this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Vertical farming is not sustainable with our current power options, we need every wh to replace fossil right now, we can’t add the energy needs of farming to the equation
It won't be tomorrow, but I think it will happen. It could start in regions baking in too much solar.
I’m always hoping fusion will do a major leap… I’ve been waiting for a while… but you’re right, there are niches, like places where nothing grows, where water is in short supply, etc.
Fusion is very hard. There's been some intriguing progress and I do believe we'll get there – and maybe sooner than many think – but to have a real effect on the climate change timeline I think we'd need to be just about finished with the experimental phase now (if not several years ago) and moving into widespread scale-up. That's just not realistic at this point, unfortunately. So while promising in the long view, I wouldn't bet on it solving any of our near-term problems.
(Edit: and that's ignoring the practical issues of sourcing the required amounts of deuterium / tritium and beryllium, which would rapidly exceed the entire world output under any kind of real scale-up)
Ugh don’t make me think about the tritium issue… I think we’ll get there too, but it should have been yesterday as you said…
Well at least we got voice controlled lights before the end of the world, that’s something… /s