/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.15776127]

Is vertical farming legit or just another money sink for fear mongers

[Anonymous No.15776152]

>>15776127
The truth is that theoretically vertical farming can be good for the environment if we had unlimited renewable power. There's the catch: unlimited renewable power is something I consider to be straight up impossible. We can't produce enough clean energy for everybody to have an EV, much less make the food you eat.

Some people will probably attempt it, and vertically farmed foods may start to enter the market. Will we ever start to see 100% of veggies from a vertical farm? No, it'll probably max out at 1-2% or some irrelevant number.

[Anonymous No.15776161]

>>15776152
It should work well for places like Iceland that have an excess of local energy but poor agricultural productivity.

[Anonymous No.15776163]

>>15776152
Nuclear power solves this

[Anonymous No.15776169]

>>15776152
Basically this. Consider a vertical farm powered by solar. You get the advantages of growing indoors, but you need to adequately light several floors or shelves. If we assume that it takes a field of solar panels the size of the buildings footprint to light each floor or shelf, then you end up needing the same horizontal land area as if you planted a regular field. Modern lighting is highly efficient and LEDs optimized for plant growth use less energy than their white counterparts for the same plant growth and many crops don't need full sun, so our assumption is pretty reasonable. Agrivoltaics is much more worthwhile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics

Even just using cabbage fields in the US, which show improved yield with the shading, we could generate about 10 times the energy used by the US.

[Anonymous No.15776170]

>>15776163
We'd run out in about a century.

[Anonymous No.15776173]

>>15776163
run out of what exactly?

[Anonymous No.15776219]

>>15776173
Wrong guy...

[Anonymous No.15776250]

>>15776161
Yeah, except Iceland is basically the biggest outlier for everything on the planet

[Anonymous No.15776251]

>>15776173
Fissile material. Look up estimates for how long various power sources are projected to last and then divide the figure for nuclear by the percent of our energy, in all forms, generated by nuclear to find out how long it would last as our sole source of we never used more energy than we do now. You can probably even find projections that directly investigate how long various sources would last as our sole energy source to save you the arithmetic.

[Anonymous No.15776307]

>>15776251
Youre so fucking stupid

[Anonymous No.15776310]

>>15776251
You're so based

[Anonymous No.15776331]

>>15776127
Yes, if you're talking about hydroponics it can produce good food and be environmentally friendlier than soil-grown because it saves on energy and water and ideally doesn't pollute as much (including the soil).

The caveats are all in the inputs: energy and water. Obviously gas is not sustainable (though methane is better burned to CO2) but that's what currently powers lots of greenhouses but it's increasingly powered by geothermal energy, hydro, nuclear etc
>>15776152
No such thing as unlimited power but we're closer than ever to meeting and exceeding as much power as we can utilize with developments in nuclear fission (10.000 years' worth) and fusion (more than we'll need for the foreseeable future) alone.

[Anonymous No.15776339]

>>15776152
>We can't produce enough clean energy for everybody to have an EV
That's because EV/cars are insanely power-hungry/consuming and there have never been 7B people co-existing on Earth before and (soft) bottlenecks in supply of current battery or capacitors and also most electrical grids need massive upgrades to charge a large amount of EVs, not because there's not enough electricity generating capacity.

[Anonymous No.15776361]

>>15776127
It's superior in every way except the one that matters most: capital cost

[Anonymous No.15776369]

>>15776251
You're so cringe

[Anonymous No.15776370]

>>15776170
thorium?

[Anonymous No.15776373]

It could be effecient if you use an extremely energy dense power source like Nuclear. Less use of space, water, fertilizers, pesticides, and higher yields. But you're really swapping dependence on weather with dependence on power generation.
There are dangers to overabundance without other structural changes, jsut look at the unintended consequences of the green revolution.

[Anonymous No.15776562]

>>15776331
>and fusion
Shut up, just shut up nigger. 40 more years right? And it'll be 40 more years 40 years from now. It's like saying you'll kill yourself now so that when they invent a flux capacitor someone can come back in time and stop you. It's fiction, it doesn't exist.

[Anonymous No.15776591]

>>15776339
You are a fucking retard. We can't just base the future on "If only"s. If only we could somehow alter the already incredibly fragile grid to do what it wasn't designed to do. If only we could find some infinite power source tomorrow and all our problems would be solved. If only we had infinite power to recreate thousands of acres of land in some fucking skyscraper, and you can't use fossil fuels or that completely negates the entire point of it.

You retards are living in a fairy land where every sci-fi movie becomes reality. Even if we did do vertical farming, it's just gonna overpromise and underperform like all this overhyped futuristic shit.

[Anonymous No.15776617]

>>15776127
Perfect match for the brave new lifestyle.

[Anonymous No.15776628]

>https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/food-and-farms/why-vertical-farming-just-doesnt-work
>I did some back-of-the-envelope math with one disillusioned investor, and we calculated that indoor farms like the one he had supported would require every megawatt of America’s current renewable energy production to grow just 5 percent of America’s tomato crop.

[Anonymous No.15776671]

>>15776370
yeah indeed, we have more then 200 years of thorium easely extractable to fuel the world(with increasing energie demand taken into account), lit will give us lots of time to learn how to extract it better, or find a new power source, as long as the rapidly decreasing QI doesn't stop energie investments

[Anonymous No.15776927]

>>15776127
Hydroponics are an abomination. Skipping the cycle of nature and replacing it with a bag of chemical powder will cause untold sickness, soil depletion is not something that has an outright easy fix and so why would this be a complete system.

[Anonymous No.15776979]

>>15776127
where do u get the power for it? You just end up having the surface covered in solar panels, then have a load of farms underground using lights powered by the solar panels.

[Anonymous No.15776981]

>>15776127
oh the real answer btw is it depends on the price of energy
you end up paying all the costs a normal farmer does plus keeping some lights on all day long

[Anonymous No.15777212]

>>15776927
a lot of hydro grown vegetables taste like hydro chemicals.
terrior is concept that seems to be unknown to the producers and consumers of vertical goyslop

[Anonymous No.15777283]

>>15776127
It's legit, but costly. Leaches making money off of owning property hate it.