[Sabinus]

Technology can't save you from famines when there isn't enough sunlight to grow crops for a season or two. One good supervolcano and civilization might collapse or at least take such a hit as to be utterly transformed. Billions dead, etc.

[lazide]

Literally grow lights and nuclear reactors? (Or plain old gas turbine generators)

Technology is the only thing that can save anyone from that type of situation. Prayer sure wouldn’t help!

[Sabinus]

You think it's possible to put any decent percentage of our GLOBAL food production in greenhouses (remember with less light global temperatures go down) within ~6 months?

Billions would perish. If the luckier rich countries did not get nuked or invaded by armies or waves of endless starving refugees then they would be able to save a good amount of their population. At best world development goes back ~50-100 years. At worst, modern civilization basically ends from the combination of conflict and famine.

[lazide]

that doesn’t address the context of the response at all.

is technology helping, or hurting in that situation?

near as i can tell, it is the only thing that could help.

we aso have significant food stores and buffers, and if it was the situation you described it would literally be a ‘drop everything and get working’ emergency. we’d likely do better than you expect.

what else could possibly help besides technology?

But yes, a lot of people would die.

[Daishiman]

You don't have the _slightest_ idea of how much energy and materials you would need to provide sufficient grow lights to feed humanity right?

[lazide]

Sure I do. Do you have anything else you can propose that would help at all?

And if a couple billion people (minimum) would be dead if we didn’t do it ASAP, do you think that energy or material wouldn’t be expended at the drop of a hat?

Hell, look at how much energy we expend just to serve cat videos.

People generally respond to sudden, external, visible risks pretty well.

It’s when risks are hidden, build slowly, or are caused by behaviors they consider ‘unsolvable’ and they’ve learned to adapt to that they suck.

[Daishiman]

Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare with 1 kWh LED lamps?

[lazide]

Depending on a bunch of factors

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601....]

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/how-much-energy-does-it-take-t...]

But let’s say we take the upper end of energy consumption multiples between input energy and output energy (kcal), say 120 times. So to feed 1 person 2000 kcal per day, would require 240,000 kcal worth of ‘production’ energy, which at that multiple would add up to 278 kWh per day per person. Signifiant!

Multiply that by the population of the US (345 million), and that is a lot of kWh for sure - 95910000000 kWh. But it looks like national energy usage is measured in ‘quads’. And that is .3 quads per day.

Current US energy production is approximately 100 quads per year, and consumption a bit less than that at around 90 something.

[https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/]

So if we picked the absolute least efficient most energy consuming plants, and grew them in the least efficient type of growing environment, we’d need to drop everything and devote all our energy production to it.

Assuming no rationing, no efficiency improvements (LED lights are quite efficient now, and if we really had this issue we’d of course devote 100% of available production to them!), and no bulk commercial production of simpler foodstuffs (we can make bulk sugars and proteins via bioreactors right now, for instance), it would be terrible but possible. At least for the US.

Countries with more solar production, or colder, would be harder hit of course.

China would be well positioned probably to pivot, and I’d be surprised if they didn’t use it to their advantage. Especially with turning up their nukes and pivoting all their solar plants to making LEDs instead.

India and Bangladesh would be really screwed though.

Everyone would finally think farming was cool again though, so that’s a plus.

[Daishiman]

I take it you never bought LED panels for indoor grow ops right? Never considered the cost and resources required for the wiring, installation, programming, making greenhouses in the span of a year? Do you know how much copper you need per capita? The bottlenecks in manufacturing? This is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.