Comments by "roidroid" (@roidroid) on "A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food | Lisa Dyson" video.

  1. spoiler: she's talking about ALGAE. edit: well... she also mentions hydrogen-eating bacteria, which is a bit different. But most of what she's talking about with growing protein, harvesting carbon, producing oils, is done with ALGAE. But i guess the tech is branching out from that into hydrogen-eating bacteria, cool.
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  2. solar cells are nowhere near as efficient as what?
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  3. It's much easier than the previous strategy tho, which was to grow algae using the direct sunlight. This new way, you can harvest the energy via solar cells and transport the energy via wires, which is a much easier (and more efficient) strategy than pumping algae around roofs. It's better to transport electricity over long distances, than to transport liquids over long distances. (ie: large solar installations can be in a far away locations where they don't get in the way, but your chemical plant can be right in the city where it's products are needed). It also allows you to use alternate sources of energy such as geothermal and nuclear, if needs be.
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  4. in deep space? Nuclear energy.
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  5. On earth you could use solar. This situation is a bit different to normal vertical farming, as the solar power collection has been decoupled from the vertical structure. So problems of crowding & shade have been moved outof the city to wherever the solar collector is (ie: the desert). Basically, this vertical farming could scale down underground rather than upwards.
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  6. nah
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  7. I empathize. But this is the sortof thing that can be deployed and scaled very rapidly, and is really only an evolution of already existing Algae bioreactor tech. If you want to visualise it: Look at large scale Algae bioreactors, and then remove the requirement for sunlight. edit: Hmm, an algae bioreactor is simply an industrial chemical plant with a sunlight component (which greatly complicates it). Remove the sunlight component and you've basically just got a normal industrial chemical plant. Like a factory that produces bread yeast, beer, or medicines. It's just a normal chemical plant, looks pretty standard & boring.
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