| I actually think that food is the least of our problems. Now growing animals for food is incredibly wasteful (in terms of water and other resources). Lab-grown meat isn't economically viable yet but by 2050 I imagine it may well be. Still, it'll be hard to argue with the economics of how cheap it is to grow a cow. Fuels and metals are the big problem. The first is I believe a much bigger problem than the second. The reason is that there fuels are a means to an end: energy. When it comes to the electrical grid, you can supply that power with coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, wind power, solar power or nuclear power. It doesn't matter to the end user. It will be reflected in the price but the point is that you can make substitutions. The bigger problem is metals as we're rapidly running out of those or, rather, the cost of extracting those will in the next century or two drastically increase. It is incredibly cheap to rip up iron out of the ground (~$10-15/tonne IIRC). Transportation and smelting to steel may increase the overall cost by an order of magnitude but that's still cheap. Some look to space as a means to solving that problem but I have trouble fathoming a situation where extracting metals from the Moon or asteroids or whatever will be within even a few orders of magnitude of the cost of digging a big pit on Earth. Even if energy were free (in fuel terms), the cost of travelling far, retrieving the ore, refining it (probably in space) and getting it back to Earth are just fundamentally high (in comparison). I honestly believe there needs to be at least one order of magnitude less of us than there is now and there will be one way or the other in coming centuries. |
There's some interesting work being done on manufacturing food elements using synthetic biology[1]. they think it will cost one tenth of cheapest foods we have today, and will require little water. one of their food elements is a healthy substance with the taste of fat.
[1]http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5