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[wierd]

Only gets you a tiny sliver of increased efficiency. Not nearly enough to halt the avalanche.

[sluissa]

You'd use significantly less land with greenhouses than you would with open air farms. Once you start building things you no longer have to think in 2 dimensions with everything planted on a flat plane. You can build and plant in whatever shape you want.

It's not even a new idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_Gardens_of_Babylon

[Dunamisdeos]

Only gets you a tiny sliver of increased efficiency. Not nearly enough to halt the avalanche.

I think if I could build a second farm literally over top of my current farm the increase would be somewhere around 100%, on account of the doubling of farm in the same area.

As stated, this assumes efficient control of water use.

[smjjames]

Only gets you a tiny sliver of increased efficiency. Not nearly enough to halt the avalanche.

Hydroponics? The point is more to use the space efficiently and use space that is otherwise unused.

You'd use significantly less land with greenhouses than you would with open air farms. Once you start building things you no longer have to think in 2 dimensions with everything planted on a flat plane. You can build and plant in whatever shape you want.

It's not even a new idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging_Gardens_of_Babylon

Make that hollow and plant stuff inside (would have to use lighting, obviously), and bam, you have 3D farming.

Only gets you a tiny sliver of increased efficiency. Not nearly enough to halt the avalanche.

I think if I could build a second farm literally over top of my current farm the increase would be somewhere around 100%, on account of the doubling of farm in the same area.

As stated, this assumes efficient control of water use.

That's increased production, not efficiency. You'd have to deal with almost exactly the same problems that you'd face in an offworld colony, but that's not insurmountable.

[wierd]

Wont work. 

Sunlight is required for plants, and you cant just increase the amount of sunlight without causing an ecological catastrophe elsewhere.  There are fundamental limits to what you can achieve without the use of artificial lighting, and the use of artificial lighting increases energy costs proportional to the increase in density of the artificial agricultural development space invested. (and losses from transmission, and inefficiencies of conversion by plants into biomatter)

Even if we switched to fusion, there is only so much hydrogen on the planet, and you are just trading one catastrophe now, for another one later.

[MrRoboto75]

well I guess we'll just do nothing then

[smjjames]

Wont work. 

Sunlight is required for plants, and you cant just increase the amount of sunlight without causing an ecological catastrophe elsewhere.  There are fundamental limits to what you can achieve without the use of artificial lighting, and the use of artificial lighting increases energy costs proportional to the increase in density of the artificial agricultural development space invested. (and losses from transmission, and inefficiencies of conversion by plants into biomatter)

Even if we switched to fusion, there is only so much hydrogen on the planet, and you are just trading one catastrophe now, for another one later.

Hydrogen is one proton and one electron, shouldn't be hard to make......

[wierd]

Says the guy who does not understand entropy. (It's proton btw. Not neutron.)

[Dunamisdeos]

Wont work. 

Sunlight is required for plants, and you cant just increase the amount of sunlight without causing an ecological catastrophe elsewhere.  There are fundamental limits to what you can achieve without the use of artificial lighting, and the use of artificial lighting increases energy costs proportional to the increase in density of the artificial agricultural development space invested. (and losses from transmission, and inefficiencies of conversion by plants into biomatter)

Even if we switched to fusion, there is only so much hydrogen on the planet, and you are just trading one catastrophe now, for another one later.

Hydrogen is one neutron and one electron, shouldn't be hard to make......

Wouldn't that be like, much, much later? I thought hydrogen was stupid common. For fusion I mean.

These guys think its fine http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/FAQ.aspx#Fuel

[Baffler]

We would, to my understanding, basically have to go back to a pre-modern agricultural model to stay sustainable and even that would need to be painstakingly modified to be truly sustainable instead of just sustainable on a much longer timescale.

Heh, maybe we should just do our damnedest to fuck off entirely and live in space. Dismantle everything but the culturally significant landmarks for tourism purposes, but otherwise leave the place to nature and maybe a few Amish and indigenous communities. That's among the least feasible solutions though, even less than a culling as far as I know. Might as well hold out hope for AI Jesus.

[smjjames]

Says the guy who does not understand entropy. (It's proton btw. Not neutron.)

Yeah, just checked wiki and corrected myself.

Also, you're being so uber pessimistic that I think you're just trolling around at this point.

[Egan_BW]

Hydrogen is a bunch of times more common in the universe than any other element. At some point "it's not sustainable" becomes an irrelevant argument because the universe is unsustainable. If we only want solutions that will work forever, our options are suicide and, uh, that's it.

[wierd]

In terms of galactic scale, yes. It is super abundant.

For an example of a world that is hydrogen impoverished, look next door in the solar system at Mars. (though it is also nitrogen impoverished.)

If you want to have a "sustainable" fusion industry, you need to balance the rate of hydrogen consumption against the rate of cosmic hydrogen entering the earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. (it's absurdly small.)

Failing that, you have to start raining big water ice shipments from space. (and there is only so much out there.) That adds another layer of entropy expenditure though, because now you have all the energy costs associated with an essential space presence.

Nope, really, for geological timescale versions of sustainability, human population must radically decrease.

Egan--

I do not propose "heat death of the universe" scale sustainability-- just "More than a few thousand years, when honestly evaluated against the trend in energy consumption by mankind, with reasonable assessment of entropic losses".

Look at the rate we currently burn fossil fuel for the energy inside. On the order of millions of barrels of oil per DAY.  To get similar energy out of fusion, we would be consuming that much fresh water daily to keep the lights on.  There is only so much water on the planet.

[sluissa]

Energy is basically free if we get off of burning stuff for it. The sun is a fusion reactor that will last us longer than anyone can predict ahead on the planet. Solar works. Storage works. It's just a matter of investing in the infrastructure to use it.

We could literally grow 100% artificial lighting if we switched to solar, with no problem. Luckily that's not necessary, windows, mirrors and prisms are a thing.

Even the water use angle isn't really relevant. Hydroponics are up to 500% more efficient in water usage than field agriculture. There's a lot of wasted water that never gets to the plant in the field. A good hydroponics system will keep the same water flowing past a plant until it uses it rather than dropping it on a field once and letting most of it EVENTUALLY flow to a river and into an ocean, or evaporate into the sky.

Once again, it's all a cost thing. Thing grow in dirt, dirt is cheap. Oil makes them grow better, oil is cheap. It's not that these ideas are impossible, it's just that they're currently not worth it economically to invest in an expensive initial overhead project to get a marginally better return somewhere down the line. Let the economy collapse, and maybe people will realize money isn't hot shit anymore and will focus on the stuff we really need.

[smjjames]

In terms of galactic scale, yes. It is super abundant.

For an example of a world that is hydrogen impoverished, look next door in the solar system at Mars. (though it is also nitrogen impoverished.)

If you want to have a "sustainable" fusion industry, you need to balance the rate of hydrogen consumption against the rate of cosmic hydrogen entering the earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. (it's absurdly small.)

Failing that, you have to start raining big water ice shipments from space. (and there is only so much out there.) That adds another layer of entropy expenditure though, because now you have all the energy costs associated with an essential space presence.

Nope, really, for geological timescale versions of sustainability, human population must radically decrease.

Did you even look at the link that Dunamis posted? It doesn't even use all that much water, though I'd rather use other fuel sources besides water.