[thevardanian]

Scientist: We need a machine that can fly so we can travel faster.

Universe: You have feet. It took me a few billion years to craft the perfect long distance running machine, and tuned it for your purposes and called it human.

In other words, what the are you even talking about? Naturalism is stupid. If we were to rely solely on what "God", err rather "universe" has "created" for us we would have been stuck in a stagnant evolutionary pool with little of the modern conveniences most of us enjoy today.

Forget spacefaring civilizations, forget even planetary civilizations, actually forget even nation-states we would be happily meandering about the Sahara with little care save for your typical eat-sleep-fuck routine.

[thatcat]

Scaling up and replicating the digestive tract and metabolic processes of a cow is so much more complex than a plane, that's a terrible comparison. Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too, because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?

[wcoenen]

> Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain?

Sarcasm aside, it is worth exploring. The typical photosynthetic efficiency of crops is only in the 1-2% range.

Modern solar panels reach 20%. The electricity can be used to produce hydrogen at 80% efficiency. The hydrogen could be used as energy input for an engineered yeast to produce proteins that we need.

I don't know about the efficiency of that last step, but it is at least plausible that the overall process could be more efficient than photosynthesis. Solar Foods[1] is betting that it will be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods

[thatcat]

That is actually very cool and a much more promising path than animal cell culture, but tbh even with 10+ years of sustained investment I have serious doubts about whether it would compete with lower yielding sustainable ag efficiency at scale. Glad someone is doing the research though.

Seems like there is a two step conversion, step 1 is 40-50% efficient in mass conversion H + co2 to acetate by Clostridium ljungdahlii, then a 25% efficiency conversion by yeast to biomass. So that's already down to 2% overall for .07g/L/h at lab scale. Then additional losses in down stream processing to remove the water. The output is more of a yeast protien meat replacement.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/microbes-and-renewable-e...

[Jweb_Guru]

It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production, on either a per unit solar energy or per unit resources basis (there are two general photosynthesis pathways that optimize for each of these two endpoints). That doesn't mean we can't beat them at other things, of course (as solar panels demonstrate) but this is what they are optimized for, and the competitive advantage of finding a better way to synthesize biomass is huge to the point that it only needs to evolve once to take over a large fraction of the Earth.

[wcoenen]

> It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production

I'm not so sure this is true. If it turned out that a more efficient pathway is possible with solar energy collection via sheets of extremely pure crystalline silicon (i.e. solar panels), then I would not think that it's strange that evolution didn't come up with it first. Some solutions simply aren't accessible to evolution.

[wcoenen]

Update: a relevant article appeared on phys.org this week about starch synthesis.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...

[Jweb_Guru]

> "According to the current technical parameters, the annual production of starch in a one-cubic-meter bioreactor theoretically equates with the starch annual yield from growing 1/3 hectare of maize without considering the energy input," said Cai Tao, lead author of the study.

It sounds like they're trying to save on land and freshwater, not energy or raw materials.

[da_chicken]

> In other words, what the are you even talking about?

I'm not talking about naturalism. I'm talking about economics.

We're trying to grow muscle tissue without the rest of the organism present, and now we're finding out that you need basically the entirety of the rest of an organism in order to support growing vast quantities of muscle tissue.

Read the article. The exact problems that need to be solved -- supply nutrients and fluids, protect the tissue from infection, allow the tissue to be grown as large as the food supply that is available for it, etc. -- are exactly the same problems that an animal already has to solve in order to survive long enough to reproduce.

We're not talking about taking what a bird does and scaling up the concept to something large enough to carry a human. We're talking about taking what an organism does and replacing everything except the muscle tissue with an artificial replacement. You need a circulatory system, immune system, digestive system, respiratory system, temperature regulation system, waste removal, etc. It's not a bigger version of what nature has to do. It's identical to what nature already has to do. They're the same problems on the same scale. It doesn't really matter if we're talking about scaling to massive 100 ton batches. A blue whale is 200 tons.

That's why it's so hard to create something artificial to compete economically with animal husbandry. Evolution has already had to solve the identical problems, and it's already done so with the requirement of selecting for efficiency of resources. All we did with animal husbandry was also select for optimal growth and domesticity. And the scales that nature already operates at are already within the range of what is logistically workable for human industry.

It's not that nature does it better. It's that nature's been solving this problem since abiogenesis and it wasn't particular about the flavor of the muscle tissue it got. It shouldn't surprise us that it's solution is cheaper cheaper or more efficient. It has over 3 billion years of a head start.