Miriam English wrote:
> Wow! This is brilliant! It doesn't take much imagination to see these
> stacked many, many stories high (or down under the ground) producing tens
> of times the amount an acreage normally could. No other form of agriculture
> could match this level of productivity.
>
> Maybe it will go retail too. I would buy one or a few if I had the money.
>
> The concept of isolating the crops from pests is very cool. I eliminates
> complex, expensive, poisonous pest management.
Agreed. And can you imagine the impact when they manage to rig this
for grains (esp. wheat, corn, & rice)? Plug in a unit or two at your
local bakery, and it could become a completely self-sufficient food
producer (except for electricity - from solar panels, perhaps? - and
water, and presumably nitrogen from the air). Even some large
residences, such as hotels or institutions (like military bases and
universities), might be able to consume 100% of the daily output of
such a grain producer themselves, even if they couldn't consume several
hundred heads of lettuce a day.
Now, if only they could come up with a similar system for producing
meat and other animal products...say, take a cancerous muscle cell from
a cow's thigh, make sure its cancerous properties do not make it
dangerous to those who eat it, then immerse it in a nutrient bath to
get it to grow forever, applying electric stimulation to get the right
texture and harvesting off chunks every so often. Or maybe engineer a
peanut (or other protein-producing vegetable or fruit) to grow large
and have a meat-like texture and flavor...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:08 MDT