Re: What would you do to save the environment?

In article <1191091649.655115.33680@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Damien Valentine <valends3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

We're constrained by our nature to consume chemicals of
a particular sort to fuel ourselves but there's nothing except the
fact that we don't know how to do it economically yet that says
that we need to use conventional biology to produce those chemicals.



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