/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10630314

You've got cheap, carbon-neutral plastics or polycarbon sheets to make greenhouses, which seriously cut water usage and keep warmer temperatures, but you can also heat them since you have cheap power. So you gain all the deserts and tundras as growing space and more efficient growing space since greenhouses loaded up with warm temps and cheap fertilisers produce orders of magnitude more food than old fashioned pre-industrial farming.

But it doesn't end there. You've probably heard of vertical farming, the notion of growing food in multiple layers. Now this idea, outside of over-hyped popsci articles, normally only calls for a couple of layers because while plants don't use mos the sunlight that hits their area, they don't use so little of it you can stack layers of growth dozen high, and skycrappers are way more expensive per square foot than normal buildings which are vastly more expensive than cheap greenhouses which are more expensive than normal land. But someone inevitably points out you could light your skyscrapper vertical farms, especially with modern super-efficient LEDs. That's true except that the energy needed for that is hugely expensive compared to other routes of getting more calories per energy and effort put in. Of course, if you've got cheap fusion, that's no longer true.