I also recommend for reading Dickson Despommier's book The Vertical Farm that Jed already linked. It is one of those books that are very stimulating for the imagination.
On 1.1.2013, at 20.11, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > It is an example of a technology which can solve many problems that many > people think cannot be solved. Indeed. It is surprising, that people are mostly blind for the devastation that traditional agriculture causes for the nature. Ca. 80 % of fertile land area is in use of agriculture where as the rest of the human activity (including cities, high ways and strip mines) takes only about 1.5% of (fertile) land use. This graph is self-explaining: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_land_use_map.png With simple arithmetics this means that without agriculture there is no need to worry with any environmental problems that are currently worrisome. Of course large scale vertical farming does require cheap electricity. However, I would predict that solar electricity will be cheap enough in 10 to 20 years. There is one curious detail, that unlike heavy industry, vertical farming does not require constant power production. Therefore vertical farming could be near term solution that could easily absorb output fluctuations in wind power production. This would be great argument from environmentalist point of view to invest on vertical farming, because vertical farming could make wind power far cheaper because it can absorb all the wind power generation fluctuations. > People make Malthusian predictions of starvation from overpopulation. This is also sad misconception by the people. Ethiopia is perhaps the most fertile country on this planet. Ethiopia could easily feed the entire population of Europe if Europeans would be willing to buy cheap African grain. > I say that technology such as cold fusion and vertical indoor farming can > solve these problems and avoid a crisis. Solar electricity could be potentially far cheaper electricity than even cold fusion. Therefore we do not need to rely only on rather speculative cold fusion economy that is in a best case decades away in the future. > We also need to control population with contraceptives, needless to say. I disagree. Venus alone could inhabit hundreds of billions of people. When we archive fully reusable spacecraft (my estimation is that first reusable spacecraft will fly in 2020's), we can start almost immediate settlement of Venus. With full reusability, oneway ticket into Venus costs just few hundred kilodollars per person. It is less than a bungalow on Western Earth. > There are many promising technical solutions to our problems lying around > unused. I think that Tesla Model S is one of the first sneakpeaks how technology can make problems such as pollution nonexistent. There is no need to make compromises with hedonism when we are environmentalists! Imagine an electric family sedan that accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds and has a range of 400 miles. These are the specs of Tesla Model S with 120 kWh battery pack (available in late 2013). —Jouni
