacation spot? Nope.
Like reclining in air conditioned comfort of their spacious homes? Nope and nope.
There's nothing good about life that extreme environmentalists wouldn't frown on.
It looks remarkably like a home-brew setup for making moonshine. Probably would have a similar future too - only dedicated enthusiasts would take it up, as big business can do it more economically on a larger scale, and if it did take off it would be made illegal and/or heavily taxed to make sure the government gets its cut.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The advantage of "progress" that makes life worse, or at least having access to the technology and engineering needed to institute it on short notice, really depends on how optimistic you are about the alternative.
If you are of the optimistic "steady-state-or-even-better" school, giving up long hot showers, giant pieces of perfectly cooked cow corpse, and 85 degree buildings all winter for its own sake is a rather curious and masochistic hobby. Fine if that is your thing; but not really for general consumption, much less compulsory introduction.
The great utility of "worse progress" comes in the event of some sort of nasty supply shock. The basic problem is this: "progress"(R&D, engineering, building infrastructure, educating people, etc.) requires that a civilization be able to run a surplus in energy, food, and other useful materials. If civilization falls short of that, it generally falls back on eating its own infrastructure to survive(just consider the amount of european masonry that was just pilfered from roman stuff; because that was easier than mining it, and they couldn't make concrete anymore). Worst case, you not only get infrastructure degradation(both material and human capital) from lack of maintenance and training; but further destruction as people fight over the scraps.
In our case, hydrocarbons have essentially allowed us to, for the past century or two, run massive surpluses. If we have to get off that particular train, we have to hope that the fusion/solar/orbiting microwave satellite/thorium breeder reactor/etc. guys have it together by that time, or things are going to get ugly. The nightmare scenario is that we lose the ability to run surpluses before we perfect the next energy source. If that happens, we might never have another shot at it. "Worse" technologies have the potential to be a useful delaying tactic, allowing us to run an R&D and infrastructure construction surplus long enough to get something else in place. Also handy in extreme environments, like space colonies or antarctic bases or what have you.
No, but don't let that stop you from doing it.
on a gram by gram basis Corella Algae is actually like SUPER nutritious. NASA i think experimented with using it for long space flights in the 60/70's. So your body can function longer running on a tomato-sized amount of algae than it could on an actual tomato.
Ancient alien conspirators actually believe that the Holy Grail was actually a Manna Machine that produced this kind of algae. Fun Fact..
kinda skimmed the article but i think hes getting at the idea that it's a good supplement and could have potential in enriching foods.
Who gives a shit what extreme anybody thinks, it doesn't mean you don't have to worry about sustainable alternatives because you don't agree with some whack that wants you to sit on your hands all day. Sounds like a convenient excuse to do whatever you want because the extreme opposition is 'wrong'.
That must be one heck of a balcony.
Algae farming isn't the future. Nerf herding is.
We could use extreme environmentalists as fuel. Since most of them are also vegetarian, they'd even be carbon-neutral!
Mind the frickin' laser...
one word. I also put "mosquitos" after it.
damaged by dogma
Yeah, but this article isn't about some sort of apocalyptic struggle against extinction. He wants you to start growing this stuff with your urine right now.
Asimov predicted this decades ago. Just another case of science catching up to fiction, or perhaps this just validates the theories of psychohistory that we aren't supposed to know about..
Of course, there's a long way to go before we generate enough recipes and concoctions of artificial ingredients to make it palatable, so that it's economically and socially mandated to create massive bio-farms.
For more information, refer to your copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica.
"...When I eat spirulina – I eat vegan – I don't have cravings for meat or sugar..."
Just what we need, a meat & sugar addict who's 'on the wagon'.
Who gives a shit what extreme anybody thinks, it doesn't mean you don't have to worry about sustainable alternatives because you don't agree with some whack that wants you to sit on your hands all day. Sounds like a convenient excuse to do whatever you want because the extreme opposition is 'wrong'.
Doing whatever I want? You mean like a free person in a free society? That's a subversive idea you have there. I can see why you posted it anonymously.
Extreme environmentalists aren't really into letting you choose whether you care about what they think. They demand obedience to their enlightened authority.
Ever had a spirulina product, usually a smoothy/drink?
signature is pants
But the solar powered LEDs take a lot of energy to manufacture and ship. At what scales does it make more sense to use direct sunlight to grow algae rather than use a solar powered LED?
Monstar L
There was an article a few months back that showed that you need certain enzimes produced by some specific bacteria, to digest algae.
Sugar producing algae? I WANT!!!
Just add yeast. Fun for all.
Fortunately, there is enough easily accessible uranium in the Earth's crust to power civilization for tens of thousands of years. Modern nuclear plant designs are incredibly safe, and the French have proved that spent fuel reprocessing can be done quite efficiently. If there's a true civilization-ending energy crisis ahead, we have a LONG time to work on it. For now, the main issue is improving battery/fuel cell technology so that electricity generated by nuclear reactors can be used for transportation.
That is, assuming you buy into the concept of near-term "peak oil" in the first place.
is just priceless
Spirulina: A sustainable approach to combat malnutrition - Case study
Teaching manual: Grow your own spirulina
in optimal sunny conditions, you can grow 150grams
of dry spirulina in a 20cm deep (7.87inches) 20square meter (215 square feet) pool
since spirulina is 65 to 71 percent protein,
thats 97.5 to 106.5 grams of protein
and as its 3.9 calories per gram of protein,
thats 380.25 to 415.35 calories
as multivitamin, definitely worth it, but a food source? ....
i guess it might be worth it if you had nothing else to eat,
but you had plentiful cheap electricity, grow lights stacked to the ceiling
I have made no money with my own "victory garden". However, I have managed to produce small quantity of items that I can't get in sufficient quality at my local green grocer.
I think this algae idea is totally bonkers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My thanks to the submitter and the editor. Once or twice a week there is a really good article here. I'm a nature nerd not a computer programming nerd, so the good articles are sorta lean here, but this was one was excellent.
Yeasts are other sorts of interesting little food particles. If anyone of you haven't tried it yet, "nutritional yeast" found in powdered form at the health food stores is quite tasty. Sort of a nutty/cheesy flavor. Note: this is different from bread making yeast or beer yeast, look for "nutritional" on the label. The other stuff is rather strong and nasty tasting by itself, Nutritional yeast is quite good. The quickest way to try some is sprinkle some on popcorn.
Most of the population has enough trouble with basic sanitation, leading to thousands of preventable cases of gastric poisoning each year. Now people are going to poison or kill themselves with home cultured algae gone wrong. At best they'll poison the local waterways & wildlife when they dump their bad algae.
The is kind of why flying cars and jet packs, although feasible, haven't really taken off, pardon the pun. Drivers can barely manage turn signals let alone handle a third dimenson. People poison themselves with DIY alcohol brewing, preserves and curing gone wrong quite frequently.
Anyone considered the disposal implications here? Many local governments would not allow you to dump this stuff via sewer or storm water.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I suspect that there are two basic factors at work:
1. Algae are just this guy's Thing. Many people, nerd types not the least, have some weird hobby that they are passionate about. His is, presumably, algae farming.
2. All systems, any combination of knowledge and hardware and live cultures and whatnot, take time to establish and disseminate. If you want to have them available when you need them, it is best to have them set up before you need them.(Particularly with a technology like this, where development is cheap and there are potential applications right now, as well as in the future)
I for one enjoy looking a at the bleak depressing side of life. I realize that my best days are behind me, and that the only thing I have to look forward to is a gradual diminishing of my abilities until finally I am granted the peace I long for. When I realize that there are 6 billion other people on the planet who will soon have to resort to eating sea weed to prolong their own pointless lives, it makes me feel better...
Eat Up!!!
I get that. I think we should concentrate on making a good future instead though. Policy efforts and advocacy should focus on improvements. We should find ways to make optimistic outcomes more realistic instead of always trying to postpone or hide from pessimistic predicted outcomes (which are, by definition, not very realistic).
Progress is when life gets better for people, not worse.
My point is not that the earth is running out of energy sources, there are a variety of interesting fission and fusionables, and the sun isn't going anywhere; but that getting stuck between really, really sucks and can, under the wrong circumstances, represent a trap from which escape is extremely difficult.
In the case of energy, for instance, a coal/petrochemical civilization has loads of surplus energy, food, and refined chemicals with which to produce physicists, engineers, plant designs, and actual nuclear plants. Plus, it has cool accessories like "law and order" "functioning credit markets" and "lots and lots of well greased supply chains". The trouble is not that nuclear doesn't work, the trouble is that, despite having all the advantages we are likely to have, we only have working nukes for a relatively small fraction of our present needs.
As long as the existing energy base is in good order, you are in the best shape you can possibly be to build the next one. If, however, strategy N stops working before strategy N+1 is built, you can find yourself stuck at strategy N-m, trying to get to strategy N+1, and with strategy N now played out. That has the potential to really suck.
I have little patience for environmentalism that is purely about self-flagellation; but having a plan in place to make sure that you can move from plan A to plan B without chaos that will leave observers grasping for adequate superlatives seems like plain good sense.
> solar powered LED panels emitting light at frequencies the algae uses can be far more efficient than growing algae in direct sunlight(even cheap solar panels are more efficient at solar conversion than algae).
That doesn't pass the giggle test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency only 45% of sunlight works for photosynthesis; all other losses in that article (which cut *total* efficiency from sunlight down to 3-6%) still apply. So if you double the useful light shining on the algae, you may boost its efficiency to 12%... but that's 12% *after the losses from the solar panel*. Cheap solar panel efficiency is only around 6%, and expensive ones on spacecraft max out in the low 40s.
So instead of getting 6% sunlight->algae, with cheap panels (and perfect LEDs) you're getting 12% of 6% (0.72%!). Even with the excellent 40% efficient panels, that's still only 12% of 40% (2.4%!). Fail.
That's true, but it's not like things are in any danger of falling apart overnight. And, pretty much everything is in place for the construction of more nuclear plants within a few years. To not be able to do so would pretty much require a cataclysmic event that would destroy a large amount of the world's infrastructure at one time, such as nuclear war or an asteroid hitting the planet. I don't think there's much chance that oil supplies will all simultaneously dry up fast enough that other things couldn't be easily built before the shortage led to a breakdown of society.
I agree that hiding from dystopias makes a lousy overall culture; but having some people specializing in it can be quite useful.
More to the point, in this case, the chap in TFA sounds optimistic to the point of utopian. He isn't railing about the imminent demise of all Haber-Process based agriculture, he is geeking out about the second coming of the vegetable garden. Given the percentage of the American population that basically lives on things that food chemists can turn corn into, and the percentage of the world population that spends a lot of time not actually eating, he is (arguably) proposing progress in line with your definition.
growing algae to produce sugar
Combine with this: viologen mediated sugar-air fuel cell. The viologen is a major weed killer, so it's quite cheap.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
That must be one heck of a balcony.
Or some seriously dank "zucchini"...
Do i need not say more? Its just yet another scam thought up by some out of work MBA.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Except when you grow them on sunlight during the day and on LED light at night. Then you get more growth out of your tank, because you stretch your day.
But the government will come in and sue you for giving the plants stress ;)
not much to reconsider, a done deal thousands of years ago, there are were and are already sugar-producing algae used for food (e.g. Agar from red algae) But humans need more than sugar
Like anything else, it's a first step. The first internal combustion engines didn't put out 320 HP, either. It'll take time for new iterations to evolve it into a better product than this guy is pitching. And getting it started now is the only way to get those next iterations going.
Those potential improvements would include not only the size and energy input types of things, but improvements to the palatability of the finished product. I'm not saying that they'll ever produce a steak-like substance with it, but maybe they can produce enough food to feed a cow to get us some tasty steaks. (Cows are horribly inefficient food sources, by the way, requiring at least a 10:1 feed-to-meat ratio.) Or maybe if cloned meat ever becomes commercially viable, algae could be the feed needed to grow it.
And I know you want things to get "better", but "better" is not sustainable. Civilization has peaked. This is it. You and I are among the ultimate consumers at the pinnacle of production and consumption. You may want even more for yourself, but it's got to come from somewhere. From here on out as the population grows and available land shrinks, as non-renewable energy sources run down, things are not likely to get "better" by your definition. But perhaps we can slow the decay, and that might be good enough to call it "progress" by some measures.
I agree with you that advertising it with the words "your own urine" does not help sell it, except maybe to a few eco-fruitbats. That's why real businesses hire marketing people. Even a C-average-marketing-degree kid fresh from college would know "Grow your own food with urine!" is not a particularly effective slogan.
John
So, you just stuff one more tank under your bed, and grow those bacteria there ;)
This comment was attached to the original article:
"I eat a lot - 15grams a day".
No, you don't.
You're advocating this as a significant part of the diet.
The first link I found gives for 15g of dried spirulena around 40 calories.
This is 2% of the energy you likely need.
If it's not dried, and that 15g is wet, it's _way_ under 1% of your daily calorific requirement.
15g a day is not a food. It's a spice, a flavoring, or a supplement.
thankyou! I couldn't believe someone would think nothing wrong of that ludicrous efficiency statement. As if algae evolved to be more efficient under artificial 'frequencies' of light.. moron in a hurry fail!
What's the benefit in using LEDs to grow something for fuel? Surely the LEDs can't cause the algae to "produce" more power than they consume. The power from the LEDs has to come from somewhere, right?
Doesn't using electricity to grow algae for fuel kind of defeat the purpose?
Soylent Green, from people?
Agreed. Because obviously nothing is going to go wrong eating home grown pond scum.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Monsanto will have its own private army to attack and destroy any household suspected of such ghastly crime.
What? No matrix gruel?
Open Source? Right, so where are the specs about the lab? The detailed build log or details about the setup? No where to be found, that's where. Oh wait, unless you want to pay $300 and whatever costs to get to California.
Spirulina is pretty much the king of the hill in that respect. The problem with it though is that it's cleansing, consuming enough to make for even a small snack would definitely be enough to give you diarrhea amongst other things. But it's packed with nutrition.
To some extent same goes for other algae, they've got lots of nutritional value, but you have to be mindful that they are used medicinally for a reason.
Algae has some promise. Algaes suspended in water have great potential. Ultimately the objective is the conversion of CO2 to sugars, so algae is only a step on the climb.
Solar energy rocks! We need to recognize that the ability to store solar energy in sugars and proteins enables many uses. If there were an ability to convert algae to protein in some more Green way, perhaps with the remarkable protein conversion of Soy, that would be awesome. In fact, I see this Soy-Lent Green being both a food and fuel for the future. Soy-lent Green could enable us to continue our population growth. Soy-lent Green is people!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
These guys claim to be "Open-Source" but when you go to their website they want you to come to California and pay $150 for a seminar to learn from them. No designs or instruction available for free.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Ancient alien conspirators actually believe that the Holy Grail was actually a Manna Machine that produced this kind of algae
They also believe the Ark of the Covenant was a radioactive energy source of some type which powered the Manna Machine. Interestingly enough, the descriptions available do describe, if you want to liberally interpret the readings, a high energy weapon (gamma + laser beam or something) with radiation sickness; including for those who might open the Ark.
A big issue with biofuels is the water used. It's sort of dead obvious once you think about it. It doesn't take a heck of a lot of water to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground, but producing a similar amount of ethanol from corn will require a lot of water for irrigation, and we're already straining our freshwater water resources. According to a report commissioned by congress [http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/energy-department-blocks-disclosure-of-road-map-to-relieve-critical-u-s-energy-water-choke-points/ it takes 1.5 gallons to produce a barrel of oil, 4 for corn without irrigation, 1,000(!) for corn with irrigation. Coal and nuclear also require vast quantities of water for cooling.
It would be interesting to know how algae compares. Probably you'd use a lot less water than corn, since land plants have to pump water through their veins by evaporating it from the leaves, and you could use sealed tanks/ponds that wouldn't lose water. Also, if you can use wastewater or brackish water, water use would be less of an issue.
We'd be like the Linux of algae
I'll be right here waiting for the year of Algae on the Rooftop.
I've been growing algae for years at home already in my backyard fish pond. God damn nuisance it is.
I for one can't wait for the first batch of experimenters to be laid low by their Cyanobacteria infected meals. Open sores, indeed!
Conflicting information... Does this mean I should or should not get mad when someone has "pissed on my Wheaties"?
Coal and nuclear also require vast quantities of water for cooling.
I may be mistaken, but I don't think that coolant water needs to be potable. I think that sea water with the big chunks strained out is sufficient (for coastal powerplant installations, that is). Thus, those water-guzzling coal and nuclear plants don't necessarily impact our fresh water supply, if they're installed at a coast and using salt water, with the adjacent body of water serving as a heat sink.
AT 100,000 gallons of oil/acre/yr in the desert Algae may be
the new source of oil for the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hioZ7C6HLs
With some modification it can be switched over to
produce hydrogen in a biological fashion as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production
Once we get the infrastructure for hydrogen in place
it would be a viable transition between these two methods.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
For a long time children were the future. Last week it was self-powered parts. Now, algae. Elsewhere we find the future is variously Africa, robots, iPad, intelligence and Ashton Kucher. All of them THE future. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd rather stick with the traditional future comprised of the indefinite span of time that has not yet occurred.
You are what you eat: pond scum.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You let them run your country...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There's nothing good about life that extreme environmentalists wouldn't frown on.
Note the keyword extreme. Hint: categorizing an entire set by its most extreme members leads to misleading results.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You're stuck on that track pretty bad, dude. Do yourself a favor and nudge the tone arm.
QUOTE:
The day-long workshops cost $150 and he'll also provide you with a kit that includes a tank, spirulina starter stock, a nutrient mix and other equipment for $200. Through these workshops, Baum hopes to continue forming a collaborative community that shares knowledge about algae farming.
The seminars grew out of Baum's first venture in algae. In 2008, he created what he says was the world's first communal algae farm. The project was based in Berkeley and consisted of more than a dozen 55-gallon tanks of algae. :END QUOTE.
Do you see what this is now? He is selling supplies like hydroponics kits. It might sound good in theory, but think about it: what are you going to do with your life when you've restricted your energy consumption and are too week to do anything constructive? A man needs food to work and only 7 hrs of sleep, while listless whiny babies need milk and 14 hours of sleep, and stupid Koala bears eat nasty leaves and a safe place for 20 hours of sleep.
The worse your food quality, then the worse your life will be. This man didn't discover anything new, so send him away already. All the countries of 3rd-world and 2nd-world nations consume similar qualities of food, and their productivity proves it in comparing to their caste of nobles that rule them in an otherwise extravagant lifestyle that dominates any rise of progress.
STOP ADVERTISING FOR HIM, SLASHDOT! He's a College dropout and this is his money-making scheme.
But Obama isn't home grown pond scum
Indeed. Algae farm + weedkiller sounds like a natural combo.
Umm, we just found out that certain cyanobacteria can photosynthesize with IR light, something we previously thought impossible. You might want to re-think any further statements you want to make, because it is a WHOLE NEW ballgame.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Any scale, actually. Converting light that would otherwise act as a regulator or inhibitor of growth/cellular division/biological processes into usable light increases the overall efficiency of ANY system.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You would think that, but I've been working on systems to produce far more while consuming far less.
http://imgur.com/TOgCX.jpg
As another example, an acre of barley grass takes about 100,000 gallons of water to produce on regular land, and about two weeks for usable animal fodder harvest. Newer systems I work on cut that down to about 1500 gallons, it happens in 7 days, and we don't even need ANY source of light. We grow it in completely dark sheds.
http://imgur.com/TYJUR.jpg
And we have these already in production for growing biofuel-producing algae, so your assumption would be somewhat wrong. The Middle East is one of my bigger clients.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Sea water is quite hostile. I wouldn't want my nuclear plant *rusting* from all the sea water, thank-you-very-much.
Sea water is quite hostile. I wouldn't want my nuclear plant *rusting* from all the sea water, thank-you-very-much.
I'm sure that the operators of all of those coastal nuclear power plants (such as San Onofre, the nearest one to me that I know of) will be quite disturbed to learn of your disapproval of their use of sea water as a heat sink.
There was an article a few months back that showed that you need certain enzimes produced by some specific bacteria, to digest algae.
It depends on the type of algae. For instance, macroalgae (such as seaweeds) are pretty much similar to any other kind of plant, in that the cellulose portion of it whistles straight out of your exhaust-pipe unless you happen to be a goat, which has bacteria secreting cellulase in his rumen.
Lots of phytoplankton are pretty much digestible, though I guess diatoms (which have silica cell walls) might be a bit problematic.
Lovely idea to have the algae grow on house-hold produced urine. Then I can share my prozac with my daughter and wife and son, my wife and daughter can share their birth control pills with me and my son, my son can share his magic mushrooms with us, and my daughter can share her antibiotics for the clap with the rest of us.
Better living through chemistry!
If you were to insist on the efficiency of photosynthesis as a yardstick for viability, nobody bould bother farming anything at all. The simple fact is that yes, the photosynthetic process is by its very nature not usually very efficient, but it is good enough.
Add that to the fact that farming of algae is comparatively easy, cheap and scalable and you have a winner.
Because obviously nothing is going to go wrong eating home grown pond scum.
If you ever eat sushi-nori, you'll be eating a marine equivalent of seaweed "pond scum". Personally, I like it.
The photosynthetic process is not bad (sure its not a triple junction cell or anything). However the total efficiency of a crop is quite poor. A lot of that energy is used just to keep the crop alive.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
You just split my sides though.
So you are saying that coke soon will contain HFAS* instead of HFCS? *High fructose algae sugar
There are instructions here for a small 100$ farm. Am I missing something?
damn that is awesome. Do you have a website where you talk about your indoor vegetable growing experience? Or can you recommend any good sources of info for starting in hydroponics? I always have an outdoor summer garden but would kill to have fresh tomatoes in the winter without a greenhouse...
Yeah, and congress would have to detach from the bottom and swim upwards quite a ways to encounter pond scum.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Use solar power to drive the LEDs. The more off grid you can be the better. Not for any "green" reasons, It is just nice not to give the power companies any more money
Mind you, all the bits have to be made in a factory some where so just how "green" this all is is another matter. Once you start charging a dirty car battery who know????
Nah, we should use theists... there's more of 'em, and they do a lot more damage. It'd be a public service.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
People will develop tasty algae (or whatever) and mass-produce it if it's worthwhile. Economies of scale make devoting time to grow it at home mostly useless except as a hobby.
"Is shooting yourself in the head to avoid a pointless and severely unpleasant (but "sustainable") existence in a dystopian ecologically green world "the future"? Can we deprive ourselves of everything good about life so our children can inherit a world where they'll also have to deprive themselves of everything good about life? Is this wise?"
There is zero reason that the world should be dystopian in order to be "green". It will take a bit of work to develop and maintain, but so does our current, polluting lifestyle.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
When you can feed a family of four, and a little extra, on something that can fit in a garden shed, then we'll talk. Until then, you're just a *very* bad farmer trying to farm something that's extremely widespread, not very nutritious, and would have grown in your pond using technology that costs an awful lot more than just planting a decent bush or tree in your back yard.
Algae is okay for fish to eat (but even then usually have something else too), and you can then eat those fish, but to suggest eating algae can solve world hunger is ridiculous - if that was the case, we'd have been doing this en-masse for millenia instead of all this processed food / farming lark.
Feed my family "for free", or reduce my petrol bills and then we can take you seriously. Until then, you might as well claim that you've lived the past 50 years by sucking moss off rocks at your local beach while everyone else is eating the fish, shellfish, local birds, etc.
I'm sure that the operators of all of those coastal nuclear power plants (such as San Onofre, the nearest one to me that I know of) will be quite disturbed to learn of your disapproval of their use of sea water as a heat sink.
Not to mention the submarine and aircraft carrier reactor operators. However, a freshwater nuclear navy might be helpful in the planned invasion of Canada via the great lakes...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What the other response to this post is trying to say is that chlorophyll can't convert most light frequencies into food. Converting sunlight into blue light, even with a 30% efficient process, would mean more sunlight + co2 + h2o converted into sugar (or whatever you're trying to produce).
It's not just sushi nori. Various red seaweeds have been a part of European cuisine for many centuries. Carrageen and dulse have long been eaten in Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and probably other places bordering the Atlantic. Apparently, carrageen is also consumed in the caribbean, and dried carrageen is available in health food stores across North America.
BTW, those who don't want to eat seaweed should make sure that E407 is not listed as an ingredient in their ice cream, beer, pate, etc...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I can make edible slime out of my own piss? Great - sign me up!
Once we get the infrastructure for hydrogen in place
it would be a viable transition between these two methods.
Why bother? We have the fueling infrastructure for biodiesel right now, and mechanics who know how to work on diesels. Diesel fuel is less dangerous than gasoline, while hydrogen is arguably moreso, or at least in the same ballpark. Batteries are gaining quick charging technologies that are setting them up to rival the speed of hydrogen refueling, and they are already approaching the best-case energy density of hydrogen while currently providing superior efficiency in giving up their energy as opposed to hydrogen through a fuel cell. Hydrogen in cars is stored at extremely high pressures necessitating an extremely costly storage and distribution network that is simply not necessary with diesel fuels; meanwhile we have an adequate power grid for nighttime charging of MANY electric vehicles before ANY changes need be made. Indeed this would improve the overall efficiency of the grid system because of our currently wasted nighttime base load.
There are zero compelling reasons to use fuel cells. Give up on them already: that means giving up on hydrogen, too, which has its own special set of problems that we simply don't need on the road. Biodiesel from algae grown in our deserts on seawater (and optionally coupled with saltwater aquaculture of other food that people actually want to eat!) has the potential to replace our entire diesel fuel consumption and then some, and profitably, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course, putting the algae in glass tanks inside of a glass window as the author of the article has done blocks the majority of UV anyway... The question is, how long does it take for energy payback on your solution due to the increased efficiency as opposed to the energy cost of its production? It takes a lot of energy to make those LEDs and such.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which part of farming algae makes life worse?
If you've ever eaten sushi, you've eaten seaweed. If you've eaten vegetarian caviar, you've eaten algae.
Farming algae helps you take advantage of a resource which would otherwise go to waste.
Why bother?
For cars and heating? You wouldn't - it would be a stupid idea. For laptops and other mobile devices, it might make sense. You can make a hydrogen fuel cell a lot smaller than you can make a diesel turbine. More likely, however, you'd want to produce methanol, which can also be used in very small fuel cells but can be stored easily without needing to be kept under pressure. Interestingly, these are more efficient at around the temperature of a warm CPU, so you might end up with the methanol flowing in a pipe over your chips then cooling the waste water (or just dumping it) in future laptops.
The main problem with using fuel cells (of any kind) in consumer electronics is that you can't recharge them at home, you need to buy the fuel to refill them. A small algae tank that could produce methanol would eliminate this problem and make it a much more attractive fuel source.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For cars and heating? You wouldn't - it would be a stupid idea. For laptops and other mobile devices, it might make sense. You can make a hydrogen fuel cell a lot smaller than you can make a diesel turbine.
Batteries are improving faster than fuel cells, though.
More likely, however, you'd want to produce methanol, which can also be used in very small fuel cells but can be stored easily without needing to be kept under pressure.
Except that practical methanol fuel cells are seemingly even further away than the hydrogen ones. Also, a methanol leak is immediately hazardous: the bad things in it can be absorbed through the skin and make you blind. A hydrogen leak, absent a spark, is actually less hazardous than a methanol one. Methanol is a stupid idea for portable power. It is actually not even suited to vehicular use because it is more hazardous than gasoline!
Interestingly, these are more efficient at around the temperature of a warm CPU, so you might end up with the methanol flowing in a pipe over your chips then cooling the waste water (or just dumping it) in future laptops.
I'm just not seeing this EVER being allowed on public transportation, nor should it be. Modern batteries burn, but compressed gases built up in enclosed spaces still cause explosions.
There are currently approximately zero use cases where a fuel cell is better for the consumer than something else. There are indeed very few cases at all where it makes any sense to use a fuel cell. None of them are in portable devices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know, man. Life used to be pretty sweet until around the 1860. Now I have to live in a slave-free hell-hole where I have to do all my work myself. Fuck progress, I want my slaves.
What is your energy consumption? IE, how many kWh per 7 day period?
people used to buy disposable batteries for electronics in decades past, so if a fuel cell lasts something like a week in a moderatelly powerfull notebook and were cheap enough, i wouldn't mind.
now, your idea of a home algae tank is unfeasible. methanol is an alcohol. you can make alcohol at home. home made alcohol goes by the handles "beer" and "wine", depending on the source material (grains or fruits/sugars) and the yeast used. but it'll be diluted enough to be useless to power anything other than yourself at a party. methanol producing algae would be the same. they'd start to die by the time the concentration reached a critical level, leaving a solution of mostly water and some methanol.
to be used as fuel, it'd need to be distilled, a time and power consuming activity, with hazardous/poluting by-products. ask anyone who ever made moonshine.
What ? Me, worry ?
While not corn, and who says corn is the only potential source for biofuel, i recall reading about work being done towards potatoes that could deal with salt water.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I think Jeff Goldblum is working on that problem... Apparently there's some kind of attendant breakthrough in transportation technology, too.
Batteries are improving faster than fuel cells, though.
But methanol still has 15 times the energy density of the best Lithium-ion batteries, and about 5 times the energy density of LiS batteries (which currently die after so few charge cycles that they're not in use anywhere outside military UAVs).
Except that practical methanol fuel cells are seemingly even further away than the hydrogen ones.
The first functional cells were produced in 1990. They've been refined significantly since then and they are commercially available.
Also, a methanol leak is immediately hazardous: the bad things in it can be absorbed through the skin and make you blind
You need to consume 10ml to make you blind. Absorbing this much through your skin would be very difficult. It's volatile, so a small leak will disburse into the air, making it only dangerous in confined spaces.
I'm just not seeing this EVER being allowed on public transportation, nor should it be.
Better check the law. They've been allowed for a few years. Quoth Wikipedia (complete with citations, if you want to follow them):
However, the International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) Dangerous Goods Panel (DGP) voted in November 2005 to allow passengers to carry and use micro fuel cells and methanol fuel cartridges when aboard airplanes to power laptop computers and other consumer electronic devices. On September 24, 2007, the US Department of Transportation issued a proposal to allow airline passengers to carry fuel cell cartridges on board[4]. The Department of Transportation issued a final ruling on April 30, 2008, permitting passengers and crew to carry an approved fuel cell with an installed methanol cartridge and up to two additional spare cartridges
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They're essentially the same thing. It's the new green religion.
Disclaimer: I'm environmentally conscious myself, but I prefer to focus on real environmental issues like GMOs, recycling and deforestation.
Mind the frickin' laser...
but nothing so dramatic is needed, as the ancient Egyptians mastered the conversion of sugars and other carbohydrates into booze.
in that the cellulose portion of it whistles straight out of your exhaust-pipe
You might want to see a doctor and get that checked out...
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
to be used as fuel, it'd need to be distilled, a time and power consuming activity, with hazardous/poluting by-products. ask anyone who ever made moonshine.
When you're trying to make methanol, you're trying to make the primary byproduct. All of it can be burned in a typical ICE with proper tuning, but I suspect purity is something of an issue when you're feeding a fuel cell. So it's usable as a vehicle or generator fuel, but it would be complex to make fuel cell fuel.
Probably a better option for making fuel from homemade algae in any case is to use the ABE process which was first used for making the constituents of explosives. It makes acetone, butanol, and ethanol, which can go together directly into a gasoline vehicle with minor tuning changes, or the butanol can be separated out and used as a direct gasoline replacement. I advocate re-tuning, which in many or even most modern vehicles can be done on the fly. (Indeed, the oldest vehicles could be altered with aircraft-style adjustment of timing as well with simple and simply refitted mechanisms.) You make the algae in one bioreactor (a term loosely applied, which can as per the photos mean a fishtank or a plastic drum) and then you make it into butanol in another one. Getting the process streamlined is currently the focus of several companies, but it ought to be within the reach of the average person.
Butanol has the advantage that it does not require replacement of existing vehicles or generators which now run on gasoline, which indeed dominate the landscape. Some of the most modern vehicles with heated wideband O2 sensors ought to be capable of running on mixed ABE fuel without even making tuning changes. I still haven't become personally acquainted with the grade of machinery necessary to separate oil out of algae for biodiesel production, but I'd very much like to.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For a more palatable form of potential subsistence farming once most of us are out of a job :
http://gardenpool.org/
You had me at household urine. Where do I sign up?
ad astra per alia porci
Hmm...not too good for us low carb types.
Gimme dead animal that I can sink my teeth into any day of the week....I mean, I'm open to trying most anything food wise, but can't see myself eating much and being satisfied with algae...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Is shooting yourself in the head to avoid a pointless and severely unpleasant (but "sustainable") existence in a dystopian ecologically green world "the future"?
It depends on what you find "unpleasant". Some find aspects of modern life unpleasant, but others don't even notice them. Others find primitive living unpleasant, a few would prefer that life. In any case change happens, and mos people adapt to a new sense of what is "normal". In general I think we live better than our ancestors did, but it doesn't mean everything that's happened is positive. For one thing, most of us have got to trek a long way to find a decent fishing hole. That doesn't mean I want to live in a log cabin with dirt floors.
I was working in the environmental movement when the whole paradigm shift from "Crying Indian" environmentalism to sustainability was taking place. I've always been skeptical of "sustainability". While sustainability is a useful way of looking at things, here's my problem with making it the intellectual cornerstone of environmental thought: non-sustainability is a self-correcting problem.
Let's imagine a dialog between A the environmentalist and B the non-environmentalist.
A: You should stop doing that.
B: Why?
A: Because it isn't sustainable.
B: So?
A: So you won't be able to keep doing that indefinitely.
B: Sure, but I *can* do it *now*. Later on, I'll do something different.
B has a point that's seriously worth considering. Take coal mining. It's not sustainable in the sense that you can't get your energy from coal forever, but from a financial sense it may be sustainable; you take the wealth out of the ground today and you move your investments elsewhere tomorrow.
The real issue with non-sustainability isn't that you can't keep doing it. It's in the specifics of *why* something is not sustainable, and how to handle the consequences of doing the non-sustainable thing when the cash flow dries up. The corporate owners of a gold mine can extract all the market value of the gold, then let the company go bankrupt leaving other people to deal with the problem of leaking ponds with arsenic laden tailings in them.
The point of a "sustainability" analysis is not to say, "you can't keep doing things exactly this way forever, so you can't do this." A sufficiently detailed analysis would probably show *anything* is non-sustainable. The real work comes when you've identified a reason for something being unsustainable. Then you ask, "How will this stop working? What will be the consequences of doing this, and who will bear those consequences when we stop?" In the case of gold mining, you've got to make sure that the mining company invests its revenue in pollution control, maybe putting some in escrow, rather than saying "you can't mine here." If accounting for the cost of the mine's mess means the owners don't turn a profit, then the mine is simply not economical with all the costs taken into account. If any reasonable person would think that the consequences of mining are provided for, then its reasonable to go ahead and mine the gold, even though it's not sustainable. No process is perfectly sustainable.
So the point of environmentalism isn't to lower the quality of life *now*. It's to take our future quality of life into account when we make decisions.
There's one more dimension that needs to be mentioned, one that is orthogonal to "sustainability". That is justice. The costs and benefits of a practice aren't locked together. If I invest in a coal plant that pollutes a neighborhood, I may benefit financially enough that I can move to an unpolluted area. The people living near the plant also benefit by lower energy costs and increased economic development, but they don't benefit as much as I do. On the other hand, they pay a lot more in terms of reduced environmental quality than I do. I bear none of that cost.
Environmentalism often seems opposed to capitalism, because the mobility of capital is so important
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're doing it wrong. I grow enough tomatoes on my balcony to have to give many away.
Civilization has peaked. This is it. You and I are among the ultimate consumers at the pinnacle of production and consumption.
Well that view certainly is derived from a lack of imagination. You think civilization has peaked now? When it comes down to it, the resources that humans consume and use for existence are really nothing more than different forms of one basic thing: energy. Given enough energy, our species has the capability to do a hell of a lot more than we are currently doing. That said, if we were at a point in civilization where there were no more useful forms of energy available for utilization I would agree with you. Fortunately, that is nowhere near the case. We have high energy density heavy metals peppering the surface of our small planet. We have an awesome light-radio called the sun that has an enormous amount of energy for us to utilize. Hell, we even have the entire magma driven core of our own planet that could provide us with enough energy to generate food and resources for our civilization. The coolest part is that we already have the means of easily using these energy sources. And as we grow and get bigger, do you think there will be a lack of energy then? Well let's see, there is pretty much an uncountable number of stars in our galaxy. There is a huge energy source at the center of this galaxy. If we make it to the point that we can utilize that energy, well, then, we probably can utilize the energy from the thousands of other galaxies out there in space.
;)
So you think human civilization peaked? I think you suffer from an extraordinary case of cynicism. We have more than enough energy and potential available to grow our society exponentially. The only thing holding us back is overly cynical and overly dark bullshit attitudes like yours.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Screw hydrogen. Most homes in the northeast of the US that are not natural gas connected still use fuel oil (more or less diesel). I live in a well sealed but 4 layer brick house--I'd love if I could use some biodiesel in this piece of shit burner I've got (and will be replacing with geothermal 2 years from now). There are cars and other vehicles that can run diesel.
Even if I produced 250 gallons a year, that'd not only by good backup fuel, but also reduce my heating bill significantly, the equivalent of a winter month, and save me $600.
Anyone know of a no smell, high biodiesel yield/nymph/fattie algae species? (I figure if it was human and of your sexual preference, you'd keep them to yourselves. )
I'd much prefer someone have clear instructions, an analysis of algae types and their production and smell, and processing and equipment guidelines. Getting a CLEAR idea of how to go from algae to biodiesel would help. Where's the analysis with ph, density, humidity/temperature comparisons, volume, aeration, etc.?
When you go to look online, most of it is shit, with youtube links and "you might be able to do this" or "buy this book and we'll teach you." Hell, the best stuff is probably wikipedia still with their algaculture article, but there is not clear cut, do it all place(s).
In the past 3 months, some stuff I looked into was how to build a solar array (done), how to build an AR15 (done, hell, I even partly designed a replacement for the gas displacement but then I realized others had done this and I could just simply purchase it), how to hook up wind turbines to a battery array (complete garbage online), and algae to biodiesel conversion (worse than the previous, the info is there, it's just completely unorganized). I'll probably slug through the gov doc one of these days but I don' t look forward to read a few hundred pages when there's other things to do, and if that fails, I'll just run my own reactor myself, but it'd be nice if people touting this have actually done this, to get it better organized.
Linux? It's worse than Linux. Even with slackware back in the day, there were instructions and lists that you could read to get an idea of what was involved, hardware lists, etc.
Hello,
Aaron Baum, the subject of the article here.
I take about 20 grams of spirulina a day & it gives me wonderful stamina. Never heard of anyone getting the runs from spirulina -- I've taken up to 30 grams in a day and just felt even better. I have never heard of anyone suffering any ill effects from eating Spirulina -- it is the most-researched algae for both positive and (a lack of) negative health effects... Perhaps you're thinking of wild-harvested blue-green algae (properly known as Aphanizomenon Flos-Aquae), which sometimes contains toxins which can have such effects.
Best, Aaron
P.S. If you're interested in DIY algae, come to our workshop Oct 3rd in Berkeley. Upcoming workshop in L.A. AlgaeLab.org.
INSANELY low, I can't give an exact figure as it varies per crop type. The only thing that power is used for in the dark sheds is climate control and nutrient flow, which makes it easy to build a shed that runs completely on solar power.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I had a website, hosting for that went tits-up. I could easily teach you how to garden indoors, and hydroponics is not as complex as people try to make it seem. If you can maintain a pool, or an aquarium, you can do hydroponics with ease.
Feel free to contact me if you wish - my e-mail is right next to my UID.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you go by energy costs, payback happens within two years. If you go only by financial costs, payback is roughly 8-14 months.
We wouldn't encase the algae in glass, we pump it through a thin tube with LEDs in direct contact (avoid as much loss as possible) and recirculate.
Wish my pal Chris was on this site, he'd be able to explain a bit better than I. I just make the lights.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Good thing they don't make nuke plant heat exchangers, pumps, and piping out of carbon steel!
Oh, and that includes Seabrook nuclear power plant.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Now only that, but if somebody got cancer or some other illness at a younger age due to a genetic predisposition, then in the "olden days" it was more likely that person would have died.
In modern times, medicine may be able to cure you of your malady, but then you're able to pass the genetics onto your offspring. Maybe one of the reason we're seeing more of various conditions is that people *aren't* dying from them (or at least not until a more advanced age).
Growing algae requires maintenance, energy, and costly raw materials. And in the end, you get a fairly limited diet out of it.
If you want to grow your own food, just find food crops and plants that work in your climate and that require little maintenance, and set up a garden that yields food most of the year. All you need is soil, water, and rocks.
If you're living on the 25th floor of an apartment complex and don't have the space, you might as well just buy sustainable food imported from elsewhere; you'll never make up for the energy and raw materials required to grow algae in your living room.
religion != theism
Hi, Aaron here, the subject of the article...
The trouble with using LEDs or any other artificial light sources to grow algae is that algae are at best about 5% efficient in converting light energy into stored chemical energy (though this is much better than any land plant). In my non-AlgaeLab time I work for NASA on a project (called OMEGA) to grow biofuel algae on the surface of the ocean using wastewater and power plant exhaust. The reason I'm interested in growing Spirulina is that the health benefits of eating even a small amount a day are quite significant.
BTW If you're interested in DIY algae, come to our workshop Oct 3rd in Berkeley. Upcoming workshop in L.A. AlgaeLab.org.
Aaron here, the subject of the article...
UV is not used by plants for photosynthesis (google PAR for more info), and represents less than 10% of the energy in sunlight anyway. Algae grow quite happily in glass and plastic tubes.
You had me at "diluted urine".
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Perhaps I didn't define it well enough. First, I believe the peak to be the 20th and 21st centuries, the 200 year span of human history we're living in. Right now the planet is more wealthy than ever, with more wealthy people on it than ever, and we're smack in the middle of it. It's a glorious time to be here. But we have a huge population of poor people, and they need to get in on this wealth, too, before we have a global outbreak of class warfare.* So our first task should be to finish feeding the poor of the globe, and begin raising their standards of living. That's going to take a lot of resource sharing, which may mean fewer luxuries for the rest of us. Right now, the West consumes a huge share of the planet's resources per capita, somewhere on the order of 5 to 25 times that of the average earthling. To level the playing field, either we find ways to improve production by orders of magnitude, or we give up something in exchange. We're straining to produce incremental improvements as it is (a 41 MPG average hybrid instead of a 27 MPG internal combustion car just isn't enough.) So I don't see the magic coming out of the manufacturing sector.
Sure, we'll eventually tap nuclear power again on a large scale, along with solar, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal, and every other alternate source of energy. And we'll figure out how to store energy to keep powering our cars. Energy, I think we'll get that one figured out.
But those cars are going to get more numerous, and the energy will have to be shared a lot more than it is now.
That's because the population keeps growing at an accelerated pace. In about a hundred years, unless population growth is checked by means most people would find abhorrent, there won't be enough space for us and our current means of food production. Real bovine-origin steaks? Only for the elite. The rest of us are likely to end up on algae and cloned meat. Is that "progress"? Not according to Kohath in his posts above. But I think it's progress if it wards off the starvation of billions, so there's still room to disagree.
Arable land is one of those resources we must run out of. As Mark Twain supposedly said, "Invest in real estate. They stopped making it." Are we going to till the Amazon until there's nothing left? (Of course, why would we stop today?) But then what, after the jungles run out? I expect we'll eventually truck dirt and pipe water to sunny deserts like New Mexico, Arizona, the Gobi, the Sahara, and feed another ten to twelve billion people or so. That's what, 2080? What about 2090? 2100? Who knows, perhaps giant floating barge-farms where we hydroponically grow food in the ocean. But even if we can muster the equipment and the resources to instantly create arable land out in the ocean like they did in Dubai, and build energy-neutral desalinization plants, we won't be able to keep it up as fast as the population grows.
And all this assumes a Spaceship Earth full of rational people driven to the common goal of the betterment of humanity. Instead, we've got batshit crazy extremists everywhere that are trying to bomb the hell out of each other's infidels and separatists, and warlords vying for entire ungoverned states in Africa and Asia. For now, instead of feeding the world, we're still focused on killing each other, while the "leaders" of this country spend their time debating decimal points of health care as if they're making profound progress.
It's really easy to think that civilization hasn't peaked, especially when you live in Seattle, or Chicago, or anywhere that is six thousand miles from the shitholes where half the world are still peasants living in fear and/or hunger. Get them all into functional societies with food and water, and spacious, bug-free housing, and full employment, and 0.8 cars per person, and flat screen TVs, and all the niceties the rest of the West takes for granted, and I'll say "you win." And I'll even grant you that it's happening in India and China. But not fast enough in the rest of the
John
Shera is the Mascot of the XIX Common wealth Games 2010 Delhi his message enthusing people to come out and play. In his favor a reminder of the Fragile Environment he lives in and our responsibility towards protection of his eco system.http://bit.ly/cLso7o
UV is not used by plants for photosynthesis (google PAR for more info)
I don't have to google anything. Plants use mostly red and blue light, reflect green, are heated but do not generally photosynthesize when exposed to IR, and are burned by UV just like everything else. Indeed, increased UV is fingered as being at least partly responsible for driving oceanic algaes underwater (aka killing the ones that aren't there) thus reducing their exposure to visible light and slowing their growth.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A big issue with biofuels is the water used. It's sort of dead obvious once you think about it. It doesn't take a heck of a lot of water to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground, but producing a similar amount of ethanol from corn will require a lot of water for irrigation,
Any time someone brings up corn ethanol as a reason why biofuels are a bad idea, you know that they are either some kind of shill or they actually know nothing whatsoever about biofuels. Read this before you attempt to contribute again. Corn ethanol is pure pork, it is profitable only because of corn subsidies and it exists specifically to steal your money in the form of tax dollars spent on subsidies which are given to big agribusiness. Corn for ethanol is almost universally grown "continuously" meaning without the benefit of crop rotation; it is virtually all GMO which in practice means it is purchased from Monsanto and it's fertilized and pesticized (how would I say that both correctly gracefully, anyway?) with chemicals purchased from them as well, chemicals which typically end up in the groundwater; indeed, the soil is also inoculated with known carcinogens to prevent the growth of fungi and harmful nematodes, and these chemicals also get into the groundwater, to say nothing of the damage done to the soil, which is rendered an inert hydroponic growing medium through these means. Literally everything about ethanol fuel from corn is bad. ALL topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded save for animal feed, and then only when the animal crap is returned to the field.
Also, if you can use wastewater or brackish water, water use would be less of an issue.
Also, if you could use google then you would have found out that you can use salt water, which can be pumped for "free" with sunlight once you've made the pipeline system.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fuck you too. Why don't you go do your job instead of fucking with my comments?
error: "Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)"
my subject at the time: "Score: 1, with no comment history available"
The first rule of slashdot, apparently, really IS that you don't talk about slashdot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Never heard of anyone getting the runs from spirulina"
You've never heard of babyfurs, and thank GOD you haven't. You don't want to know what their preferred use for high-chlorophyll content flora involves.
Spirulina is their preferred 'diaper-messing' source.
It's about the only major thing they advocate.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You would be wrong, sir. UV is used by several plants as a photosynthetic and photomorphological power source, just like several new discoveries have shown that certain plants also utilize IR light for primary photosynthesis or for supplementary (Emerson Effect.)
PAR only covers visible-range and does nothing to cover the effects of other wavelengths of EM radiation.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, plants can only use about 5% of the energy that falls upon them.
Chlorophyll is like a battery bank - you can only charge it up so much before it won't take any more charge.
This is why we have light movers.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"The trouble with using LEDs or any other artificial light sources to grow algae is that algae are at best about 5% efficient in converting light energy into stored chemical energy (though this is much better than any land plant)."
No, the problem with using LEDs is the photosynthetic flux density drops DRAMATICALLY the second the light hits the surface of the water.
This is remedied by using high-output SMDs with a narrow emission angle.
BTW, we're already at the stage where we can produce plants (this includes certain algae species,) without needing light at all.
http://imgur.com/rIdIw.jpg
Too bad NASA seems 100% uninterested, as this is THE method to provide food and nutrition for humans and livestock in space with an absolute minimum of power required.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"It's sort of dead obvious once you think about it. It doesn't take a heck of a lot of water to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground, but producing a similar amount of ethanol from corn will require a lot of water for irrigation, and we're already straining our freshwater water resources."
We've cut the water usage up to 99% using a fully-enclosed sealed system for production of algae. We've already done such with sheds of wheatgrass, which typical per acre outdoors requires 100,000 gallons of nutrient water, however in our sheds, you only need 1,000 gallons of water.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Okay, well you certainly seem to have thought of a lot of things going wrong with the current society, but I think you might also be forgetting to check out some of the cooler stuff going on. As you said yourself, we probably will start tapping a lot of new energy sources again soon. As we move away from the ICE as the primary means of transportable energy, you will start to see the spacecraft and launch vehicle markets expand significantly (as an Aero engineer I certainly consider the problem of local, transportable energy to be the foremost restriction in access to the stars). If that field keeps progressing and picking up speed as it has for the last decade or so, I don't think access to other celestial bodies for resources will be out of our reach or impossible. That also helps solve the problem of land access (though arable land could be a problem, but greenhouses could help with that).
However, if you want to look at other fields, that's fine to. Lately, I've noticed there are a lot more folks questioning the activities of the most established food producers (Monsanto, HFCS pushers, etc.) It seems like food is becoming a topic of interest for a lot of the population of Western societies and, with that knowledge, hopefully they will start to see that there really is enough food to feed the poor countries, it's simply corruption preventing it.
If that's not enough, we also are making huge progress in the fields of medicine and cybernetics. It may be that in a few decades we don't even need traditional food anymore because we can power our bodies off of batteries. Or maybe we'll just download our brains into the internet. No, this stuff isn't right around the corner, but at the current rate of technological development, if we manage to put off a cataclysmic decline for another 75 years, we start to reach the realm of reality. At least, I think so.
But even given that some of this progress does not occur. Even if we do assume that, currently, we are riding the peak of the wave and it will come crashing back down soon, I still consider it disingenuous to term us the peak of human civilization. I would wager that both the Golden-Age Greeks and the top-dog Romans thought that they were the peak of human civilization as well. I would wager that Senators and Representatives sat around in those societies, as the Vandals and Goths raided the city streets around them, and bemoaned the decline of human civilization. Nonetheless, after a few hundred years of scrapping and scraping through the mud, we all climbed out of that shit hole again and rebuilt bigger and better than ever before. Just like then, if our civilization comes crashing down around us now, a few hundred years later some folks smarter than us will learn from our mistakes and build a society that makes our civilization look positively barbaric and filthy. So perhaps we were speaking about different things, but I stand by my position that we are nowhere near the peak of human civilization.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Pfft, a good future! How about getting the present halfway decent first?
Fair enough. I'll be happy to agree that we're only at a local maximum, and accept your position that a new Renaissance awaits our 10th+ generation grandchildren; and that it will be better than anything we have today.
John
For the first time, the athletes would be watching the opening ceremony of the CWG. Usually, after the march past they go outside. But here they would come back and sit inside the stadium and watch the cultural programmes, which is going to show 500 years of Indian culture. http://bit.ly/cLso7o
Delhi is doing all the preparation for the historic day of commonwealth games as coming closer to meet the expectations of the participants and the tourists for accentuating the amenities provided to the travelers. This largest sport event is going to held first time in India and for the second time in Asia and it will impact on the economy of the hosting country that will surely gives boom to the tourism industry of India. http://bit.ly/cLso7o
You said, "[we grow grass] and we don't even need ANY source of light."
But, plants require light to grow. So, your statement must be false. Care to elaborate?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?