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[TheBiggerFish]

@Execute/Dumbo.exe: No I cannot say hypocrac-... Hypocrisy I can say well enough though.

[ChairmanPoo]

@Execute/Dumbo.exe: No I cannot say hypocrac-... Hypocrisy I can say well enough though.

Every time you type this I'm going to keep posting this pic of the King of Spain...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

@Execute/Dumbo.exe: No I cannot say hypocrac-... Hypocrisy I can say well enough though.

Worst part was I actually checked to see if I was spelling it right, got one part, missed the other.
Speaking of, does that @[Username] thing even work?

[Frumple]

Not on this forum code, no.

[TempAcc]

In regards to the whole ~caring about the earth~ thing, my viewpoint is the same that was implicit when I said I'm against factory farming and slaughtering animals for meat (once we have the tech to substitute it for vat grown meat) is because its energy inefficient, and energy efficiency is an important thing if we want to transcend our current level of civilization. We can't rely on abundant resources forever, and new tech not only needs to be able to do new, cool things, but also do those new cool things in a better, less expensive way. Animals are eventualy going to become obsolete as a resource, since they're rather expensive.

I also lol at people who think true societal equality is something that can be achieved magically through political/economical systems. That is simply not possible until we cross a certain tech treshould like the one proposed by Eric Drexler. His idea of "nanofactories" is specially interesting. This is no crank or wild dreamer scientist guy, this guy is the father of nanotechnology as a field of scientific research and engineering saying "hey, this is a thing thats possible, and here's some of the cool stuff we can do with it".

[ChairmanPoo]

If growing it in vats is "too expensive", you're basically saying it's inefficient. Therefore the post amounts to: "I'm all for substituting farming with vat grown meat once vat grown meat becomes more efficient than farming, because farming will be less energy efficient". Which is a bit... tautological...

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Well, this is probably massively off the mark, but a good rule of thumb for trophic levels is about 10% of energy gets carried up each rung, as in, 90% of the chemical energy is used by the creatures who ate it for day-to-day survival, and that 10% is the amount put into muscle, fat, stuff like that, on average, of course, because of this, feeding those animals takes up a lot of space, which is something we won't always have a excess of.
Vat growing meat may be inefficient money-wise, but in terms of space and food use, it could be far more viable*.
_{*Take this with as much salt as you can muster.}

[penguinofhonor]

If you want to talk efficiency, we don't need fancy technology to make meat cheap. We just have to realize that approximately 4.8 million kilograms of useful human muscle mass just drops dead every single day. If we start utilizing that it's effectively free.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

If you want to talk efficiency, we don't need fancy technology to make meat cheap. We just have to realize that approximately 4.8 million kilograms of useful human muscle mass just drops dead every single day. If we start utilizing that it's effectively free.

But how do you suggest we just get the meat from the corpses without just breaking into people houses?
...Wait.
OF COURSE.
Retirement homes! This was planned all along!

[TempAcc]

If growing it in vats is "too expensive", you're basically saying it's inefficient. Therefore the post amounts to: "I'm all for substituting farming with vat grown meat once vat grown meat becomes more efficient than farming, because farming will be less energy efficient". Which is a bit... tautological...

The process is expensive right now, and when I say expensive in this specific context, I mean expensive in a different way then energy wise. Vat grown meat is financially expensive atm because the methods involved in its production are still not developed to their full potential, and aren't employed in normal industry yet (something thats not widely available is something that is more expensive then stuff that IS widely available, a scarce product is more expensive then a similar less scarce product, etc).
In regards to energy, space, environmental impact and maintenance costs, vat grown meat is ALREADY way, waaaaaaaay less expensive then raising cattle herds. Its a tautology only if you don't grasp what I mean by energy efficiency and "expensive".

[Sonlirain]

Except the infrastructure for growing vat meat is not there while traditional cattle herds are here and now.
Plus they are profitable so there's no real reason to switch.
Especially since almost none of the infrastructure carries over to the "meat vat" method and the profit is not nearly big enough to warrant building a whole new infrastructure just for it.

[TempAcc]

It is profitable in a way, actualy, when you realize you cut the costs involved in, say:

1-Infrastructure and labor force involved in properly feeding, herding, and generally keeping animals alive in semi-ok conditions;
2-Costs involved in keeping animals free from diseases, parasites and other similar things;
3-Costs involved in properly breeding (specially important for cattle) and accomodating baby animals with their mothers (otherwise you need a whole other chunk of infrastructure to handle that), logistics in avoiding inbreeding issues, etc;
4-Transport costs (you can't just pack animals in a truck to move them from place to place without damaging the product, and you also need special equipment to transport already slaughtered/butchered animals);
5-Labor, costs and risks involved in butchering;
6-Larger bones and some organs aren't a thing people generally like to eat, so you either need to sell them to other industries or incorporate them in the production of stuff that usualy don't sell for nearly as much as the meat itself;
7-The size and maintenance costs of the facilities you need to have to handle a profitable meat industry;
8-Costs in handling and dealing with animal waste (which is a cost you can recover by selling it as manure, but thats not something that can be done with every animal).

And several other details I can't even begin to imagine atm. Sure, vat grown meat does require its own infrastructure, which brings its own costs, but if the costs were even somewhat similar to regular meat production, I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be groups interested in marketing and selling it so soon.

[sprinkled chariot]

Churchill was building a wall every day. Literary. He would just build a wall from bricks and then order a worker to disassemble it, before cement gets dry.

[Harry Baldman]

Sure, vat grown meat does require its own infrastructure, which brings its own costs, but if the costs were even somewhat similar to regular meat production, I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be groups interested in marketing and selling it so soon.

The groups interested in marketing and selling it so soon is likely people just getting overexcited about a gimmick they don't have the technology to fully realize, or possibly also trying to drum up interest for their highly niche and extravagantly expensive product. Considering that among their goals is figuring out how to mass-produce their 200k burger, I doubt they have any earthly idea of what the end cost might be.

The infrastructure you'd need for a vat grown meat operation would presumably include nutrient medium production (first price I can get for Dulbecco's modified essential medium is 99 bucks for 10 liters), serum production (most likely candidate currently is fetal bovine serum, for which the first price I can find is 362 bucks for 0.5 liters, and which is rather amusingly harvested mostly from fetuses obtained from cows in commercial slaughterhouses), parts and maintenance for large-scale bioreactors (large-scale in terms of the current medical applications mammalian cell cultures tend to be used for), antibiotics to ensure sterility as well as whatever tissue engineering craziness these guys will likely try and achieve to try and make their meat more generally meatlike.

In short, more likely than not these guys got a pretty cool number to pitch (energy efficiency!) and they'll manage to handily fail at solving the underlying tragedy of environmental friendliness, which is that it's virtually always prohibitively harmful to profit margins and thus doomed to fail in the eyes of an unmotivated villain. But I guess on the positive side in a world where it does turn out well you could repurpose those unsightly slaughterhouses to act as sources of nutrients and growth factors for all those meat-growing vats.

[Neonivek]

Yay for losing friends over videogames!