Re: Oil proportion of biodiesel.


> I think its a brilliant idea. The basic mechanism for the center pivot
> irrigator can provide an attachement point for automated ploughing,
> seeding, cultivating and harvesting equipement.


Nah... Far too complicated/expensive/troublesome with so little tangible
benefit. In the US less than 1% of the labor force is involved in
agriculture (see CIA world factbook for US
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html ). Since the
definition of the "labor force" only includes about half of the total
population, the total amount of labor needed on agriculture is clearly very
tiny, maybe around 0.3%-0.4% of the population.

On the other hand, if you still want to use technology to improve/streamline
the way food is produced...

I suggest CHON food. CHON is a word found in some of the Gateway series of
science fiction books by Frederick Pohl. CHON stands for Carbon, Hydrogen,
Oxygen, Nitrogen, or in other words the primary elemental constituents of
food. Larry Niven uses a similar type of concept in his book Ringworld.

Basically, food should be produced in factories. As it is right now, we
require huge amounts of real estate and sunshine to grow crops. Some of
those crops are then fed to animals. All in all we require most of our free
open real estate suitable for crop production just to feed our current world
population. If the world population is ever to get larger, clearly if would
be beneficial to produce food in a factory. We are currently victims of
mother nature. Storms and droughts can cause shortages of food (at least in
countries that don't normally produce large surpluses). Even modern farming
practices have some sustainability issues such as soil nutrient depletion,
salt buildup in the soil, and finite fresh water supplies. Additionally,
nitrate fertilizers are responsible for the contamination (ex: pollution) of
a great many surface freshwater supplies.


So how would we make food in a factory?

In order to be fully scalable and sustainable the input ingredients should
primarily be: nuclear derived baseload electricity, plain atmospheric air,
and perhaps water or other extremely abundant raw materials. Not too long
ago someone in the sci.energy newsgroup described a process of producing
alcohol from CO2 scrubbed from plain air using electricity (some source of
hydrogen, such as water or water vapor in air is also needed). The cycle
was renewable in that process chemicals were either not lost or could be
electrically regenerated.

Producing relatively simple hydrocarbon molecules such as some kind of
alcohol would seem a logical first step for making food. A next step would
likely be to convert the alcohol into somewhat more complex hydrocarbons,
such as sugars and starches. Mother nature has engineered us biological
cultures which can be used to convert sugars and starches into alcohol. I'm
not currently aware of any cultures which can be used to reverse the
process, but it seems reasonable to believe that such germs (could?) exist.
If they don't perhaps a different feedstock than alcohol could be prepared
and used, or else germs could be biogenetically engineered specifically for
this alcohol to sugar/starch conversion.

Humans can use hydrocarbons in the form of sugars and starches, but
obviously that wouldn't be a balanced diet. In addition to sugars and
starches humans need proteins, lipids, fiber, and small quantities of a
large variety of vitamins and minerals. Vitamins, minerals, and fiber
tablets are already produced in factories for human consumption. Some of
these substances are presumably prepared from bioorganic materials, but
since the quantities needed of each are relatively small, this shouldn't be
too much of a problem.

A second set of germ cultures could be used to convert some of the
previously created sugars and starches into lipids and proteins. Although
mother nature has already provided us with a number of germ cultures that do
just this, we may need to genetically engineer some of our own to be able to
produce all of the wide variety of proteins and lipids humans normally
require.

Germ cultures don't normally need sunshine, nor do they need large amounts
of land area, so this should all be achievable in a mass producible fashion
in electromechanically controlled factories. The basic ingredient
substances could then be collected and processed, also in a factory, into a
variety of recipes for tasty food products meeting all basic human
nutritional needs. Such a process wouldn't require the semi-barbaric
slaughtering of large mildly sentient animals. Vegetarians and PETA like
organizations should be pleased. Environmentalists should be pleased that
no pesticides or fertilizers are needed thus contaminating land and
freshwater resources.

All of the prerequisite technologies would appear to be in place.

Typical humans consume about 2000 food calories of chemical energy per day.
That works out to about 100 watts each on a continuous basis. Some have
claimed the electricity --> alcohol (chemical energy) process from plain air
can be done at perhaps 40% efficiency. It is hard to guess how efficient
the culturing processes would be, but presumably not very good. If we
assume the culturing process retains 25% of the original chemical energy in
the alcohol, then perhaps the overall electrical to food chemical efficiency
might be in the vicinity of 10%. This might suggest that each person would
require something in the range of 1kW of electrical energy. At five cents
per kilowatt hour (about what industrial users of baseload electricity pay
in the United States), each person would need about $1.20 per day of
electricity in the form of food.

On top of this one would have to pay operating/maintenance and capital costs
of the food factories, which might be fairly significant. On the other
hand, it may still be possible to produce food economically at cheaper than
current prices in this fashion. If so, I wouldn't expect it to be
dramatically cheaper than current methods.

If the electricity is derived from nuclear plants, then humans could be
effectively nuclear powered. This idea probably has appeal to some people.

Of course, many people take pride in eating very elaborately and expensively
(time consuming) prepared foods, so CHON food wouldn't necessarily have
appeal for everyone (even if they could be made into tasty recipes). On the
other hand, an earth sustainably supporting one trillion humans would
naturally require some sacrifices to be made.



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