Research Coordinator at ALLFED - Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters
"The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical." - Albert Camus, The Plague
Altruism is the rational response to an irrational world.
I've seen a few people wondering how this relates to our work at ALLFED (@JoelMcGuire , @George Vii , @Brian Lui).
Bivalves can be grown in sinergy with seaweed in what is know as integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) systems, which promise a consistent feedstock, in situ, with the co-benefit of recycling aquaculture waste (ref). They are also resilient to food trade restriction and the pests that affect land crops. They look like they could be significantly more resilient to changes in climate than land crops, thus being useful to counter falling agricultural yields in two ways like most resilient foods: 1) resilience - the higher the production of this food is prior to an abrupt food production shock, the smaller the overall fall in food production capacity, 2) response - the fall in agricultural yields could be countered by rapidly scaling production of this food post-catastrophe.
These are the things that we have yet to ascertain though. Uncertainty remains, but there definitely seems to be potential for bivalves and IMTA to compete in price and speed with other resilient food options, indeed contributing to a resilient food portfolio. It mostly depends on how growth rates would be affected by changes in climactic conditions. Because bivalve cultivation is not very complex technologically it looks like it could not only contribute to resilience and response against global catastrophic food shocks involving an agricultural collapse, but also those originating from a loss of critical infrastructures.
In short, I agree with the post and believe there could be significant potential for bivalves to increase food security overall and as a resilient food for extreme scenarios and would like to see more work on this. I proposed a project to look into this but we haven't yet got around to working on it (so many important projects to do, so little time... We could use a little help). Below I paste the rationale for working in this topic I wrote for my bivalve project proposal:
Ramping up bivalves could have significant potential food for GCR, seeing as to how they’re somewhat similar to seaweed (which is very promising as such),
General info here
Technical info here
Production and price info here
Clams cost approx 6 USD retail/person/day (on the medium side of cost). Of these calories 50-70% is protein
How do you think the push to replace humans with AI systems in nuclear warfare decision making will affect the chance of accidental nuclear war going forward? I hear some countries have been considering it.
While you are correct that vegetable oil would be the most compact way of storing edible calories, we wouldn't be able to rely only on it as it misses several key nutrients, and it would still not solve the prohibitive cost of storing enough food to last for a multi-year catastrophe. We think strategic micronutrient supplement stocks could be cost-effective but haven't looked into it in depth yet.
Any type of food stock would be very useful on the onset of a catastrophe, but the cost-effectiveness of large-scale long-term food storage interventions is not great.
I agree the benefits of closed environments system that you bring up are considerable, in fact there are even more benefits than those mentioned (see this paper). I wanted to bring in some other considerations to enrich the discussion around this:
If the closed environment system depends significantly on sunlight-based renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, then it is not resilient to abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios such as nuclear winter.
There are many other possibilities outside of vertical farming for closed environment food production, many of which are significantly more efficient in their energy usage. I ran a simple estimation based on a yield of between 5-40 kg lettuce/m2/y and a calorie content of 150 kcal/kg, resulting on and energy efficiency in terms of electricity to calories of 0.1-0.9%. Compare to other systems with efficiencies around 20% such as single cell protein from CO2 (From one of my papers on closed environment food production methods for space/bunkers).
Thank you, very useful. Happy to see CSER expanding to domains where ALLFED is working such as food shocks, critical infrastructure, volcano engineering, etc. Looking forward to collaborate more!
As always it's great to read your thoughts Pablo, and I like your scheme for getting the best of both worlds. I think it's worth recommending that you build accountability to prevent yourself from drifting away from your stated plan or a similarly good one. Wishing you the best at Xanadu!
This looks like a much needed inititative. I'm interested to sign up for the reserve, it looks not unlike the type of work I've done in the past .
Ah it must have been that, thanks for letting me know
Sorry Pablo I did not even realize I reverted your change (don't even recall doing that). I'll be more careful going forward
It's worth mentioning that the new Charity Entrepreneuship book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit does go into some of the "concrete issues" questions you're asking. Particularly, the one on legal structure receives very good treatment (though somewhat lacking for non-US/UK orgs). They also go in some depth into media/website/aesthetics.