Marine life in world's oceans vanishing

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3236134/Marine-life-halves-45-years-Overfishing-climate-change-pollution-blamed-potentially-catastrophic-decline.html

This hurts us, especially those of us not near the coast.

[cherimoya_kid]

Cheap vat-grown meat is the solution.

[TylerDurden]

Cheap vat-grown meat is the solution.

The expense will be vast, and the resulting product cannot ever hope to equal the nutrition found in raw, grassfed/wild meats. Besides, what if they produced all such meat precooked?

[cherimoya_kid]

The expense will be vast, and the resulting product cannot ever hope to equal the nutrition found in raw, grassfed/wild meats. Besides, what if they produced all such meat precooked?

The expense will decrease exponentially, as it always does with new technologies. At its heart, it uses far less land, water, time, and human input...therefore it will be cheaper than farmed meat.

As far as nutrition goes, the meat will absorb the nutrients it is grown in. If it's grown in a rich nutrient solution, then it will be nutritionally rich.

As far as being sold pre-cooked, that's a non-issue. It's already easy to set up a hydroponics or aquaponics operation in your home, relatively cheaply. Home-grown vat-grown meat would be similarly easy, once the process is streamlined.

As time passes, we are moving back to local production of everything.

1. Electricity from solar
2. Goods from 3-D printers
3. Food grown hydroponically

Etc. it's a trend that shows no sign of reversing. Why would it? And don't babble on about the collapse of society. We're actually far more safe and stable now than at any time during the Cold War.

[TylerDurden]

Err, mass current migrations occurring due to f*cked up 3rd-world governments, due to wars etc., current huge droughts in the US with every sign things will be even worse in the future, mass ecosystems being wiped out, and so on and on.

I have only been able to grow some sprouts in a hydroponic way, I suspect that they are nowhere near as good as the genuine article. Meat also does not just require an input of nutrients, the base nutrients need to be processed in an animal stomach and then  redistributed as muscle etc. Any other roundabout method would  inevitably lead to far lower quality. Plus, growing meat hydroponically cannot possibly replicate the benefits of exercise on the meats.

Solar energy is also a dud. I just recently checked, due to a foolish recommendation by a relative, and found that a certain Italian villa would require at least c.50,000 euros+ to get the solar energy I needed, with almost a decade required to get back enough costs. In the UK, there used to be plenty of Green financial incentives to buy solar energy but they have now been done away with, so that it costs even more in the UK.

[cherimoya_kid]

Solar energy is improving exponentially every year in price, efficiency, and adoption. So you lost that point.

Since you're too lazy to research hydroponics, I'll summarize my many years of research.

1. It's easy to equal the best soil-grown vegetable quality with hydroponics. Just use the strongest mineral nutrient solution the plant can take, and do a little foliar feeding, and boom! You're done.

2. With fruiting plants it's a little harder, so you have to use more foliar feeding. Otherwise, that's it.

As far as 3rd-world instability goes, that's NOTHING compared to the 1st-world instability we survived in World War II and , to some extent, the Cold War.

I win.

[lb_on_the_cb]

Solar energy is improving exponentially every year in price, efficiency, and adoption. So you lost that point.

Since you're too lazy to research hydroponics, I'll summarize my many years of research.

1. It's easy to equal the best soil-grown vegetable quality with hydroponics. Just use the strongest mineral nutrient solution the plant can take, and do a little foliar feeding, and boom! You're done.

2. With fruiting plants it's a little harder, so you have to use more foliar feeding. Otherwise, that's it.

As far as 3rd-world instability goes, that's NOTHING compared to the 1st-world instability we survived in World War II and , to some extent, the Cold War.

I win.

agree with you on solar but i'm skeptical of hydroponics.  im sure they can grow plants that look healthy but just like commercial produce grown on huge industrial farms, is the food actually nutritious or low in most trace minerals? i think we may find out decades later that hydroponically grown vegs are also inadequate.

[cherimoya_kid]

agree with you on solar but i'm skeptical of hydroponics.  im sure they can grow plants that look healthy but just like commercial produce grown on huge industrial farms, is the food actually nutritious or low in most trace minerals? i think we may find out decades later that hydroponically grown vegs are also inadequate.

Actually, it's pretty simple to test the nutritional content. A refractometer can give you a good rough idea of the total nutrient content, and lab testing shows that hydroponic veggies are of at least similar nutrition as soil-grown, if not better. Fruits are harder to make work, but you just have to foliar feed the leaves with a nutrient solution maybe once a day.

[lb_on_the_cb]

Actually, it's pretty simple to test the nutritional content. A refractometer can give you a good rough idea of the total nutrient content, and lab testing shows that hydroponic veggies are of at least similar nutrition as soil-grown, if not better. Fruits are harder to make work, but you just have to foliar feed the leaves with a nutrient solution maybe once a day.

yeah, i believe that brix stuff is useful but i dont trust hydroponics.  There are a lot of things going on in the soil to help the plants (different beneficial fungi and bacteria, who knows what else) and just like the farmers (and scientists) who believed NPK was enough...maybe they will supplement 15 different minerals this time but later we'll find out the plants looked fine but something was missing.   

[TylerDurden]

Solar energy is improving exponentially every year in price, efficiency, and adoption. So you lost that point.

Not really. After all, we have been peddled solar power as THE one power for the consumer since the 1980s, but inherent problems always cropped up which made it a lot less viable than the media claimed.

Since you're too lazy to research hydroponics, I'll summarize my many years of research.

1. It's easy to equal the best soil-grown vegetable quality with hydroponics. Just use the strongest mineral nutrient solution the plant can take, and do a little foliar feeding, and boom! You're done.

2. With fruiting plants it's a little harder, so you have to use more foliar feeding. Otherwise, that's it.

I always remember arguing with my father, with me pointing out the utter uselessness of absorbic acid supplements, and him stating:- " but, look, ascorbic acid is the same chemical compound as vitamin C, so it must be just as healthy. " Never mind the fact that excess vitamin C has not been proven to be healthy for us, but my father had failed to realise that a lot more goes into a substance than just nutrients.

As far as 3rd-world instability goes, that's NOTHING compared to the 1st-world instability we survived in World War II and , to some extent, the Cold War.

I win.

Not really. Most futurians get their predictions wrong in the end, whether pessimistic or optimistic. What I meant was that as human technological complexity increases, our  negative impact on the environment will inevitably grow, and multiple disasters will happen in all areas. For example, what good would hydroponics be if drinking water was massively contaminated around the world? Take another example:- earthquakes used to kill very few people around the world, now, with overpopulation, the numbers of casualties  are much bigger than before.

Here is an article which point outs how unviable and expensive  hydroponics is right now:-

http://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dirt-free-farming-will-hydroponics-finally-take-off/

[cherimoya_kid]

Geoff, I would suggest actually researching solar before you laugh it off.

As far as hydroponics causing some secret nutritional deficiencies, that's completely unsupported by any research of ANY type. Anxiety does not equal fact.

[cherimoya_kid]

Your article, Geoff, by the way, completely overlooks the complete automation of farming and the decrease in the cost of green energy. Both of those are going to revolutionize food production within 15 years or so.

Geoff, my advice is to stick to what you know. You're a smart guy, but you simply have not done your research in these areas. Nor will you, because you are so filled with hate for the human race that you refuse to be open to the possibility that things might get better for everyone without some major disaster that kills off most humans. And that, sir, is that.

[TylerDurden]

Geoff, I would suggest actually researching solar before you laugh it off.

I have done so, on two different occasions, once in the early 2000s and once a few months ago. I found that it was not only not profitable, but also that all the green incentives re less tax etc. were all now being removed in the UK as they were considered too much of an expense for the government in an age of austerity. GS backs me up on this as regards profitability.

As far as hydroponics causing some secret nutritional deficiencies, that's completely unsupported by any research of ANY type. Anxiety does not equal fact.

Well, OK, then  fact is that my past experiments with hydroponically-created sprouts of various kinds were pretty dismal, whereas my experiments with raw wild game a few months later were stupendously beneficial to my health.

[TylerDurden]

Your article, Geoff, by the way, completely overlooks the complete automation of farming and the decrease in the cost of green energy. Both of those are going to revolutionize food production within 15 years or so.

They have been talking about the decrease in cost of green energy for decades, but there are many issues with it and the predictions are not met. Wind-farming, for example, kills wild birds in huge numbers, blights the countryside, and isn't really profitable, still.

Geoff, my advice is to stick to what you know. You're a smart guy, but you simply have not done your research in these areas. Nor will you, because you are so filled with hate for the human race that you refuse to be open to the possibility that things might get better for everyone without some major disaster that kills off most humans. And that, sir, is that.

Well, I am actually more of a hopeless romantic. I have seen how even supposedly beneficial(modern) things in my life have turned out to be an indirect problem. Take the Internet, it forces me to sit down in an unnatural way for hours every week. As a result, my levels of exercise are abysmal, and certainly neither natural nor palaeo. I can see you do not have a problem with, say,  living, 50 years in the future, in an endless overcrowded urban desert, eating daily some yellow gloopy substance coming from a packet with a label stating "authentic, 100% grassfed meat"). It just reminds me of that  book I read as a child by E M Forster, "The Machine Stops". At least when I am tearing a raw wild hare carcass with my teeth or hacking a raw oyster off its shell etc., I feel a bit more human as a result.

[TylerDurden]

More "doom and gloom", as CK would say:-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3237229/Air-pollution-kill-6-6-million-year-worldwide-2050-emissions-India-China-largest-impact.html

[RogueFarmer]

Hydroponics and lab grown meat will be 100% much more expensive than naturally grown beyond any shadow of a doubt. The only reason you could possibly conceive otherwise is because of inflated property values, failure agricultural models and cheap readily available energy that is causing environmental harm. You still have to mine for and manufacture solar panels. None of this stuff is free. Even if what you say is true it just gives purchase for humans to create even more cities, keep rapidly increasing population and destroying the earth. It's like scientists forgot that perpetual motion machines don't exist and can't exist. Where are all these minerals and nutrients coming from? What form are they in? Are they synthetic or natural?

There is no free lunch.

Humans are never going to be able to beat the food production that nature is capable of, that can sustain us and laboratory technology will never beat natural nutrition without directly exploiting nature. Where do these nutrients come from to grow this meat?

We don't need all of these snake oil technologies, we already have all the answers we need, there are people who are paving the way for a better future right now, it's just not enough people are listening to them. We need to stop trying to be creator. Creation is already here, we need to stop being destroyer and start working with the planet because we are part of the planet. We can redeem ourselves to truly be the higher being on earth we think that we are or could be. We have the knowledge and ability and very simple technology to make the earth yield more than it did before we got here. We can turn the deserts back into grasslands and jungles. We could bring on another ice age if we wanted to. The problem is the vast majority of people are completely ignorant and afraid of what they do not know and the people in power are insane.

[goodsamaritan]

"We don't need all of these snake oil technologies, we already have all the answers we need, there are people who are paving the way for a better future right now, it's just not enough people are listening to them."

Please provide links. We will listen.

[RogueFarmer]

My response to the op, the solution is to stop raping the ocean, stop killing large breeding age fish, flip the size limit so you are not permitted to keep big fish, only small fish and make incentives so that eventually most of the fish commercially harvested will be the smallest species so we are eating on the bottom of the foodchain instead of the top. Studies suggest that we can eat massive amounts of krill and baitfish, more than the amount of fish we already eat and with minimal effect on the ocean. We need to be targeting these species that rapidly increase in population. We need to be eating fish with lifespans similar to gerbils and rats instead of fish with lifespans similar to people.

[RogueFarmer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeTQtzkpLQQ Bill Mollison's Global Gardener series episode 1 the tropics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkPtYO27L3Y Episode 2 Dry lands
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p4F8tSqiec Episode 3 Cool climates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF9IgvjCv84 Episode 4 Urban
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZDnKwHQBp8 This is a video out of a series called "what if we change" with guest Geoff Lawton developed and coined the term "Permaculture with Bill Mollison
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhOJRJAuyEs Larry Korn talks about Fukuoka Sensai
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change?language=en Allan Savory talks about how livestock can stop global warming and revitalize landscapes and local economies.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6HGKSvjk5Q This is a slide presentation with Greg Judy about actually building soil with cattle while producing superior grass fed beef.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePCqDOLUTvU  This is a presentation by Vandana Shiva about "Living as Earth Community"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftgWcD-1Nw This is a video of a 2000 year old food forest in Morocco in the middle of the desert with tropical fruit growing in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaQ3hXkXVjY This is Joel Salatin he has lots of videos about his innovative grass fed farm in Vermont. He is one of the most profitable farms in Vermont and produces beef of higher quality and cheaper than probably anyone in Vermont.

[RogueFarmer]

SOUND SCIENCE IS KILLING US an article written by Joel Salatin. http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/sound-science-is-killing-us/

[cherimoya_kid]

Good science will lead you to the truth. The gold standard of all nutrition technologies is animal/human studies. If several mammal species (like mice/rats/dogs) can eat a specific diet while all still bring healthy/happy and reproducing easily over 5 or 6 generations, then humans will generally be able to as well. This is the crucial point that nearly everyone misses, but that people are slowly waking up to. That's why I do not fear these new technologies. We can legitimately ask for any/all of them to achieve that standard BEFORE we consume them ourselves.

[TylerDurden]

Good science will lead you to the truth. The gold standard of all nutrition technologies is animal/human studies. If several mammal species (like mice/rats/dogs) can eat a specific diet while all still bring healthy/happy and reproducing easily over 5 or 6 generations, then humans will generally be able to as well. This is the crucial point that nearly everyone misses, but that people are slowly waking up to. That's why I do not fear these new technologies. We can legitimately ask for any/all of them to achieve that standard BEFORE we consume them ourselves.

This is a very inaccurate observation. We have had numerous cases in the past where animal studies have shown benefits for animals but which have turned out disastrous for humans. That is why, despite scientists being vehemently against vegan-terrorists,  have increasingly turned away from animal studies and have started doing studies on isolated human cells. Strictly speaking, studies done on live human subjects should be practised instead, but anyway..... In the case of cooked diets, they do not kill before the animals finish their mating period, so, even though these cooked diets are very unhealthy in the long-term(no doubt causing increases in birth-defects),  studies on animals eating cooked diets over 5 generations would mean nothing.

The other obvious point is that humans do not necessarily follow good science, even when faced with it directly. High-quality scientific studies have been suppressed for long periods, and we humans still manage to increase air-pollution etc., even when other less ecologically-destructive alternatives are available. I can cite the Austrian scandal of putting antifreeze into their wine-bottles despite the producers knowing how dangerous they were for consumers, and a myriad, myriad, similiar events.

[RogueFarmer]

The human brain has shrunk as much as 20% in the past 20'000 years. How can 5 or 6 generations be good measure?

[cherimoya_kid]

The human brain has shrunk as much as 20% in the past 20'000 years. How can 5 or 6 generations be good measure?

10%, and the ENTIRE decrease corresponds to a decrease in body size, as far as I am aware.

I say 5-6 generations because the cats in Dr. Pottenger's experiment took 7 generations to return to normal after being put back on a good diet.

Geoff--If you include several different species, then the odds of human problems go way, way down. In general, if longevity, reproduction, intelligence, social behavior, and mood are unaffected after 5 or 6 generations, any longer-term effects are going to be extremely small, if any.

[TylerDurden]

10%, and the ENTIRE decrease corresponds to a decrease in body size, as far as I am aware.

The 10% figure is more or less correct, but the decrease may be more due to human domestication(humans no longer being selected for intelligence any more) rather than a change in diet.

The EQ(brain-size to body ratio) quotient is a fascinating issue. In actual fact, there was a corresponding  decrease in height since the palaeolithic era. HOWEVER,  in modern times, some ethnic groups in certain countries worldwide(Netherlands etc.) have already gained an average height that is in fact  somewhat taller than the average given for palaeolithic-era humans, yet still have average brain-sizes the same as those in neighbouring countries.

I have also read absurd claims that Neanderthals and humans had the same EQ ratio. However, this is simply not true. Neanderthals were indeed stockier and heavier than their palaeo human counterparts but they were also much shorter in stature than Cro-Magnons etc, making them roughly the same body-size as early modern humans, overall. Taking into account the far bigger average brain-size of Neanderthals as well, means that Neanderthals were likely more intelligent than homo sapiens, as they therefore must have had a much higher EQ quotient.

Geoff--If you include several different species, then the odds of human problems go way, way down. In general, if longevity, reproduction, intelligence, social behavior, and mood are unaffected after 5 or 6 generations, any longer-term effects are going to be extremely small, if any.

I'm afraid you are mistaken. Here is a treatise on the Thalidomide case where animals from many different species were used with negligible effects unless dosed at vastly higher levels than humans were, such as 300 times, (and the number of generations was irrelevant as a factor as animals are largely immune to thalidomide overall); however, thalidomide on humans had particularly nasty, far more frequent effects, if only on the first generation:-

http://www.prijatelji-zivotinja.hr/index.en.php?id=582