Growing Food With Air and Solar Power Is More Efficient Than Planting Crops (phys.org) 247
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Naples Federico II, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has found that making food from air would be far more efficient than growing crops. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis and comparison of the efficiency of growing crops (soybeans) and using a food-from-air technique. [...] To make their comparisons, the researchers used a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity, which is combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove nucleic acids and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals.
They compared the efficiency of the system with a 10-square-kilometer soybean field. Their analysis showed that growing food from air was 10 times as efficient as growing soybeans in the ground. Put another way, they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.
They compared the efficiency of the system with a 10-square-kilometer soybean field. Their analysis showed that growing food from air was 10 times as efficient as growing soybeans in the ground. Put another way, they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.
Evoloution (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cool. But we could feed this food to that food and then the vegans could stop whining about it.
And we can feed this stuff to people in space.
Re:Evoloution (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have squirrels and raccoons and possums and fruit in my backyard in the city. It is only the prissy snowflakes that require sanitized store bought food that causes our problems.
Shut all the shops. Stop selling all the sanitised food.
Tell me, what are you eating next week, when all the squirrels, raccoons, possums and fruit have been consumed by hungry neighbours?
Re:Evoloution (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Evoloution (Score:2)
Most of humanity lived near rivers, ponds, or lakes until they learned to dig wells.
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Probably.
And most of them probably believe that if they were dropped into the world 50K years back, they'd be able to run it to suit them....
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Most agriculture grows food we were already eating. Fruit, grains, meat and fish were already common in the human diet. Dairy, not so much, though there is evidence that it was consumed by adults over 6000 years ago, even though most humans had no lactase to handle the lactose in milk. Lactase is a relatively recently evolved ability for our species.
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Do you honestly think the point of eating paleo diet is to live a paleo lifestyle ?
"send the ambulance away, oh I mean "awoo, gruff gruff shh" "
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Re:Evoloution (Score:4, Interesting)
People consume quite a lot of protein powder in pure form, and algae is already an ingredient in many, many foods. I don't think we're going to start eating bacterial slurry three meals a day anytime soon, but the food industry has lots of demand for basic food additives with particular properties.
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It appears to be true soylent color-of-some-sort. It's not green since that's people. Maybe it's red or yellow.
OT, yet Soylent: I had a co-worker who was an extra in the film Soylent Green. He was in the scoop of a front end loader that was scooping up people to haul them off. In the movie they were screaming. He told me they were laughing but the sound editor put in screams. So if you ever see that movie, notice that they are laughing.
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People really fail to grasp algae. It grows fast, it has a simple genetic structure and it can be genetically modified to produce anything.
So basically you can have in your kitchen, an aquarium that grows the ingredients for ham and egg and lettuce salad. Algae plants modified until the leaves form a square of algae bacon, just engineered over time, peel the skin and the sandwich sized slab of algae ham, grown to taste like ham with a texture similar to ham, another leaf, a slice of bread needing to be pee
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Or we could feed it to cows and then eat the new, guilt-free eco-cows!
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I don't mind whether a cow feels guilty, I care whether it tastes good.
(Spoiler: It does.)
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I think I will stick to food I have evolved over a few hundred thousand years to eat.
While that sounds nice, unless and until the world population is significantly reduced, that is not long-term viable. But don't worry, there will be a huge die-off of the species that drastically grew beyond sustainable levels in the not too distant future. After that, we will likely not be able to make things like that powder anyways.
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It's only not viable because of the asshole patrol of greedy fucks lined up to take a piece out of everything.
We can live sustainably on existing crops but that's not the choice we're making.
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I think I will stick to food I have evolved over a few hundred thousand years to eat.
Agree. There's so much that we don't yet understand about our biomes, microbiomes & nutrition. Plus, the USA has effectively banned research into the nutritional efficacy of dietary supplements at the behest of the food industry so that they can continue to make unsupported, outlandish claims.
I can see this having niche applications, like some of the examples others have posted on this thread. I can't see it as a broad replacement for dietary protein for most people. I suspect we'd see all kinds of diet
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I think I will stick to food I have evolved over a few hundred thousand years to eat.
And to think you've developed the ability to form sentences in such a brief time.
Re: Evoloution (Score:4, Informative)
Some of the above exist in both farmed and wild varieties(eg turkeys). The wild versions of the above are largely the same for easily thousands of years and are still widely eaten.
Re: Evoloution (Score:5, Funny)
Ocean mammals such as whales, dolphins, seals
When was the last time you ate a whale, dolphin, or seal?
Wild game such as deer, wild turkeys, quail, bats.
Uh, when was the last time you ate a bat? This could be important information.
Re: Evoloution (Score:3)
Re: Evoloution (Score:4, Funny)
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Uh, when was the last time you ate a bat? This could be important information.
We always do a "all you can eat" buffet at my P3 lab with the decommissioned bats. Would be a shame if they go to waste.
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When was the last time you ate a whale, dolphin, or seal?
Hmm.., Rye bread fresh from the baker, home made butter, sliced dolphin with a pinch of sea salt. Deeelicious..
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Vito said that's what I was going to be doing, but it just felt like getting beat up.
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No food that you eat was around a few hundred thousand years ago. It's all changed dramatically in the last 2,000 years.
Grapes. Pine nuts, Venison, Antelope, Duck, rabbit, squid, Salmon, carp, Hamachi, seaweeds, Saba, Unagi, Uni, crab, lobster, shrimp, ... want me to keep going?
There are a lot of foods we eat now that have been around a lot longer than Humans that are basically unchanged from when pre-humans started eating them.
Oh , and FYI, Homo Sapiens itself has only been around about 300, 000 years. [wikipedia.org]
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You seriously think grapes and rabbit haven't changed in the last 2000 years? You're wrong.
As for the other animals, they may be wild, but that doesn't mean they haven't changed over time [medium.com].
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Proposal to call this product "McFood" (Score:3)
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Honestly if someone could invent a meal pill that gives me all the nutrition I need and makes me feel full I'd switch to those for most meals.
Re: Proposal to call this product "McFood" (Score:2)
I don't think I'm ready to switch to a pill. I'd still want flavor, and having a meal over 10 or 15 minutes is an opportunity for me to take a break from what I'm doing, which I need for my own mental health.
I could imagine this turning into yet another class division - cheap protein pills given to the lower classes while the upper classes eat their burgers and fresh salads.
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I'd take the pill and use the time to go for a walk.
I imagine at first it would be expensive like those meal-replacement shakes (Huel and Syolent) but eventually you are probably right, real food would become pricey in comparison.
Efficiency, not cost (Score:5, Informative)
This is more energy efficient (based on solar input), but according to the paper, it is also more expensive than traditional alternatives.
Re:Efficiency, not cost (Score:5, Informative)
And conveniently, the paper buries the fact that they've hidden unaccountable external power sources beyond solar and they don't have a direct air capture technology for CO2.
I know, I know, I did the thing. I shouldn't have read the papCARRIER LOST
Re:Efficiency, not cost (Score:5, Informative)
Also worth mentioning that they didn't actually grow anything, they just did some back-of-the-napkin calculations.
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Or you have some other paper product in mind?
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Joke falls flat, the old modem disconnect was, "NO CARRIER"
I don't know where the "CARRIER LOST" thing comes from but I don't think it's what people think it is.
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"CARRIER LOST" means somebody ate the homing pigeon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Efficiency, not cost (Score:2)
There are direct air capture technologies for CO2, useless due to cost and/or unsustainably burning through consumables, but they exist.
Dozer said it best (Score:3)
"It's a single-celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs."
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yea yea Matrix quote. Only problem of course is the body can't survive on protein alone. Our bodies run on Fat, or un-ideally on carbs.
If all you eat is protein you will get hungrier and hungrier because your body isn't getting the fat it needs to create the energy it runs on. It's a bad way to lose fat deposits as your body consumes the body fat to supply what's missing but after awhile your body will start digesting your own muscles to reduce caloric demand, long before your fat deposits are gone and the
Re: Dozer said it best (Score:2)
I think soylent green will be a better protein (Score:2)
I hear it tastes a bit like pork. Just think of how good a SLT (that a Soylent lettuce tomato) will taste after a hard day's work.
And its renewable, combined with the future population controls it will be fully self-sustaining.
We've all seen this movie (Score:2)
the researchers used a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity, which is combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove nucleic acids and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals.
They say they're doing all that.
But they've been hiding the truth all along: It turns out their process didn't actually work.
In reality, that powder they've been selling you is made out of PEOPLE!
Protein is protein (Score:3)
They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.
Generally speaking, different types of nutrients have the same caloric value per gram. Looking at a nutrition label in front of me, that's 4 food calories for protein.
If the "protein" of this proposed food has "twice the caloric value" of regular protein, that puts it in the category of fat (9 calories per gram).
Soylent Green (Score:2)
Who knew that making soylent green was so efficient.
So, in other words, (Score:2)
Soylent Green is people. ...I MEAN food from air!!
uh (Score:2)
Growing crops IS a food from air system
The majority of the non-water mass of the plant is carbon, virtually all of which comes from the atmosphere
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Speaking of carbon; cute meme I saw yesterday had a cartoon of Bugs Bunny holding up a sign saying "You are the carbon they want to reduce."
Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
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A lot of crops nowadays are grown for animal not human consumption. Maybe we could feed this microbe stuff to our cows and chickens?
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more effecient maybe (Score:2)
But not as simple.
Many things can be efficient if they get complex enough.
Bio-reactors, microbe colonies (wanna bet THAT requires a VERY clean environment?)
And while they compare to a soybean crop, it's not soybeans or much of anything we'd recognize as food.
Other Cost Factors (Score:2)
Did they include the costs of the solar panels, and the effort to mine the rare earth materials that go into solar power? Solar power systems crap out after a few years; did they include the costs to replace them?
And I'm damned if I'm going to be eating soybeans and tofu for any significant fraction of my caloric intake.
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The question isn't about costs, it's about efficiency.
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Efficiency isn't a deciding factor in most cases unless costs are pretty much equivalent. Just because a method is fractionally more efficient, that doesn't mean this way is the best way.
LOL (Score:2)
That is a very optimistic summary. Why wouldn't they just have ten square kilometers of solar powered soybeans and then try and put the competition out of business so they can control the market? Right up there with computers saving you time I would say.
Calories vs Nutrients (Score:3)
Our bodies need calories as fuel, however nutrients as building blocks and "grease" to make things happen. For example, without B vitamins, particularly B12, your brain will not function.
Yes, if you go vegan, without taking supplements, or eating the right veggies, you can function well for a while. The body will use existing B12 stores for a few years, but then will fail in a very bad way.
(Not against being vegetarian, or vegan. I too enjoy the occasional salad. However these diets require significant care).
Same with this bacteria meal. Yes, this will give you the ATPs, and probably *many* of the nutrients you need (the paper lists them), yet real "food" can still not be replaced.
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Free from u (Score:2)
You go live in a country where the politicians mandate this fine nutritive paste, and I'll move somewhere free.
Another option ... (Score:2)
How about we use a MSR nuclear power plant to generate the electricity and restore ALL of the rain forest. It could also desalinate water for consumption and agriculture.
And before people start scream about nuclear power I would suggest you actually do some independent research into the subject and not just let the talking heads on TV tell you what to think. There are methods of extracting energy from fissile elements that are cleaner and have less of an impact on the environment than covering the world w
Re: Another option ... (Score:2)
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Why should I ask myself leading questions obviously biased against solar and wind and towards nuclear?
Because you might learn something new that could broaden your view of the world?
I also can't help but notice that you didn't challenge the validity of any of the questions I posed, only that they had a bias, just as yours do. Perhaps because you know as well as I that they raise valid points about the issues with solar and wind power being as "green" as people want to believe.
I don't know about the tailings issue, I haven't looked into the side environmental impact of Uranium mining before (I prefer Thoriu
It's more of a side dish. (Score:2)
Synthesis (Score:2)
Best is to in vitro synthesis food. Even growing plants is stupid, we should just eat synthetic food. We can synthesize all the proteins we need. Add whatever minerals. Let plants live free in the forests where they can be eaten by animals.
This would be nice if food were only calories (Score:2)
but you know.. manganese, zinc, iron, chromium, the various vitamins and other trace elements....
They are kind of required.
Amazon hard on (Score:2)
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Re: Amazon hard on (Score:3)
I live in New England, and it is a perfect example of how much of North America really wants to be covered in forest. Precolonial Massachusetts was nearly all forest. Then for 200 years it was deforested and farmed. As farming moved Midwest it slowly recovered back to a forest. It's fun to walk through forests in central MA and randomly come across a farmers stone wall.
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Oh, wait, all those words mean "place without trees", which is what we found when we got there. Never mind.
Definition of efficiency (Score:2)
Here efficiency is defin
Not really news. (Score:2)
Growing Food Mushrooms is known to be significantly more efficient, use significantly less resources and be significantly less labour intensive and it's basically the same thing what these guys are doing. The problem is, of course, turning mushrooms into something other than mushrooms. Because just eating those is not really the pinnacle of food variety.
Microorganisms producing our food is a very neat thing, especially if you can turn their output into simulated meat that is indistinguishable from dead mamm
Farming is... (Score:3)
Farming *is* growing food from air and solar power. This is such a cool aspect of crop growth - almost all of that carbon in the plant is derived from CO2. The plant is literally made out of thin air, and powered by solar energy. The we eat it (or we eat the animal that eats it).
The second aspect to this that I think is worth asking is carbon footprint. When sustainable farming methods are used, many crops are carbon neutral or negative. How carbon negative is this method? The benefit to the Amazon recovery is very real. If this were installed in, say, central Germany, would that efficiency and climate benefit still hold?
TFS is misleading (Score:3)
TFS is somewhat misleading. According to the actual paper [pnas.org], their technique produces 10 times as much protein in the same area, and 2 times as many calories. So, really, it's only 2 times as efficient (why? Because the result is mostly protein, with few fats or carbohydrates). That's no criticism of TFA, which does fair accounting. For example, they use real-world efficiency of solar cells, not theoretical efficiency.
That said, for only a 2-1 advantage, I don't think too many people will be enamored with bacterial protein powder.
Good News, Citizen (Score:3)
You will eat the bugs. You will live in the pod. You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Year: 2137 (Score:2)
I usually arrive to my sleep pod around 7:30pm, I got a good deal on it it's only $30,000 credits per week. When I arrive I really look forward to eating my proti-cracker rations. I get 300g per day, some people say it's too much, but I'm glad overseer Trixie Pelosi increased the rations from 280g. Some people call xem a White Capitalist because of that, but xeyr OK in my book. We're not barbarians like the creatures in the Outlands or MegaBaltimore.
Now excuse my while I cuddle-in with my e-anime pillow whi
What about taste? (Score:2)
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it's not real. It's a thought experiment. Their scheme uses an eta-prime efficiency term as a catch all for the energy inputs solar isn't supplying.
However, operating the SCP system also requires several electricity inputs not depicted in this linear chain, and we account for all of them by introducing another efficiency term H*, which is described below. For example, H* accounts for the energetic cost of operating DAC which supplies the CO2 required at steps (2) or (3).
And they don't appear to know how to do direct air capture of that CO2.
Basically they're pulling numbers out of their ass. Hell, we could take a bunch of Slashdot comments and get published in PNAS!
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Uh huh (Score:3)
> Because it's not real. It's a thought experiment.
Unfortunately not.
https://atelgroup.org/en/biote... [atelgroup.org]
Welcome your communist soylent overlords
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It would surprising though if this approach for producing nutritious substances is not much more efficient than growing regular crops as photosyntheic efficiency, in term of converting sunlight falling on a square kilometer into plant matter is less than 1% while good commercial solar panels are 23% at the moment.
Bioreactor products are not what people are typically eating as food thus far of course. Whether we need to do this or want to this on Earth, this is quote relevant to projects in which people live
Re:Uh huh (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with these "researchers" is why don't they then go in business and do it?
It's more energy efficient, but it's also more expensive. The energy here (sun) is free for farmers, so the only advantage is that it uses less land.
It uses significantly less land.
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You may be surprised to learn that the same times that solar panels cannot get optimal sun exposure is identical to those times when plants also do not have optimal sun exposure!
This is the same stupid argument given by anti-renewable people, that if you can't get 100% solar all the time then the solution is 100% useless. It's a ridiculous argument but it is brought out again over and over like a knee jerk reaction. In this particular instance the argument is nonsensical since it's obvious that plants do
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that, to the scientists: Well, duh! You can hardly get more efficient than micro-organisms in biology. A first semester microbiology class will make that quite clear already.
For example cyanobacteria are capable of photosynthesis. And they do it a lot more efficiently than any more complex organism, because they do not need to expend energy on all the rather complicated mechanisms that are at work in a higher complexity multi celled plant (like Soy bean).
But you can't just eat cyanobacteria for a number of reasons (one of them being that they can be quite toxic under certain circumstances).
So the main issue is always how to harness that efficiency on large enough scales to replace more conventional methods. And for that they do not have the technology.
Re:Uh huh (Score:4, Informative)
So the main issue is always how to harness that efficiency on large enough scales to replace more conventional methods. And for that they do not have the technology.
"They've" got an annoying website [solarfoods.fi] too
Ah, wait, you're talking about the guys who wrote the theoretical paper, I've linked to the site of a company that's in the process of doing it (or trying to at least).
My bad. ;-)
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Low cost feed for certain drought areas. Course there's the drinking water problem.
Vapoorizer (Score:2)
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Though now that I think about it (and drink coffee) maybe it would be good feedstock for chicken and cattle.
Re:Uh huh (Score:4, Insightful)
Powdered bacteria would be a welcome protein source for many foodstuffs, especially those which are already quite artifical. That "protein powder" so popular among various exercise programs is a good example.
No, they won't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Land-owners are paid to abstain from growing food. The reason is: they can already achieve amazing yields, and in fact can produce more than enough food per year to feed the entire planet several times over. They are paid to not do this so that the ensuing price spiral doesn't make the bottom drop out of the market and cause all kinds of economic devastation.
The world does not need new ways of producing cheap food. We already have have so many that our tax money is paid to people to stop them from using them! World hunger is a distribution problem, not a production problem.