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Sixteen Thousand Concerned Scientists: Get These Posers Out of Our Hair and Let Us Save Your Food Crops



Two small notes.

First, this is a serious problem. People don't seem to realize that "sixteen scientists" don't matter. Sixteen thousand would have; just sixteen is a drop in the bucket. The problem is that headlines like that sell ad impressions. Our media has a conflict of interest, and the news is losing.

Second, this post has been bouncing back and forth between 6 and 14 karma for the last two hours, which I find amusing.


It only takes one scientist to be right about something. We don't measure scientific truth by weighing or tallying up the numbers of religious adherents on each side, we do so by evaluating the arguments and the evidence given.


If we are going to be using crops for food by the time global warming effects become significant we deserve to die out. They are already using bacteria to produce amino acids industryially, few decades in that are is inevitably going to bring us to a point where you can have a shallow pool of water with bacteria in it under UV lights, stacked on top of each other producing amino acids, carbs and fats. Maybe even directly synthesize some of those using a large scale chemical reaction.

That's sort of the answer to "global warming problems". All of those problems are going to exist anyway and a far simpler solution is to modify our environment (eg. large protective domes around cities that can withstand the stress of a tornado, filter cosmic rays, etc.) and technology instead of trying to regress to "organic farming" and cutting energy consumption. That might sound like SF but considering the technological progress, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect advances in nanotechnology/materials/construction/food production etc. in that time-frame. The biggest hurdle seems to be energy, with Thorium and micro nuclear reactors looking very realistic in that timeframe. Who knows, maybe we get efficient nuclear batteries by then.




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