Re: What would you do to save the environment?

On Sep 28, 9:38 am, jdnic...@xxxxxxxxx (James Nicoll) wrote:
You're focusing on the wrong problem. The only reason why
so much of the Earth's surface is devoted to feeding humans is because
we use amazingly inefficient ways to turn sunlight into the chemical
bonds we use. A human runs off of about 100 Watts and each m^2 of the
Earth gets about 210 Watts (taking into account things like albedo
and night). 6.5x10^9 people could be run off the sunlight that falls on
a patch of land less than 60 kilometers on an edge.

What we need are more efficient methods of creating food.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're suggesting here. As far as
I know, we use "amazingly inefficient ways" of sun-to-biomass
conversion because we're biological beings; there's no getting around
the 90%-loss-law for each step up in the food chain, unless you're
going to discard biology altogether and create some kind of machine
intelligence ecosystem. If you mean something along the lines of
terraced farming or aquaculture, that's not actually solving the
problem; it's just shoving it into a smaller space (terraces), or
under the rug (aquaculture).

.