Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kaijyuu]

Soylent green has always bugged me. Simple laws of entropy means people are a really bad food source.

Now it might work somewhat if you went out and actively harvested people (thus reducing the population), but in the original movie only people who died in the assisted suicide places and such were turned into soylent green. And if population reduction is your goal, simple genocide is far more practical.


Ok, I'm done ruining the joke

[Bohandas]

Soylent green has always bugged me. Simple laws of entropy means people are a really bad food source.

Now it might work somewhat if you went out and actively harvested people (thus reducing the population), but in the original movie only people who died in the assisted suicide places and such were turned into soylent green. And if population reduction is your goal, simple genocide is far more practical.


Ok, I'm done ruining the joke

The problem that I had with the movie was that given the social climate presented in the film, I don't really believe that the revelation or even eventual widespread acknowledgement of the fact that Soylent Green was made out of people would necessarily (as was implied in the movie) spell the doom of Soylent Corp. or even of the Soylent Green product line. Also, the film was ultimately unclear on whether Soylent Green actually was made out of people in a direct and literal sense, as the last stage of its production shown in the film involved the bodies being dumped into vats of liquid, which lends credence to the possibility that the company's clain that their product was made from algae could be true, (with people merely being used as a fertilizer or growing agent).

[Il Palazzo]

Soylent green has always bugged me. Simple laws of entropy means people are a really bad food source.

Now it might work somewhat if you went out and actively harvested people (thus reducing the population), but in the original movie only people who died in the assisted suicide places and such were turned into soylent green. And if population reduction is your goal, simple genocide is far more practical.

I've never thought of soylent green as being the sole food source, rather being one of many(and I believe in the book it is mentioned as such). It was just waste recycling pushed too far.

[forsaken1111]

A lot of the food issues could probably solved through vertical farming.  This is an idea where instead of growing plants and such on fields you grow them in skyscrapers.  This lets you to VASTLY increase the amount of available area to farm and lets you grow crops during the winter/out of season.  The downside is that you generally need artificial lighting/heating which costs a lot of power.

http://www.verticalfarm.com/
http://www.economist.com/node/17647627

Or we can just eat old people.  Whichever is easier. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Vertical farms are also phenomenally more expensive to set up initially than a traditional farmland, and the infrastructure of the building will cost ongoing maintenance as you mention. Not just lighting and heating but ducting for water dispersal, drainage for wastewater. The structure itself will need to support millions of tons of soil (or water, if hydroponic). If the climate isn't right or there is a lot of pollution (city farming) then the whole thing will need to be environmentally sealed and controlled which is also ridiculously expensive. It is a solution, but not the best solution.

[Bauglir]

Soylent green has always bugged me. Simple laws of entropy means people are a really bad food source.

Now it might work somewhat if you went out and actively harvested people (thus reducing the population), but in the original movie only people who died in the assisted suicide places and such were turned into soylent green. And if population reduction is your goal, simple genocide is far more practical.


Ok, I'm done ruining the joke

Actually, it still saves energy to feed humans directly to other humans, because you are necessarily going to lose energy in the intermediate step of feeding it to something else (or letting them decompose and otherwise enter the food chain). Since the only alternative to the humans ending up in the food chain eventually is to launch them into space for some reason, Soylent Green does save energy from the perspective of humanity.

The only question is whether it would be more cost effective in terms of shipping and processing compared to other food sources; it'd be more effective to eat your dead spouse who just had a heart attack an hour ago than it would be to eat the prepared and packaged remains of a family from halfway around the Earth, for example.

[alway]

The Oldies but Goodies Buffet:
We're here to serve you!

The problem with vertical farming will be the cost. Aside from energy issues, which via that Economist link appear far from solved (but will probably be solved with time), the biggest issue will be the initial cost. I can't imagine building a massive skyscraper complex with all the various things they want in it would be anything resembling cheap. We're talking well over $100 million here for a single vertical farm. Based on this http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_skyscraper_cost
the cost for the pictured diagram of the 20 story vertical farm in the Economist page would be somewhere between about $140 million and $300 million.

However, the other thing mentioned in the Economist which may catch on is adding on farming facilities to skyscrapers constructed for other purposes. At RIT's Innovation Center, they added a small indoor farm on the windows as an experiment. They ended up saving something like 15% on the building's environmental control costs due to decreasing the level of CO2, keeping it cooler, ect. And that was from a relatively small setup in a moderately sized building. A large corporate office would benefit from such window farming and save not only huge amounts in running costs, but make some produce and possibly even have an effect on morale in the building.

[nenjin]

If I recall correctly a few decades ago people were shitting their pants over the potential overpopulation of Africa. It turned out that AIDS and a resurgence of Malaria increased the mortality in the region and all the predictions turned out to be overestimated.

Honestly, this is what is going to stop humanity from ever truly carpeting the earth. Disease vectors. The population of Europe was at its peak when the black plague hit and basically reset the scales on economic activity, population growth, social and other factors. We've yet to see this millennium's black plague. As bad as AIDS might be it wasn't it. All it would take is a highly virulent outbreak in China, India or here in the US to spread globally and we'd see another resetting of the scales. Hopefully this time it would come with some mind toward conservation.

As the world population gets denser, disease vectors increase enormously. And as diseases evolve, they become more effective at spreading themselves, more resistant to current treatment methods and better killers of their hosts. Putting those two together and we're basically just playing the odds as our population increases that we'll see yet another super virus, tailor made for us as species in the 21st century.

[Grimshot]

 Humankind is much more vulnerable than people realize. I don't think we have to worry about the population getting too high yet. Wars, diseases, synthetic diseases, natural disasters, unnatural disasters, and whatever else should keep us under control for awhile in my opinion.

 Hmm, if we engineered people down to consume less food/resources I think we would eventually get something looking like one of those "Grey" aliens. Clearly UFOs are really just humans from the future observing us .

[Levi]

Vertical farms are also phenomenally more expensive to set up initially than a traditional farmland, and the infrastructure of the building will cost ongoing maintenance as you mention. Not just lighting and heating but ducting for water dispersal, drainage for wastewater. The structure itself will need to support millions of tons of soil (or water, if hydroponic). If the climate isn't right or there is a lot of pollution (city farming) then the whole thing will need to be environmentally sealed and controlled which is also ridiculously expensive. It is a solution, but not the best solution.

Oh its definitely more expensive to set up.  But people might not have a choice if we start to run out of food.  On a wider economic scale, you also can save some money because you don't have to ship as far and you don't generally need much in the way of pesticides. 

[forsaken1111]

Hmm, if we engineered people down to consume less food/resources I think we would eventually get something looking like one of those "Grey" aliens. Clearly UFOs are really just humans from the future observing us .

It's future me in my space saucer! Let's shoot me down and steal my future space technology of the future!

[nenjin]

And then, of course, there's always Soylent Green. Society is in no way mentally or emotionally prepared for that though.

[alway]

Oh its definitely more expensive to set up.  But people might not have a choice if we start to run out of food.

You assume those running out of food will be the wealthy.

We currently have approximately 1 billion undernourished people. There are approximately 1.7 billion in absolute poverty. That's at least another 700 million who can starve without anyone with money giving a shit. Even assuming we were to keep the same level of food production we have now, those with money would do just fine. Food prices worldwide are rising quite rapidly atm, but in the US and other developed nations, it stays about the same since most of the money we spend on food goes towards food refinement, processing, marketing, and packaging. Supply and demand necessitates a rise in food prices, but they won't rise to the level of making vertical farms costing hundreds of millions of dollar each into a feasible enterprise. Especially not with all the efficiency increases which can be gained simply by improving horizontal farming.

The reason for vertical farming is this: in the city, fresh produce is harder to come by, as it has to be shipped in. Vertical farming is intended to put fresh produce into the middle of a city with minimal land costs. It is not intended to boost the overall food supply, as they are incredibly expensive. Vertical farming for the sake of providing produce in the center of a city is essentially just a novelty food item.

The articles describe all about these wonderful efficiency increases and such, but the problem is this: those same efficiency increases can be applied even more easily to horizontal farming. With vertical farming, you must also provide light. They're making a false comparison when they compare the two by simply making the assumption that vertical farming will use the efficiency increasing methods while horizontal farming won't, despite nearly all of these methods being just as effective for horizontal farms. It's like saying "the car I have at home produced in 2005 can drive up to 90 miles an hour, while the wright flyer could only go about 30; therefore cars are faster than aircraft."

[Bohandas]

Soylent green has always bugged me. Simple laws of entropy means people are a really bad food source.

Now it might work somewhat if you went out and actively harvested people (thus reducing the population), but in the original movie only people who died in the assisted suicide places and such were turned into soylent green. And if population reduction is your goal, simple genocide is far more practical.


Ok, I'm done ruining the joke

In terms of using cannibalism to end world hunger, the most practical method would be the one outlined in A Modest Proposal. I know that its intended to be satirical, but ultimately there are no practical reasons why it wouldn't work, only moral ones.

It works fine for mice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Mice-3824/2008/5/Preventing-cannibalism.htm
http://www.ratbehavior.org/infanticide.htm
http://research.uci.edu/tmf/husbandry.htm

[nenjin]

To me it's a realistic solution because, over time, humans would be the most abundant resource and the cheapest. The movie is what I would consider the whole reclamation of human tissue for food business in its adolescent stage, where it's a popular replacement good. You could do the movie again when the system is more developed (and necessary) where it turns into the total dystopian-human-food-farms.

[Criptfeind]

Human food farms is a silly idea, the most it will ever get to is eating people who died naturally (or in a famine killing people to eat them) actually raising people for food is stupid because we already do that much more efficiently with some animals then we can ever do with humans.