All of JuanGarcia's Comments + Replies

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 productio

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

I've made a complete revamping on the entry based on the current state of the art. Any feedback is welcome.

Has EA growth slowed? Has EA reached most of the people who were going to be interested in it? Where are you getting this from?

The Spanish-speaking community is growing fast. I assume there are other countries/languages that are yet to be significantly reached, all of which are bound to have some amount of people with significant E and A factors.

In response to the following parts of your post:

• "the only relevant-seeming academic field I found (Utopian Studies) is rooted in literary criticism rather than social science"
• "most of the people there were literary scholars who had a paper or two on utopia but didn't heavily specialize in it"
• "Rather than excitement about imagining designing utopias, the main vibe was critical examination of why one would do such a thing"

I know a scholar who heavily specializes in the study of Utopia from the social sciences perspective (history) rather than literaty ... (read more)

I'll be looking forward to see if/how they deal with the aftermath of the impact, and specifically with the agricultural collapse that would ensue which is probably the most severe consequence of an asteroid/comet impact.

I think I see what you're getting at, let me add a couple of things:

1. Quorn's mycoprotein is produced from a different microorganism (Fusarium Venenatum), with different growth rates and processing steps than baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), so you are correct. It is more expensive than yeast, and also compared to the gas-based SCPs I mentioned.

Based on a conversation I had with an ex-Quorn scientist, the wholesale selling price of Quorn products is ~$3/kg wet (which makes sense given the intensive postprocessing and other additional steps). I'm... (read more)

Pretty much the only thing currently standing between us and bacterial SCP-based food (such as from methane or CO2/H2) is the lack of approval for use as a human food. Most or all of these companies have shown interest in the human food market, and a few of them are publicly pursuing it, such as Solar Foods. I expect they will be available in the next few years.

As Humbird mentions in the TEA and other sources confirm, the production cost of baker's yeast is well known (~$1.80/kg dry), so no need to run any numbers for that. I'm fairly confident SCP from m... (read more)

Then again, I do believe that you can culture simple cells for a lower cost. I estimated the cost of producing protein-rich single cells from methane at $1-2/dry kg. https://osf.io/94mkg/

However, those numbers are for a bacteria that feeds on gas. The yeast analogy is much closer to mammalian cultures.

I found this really interesting:

Humbird first models a Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) where all parameters are similar to baker’s yeast [...] The analysis comes to $3.87/kg of wet (70% water) cell mass for the constrained yeast process. As yeast production at scale is already a highly optimized process over many decades, and the additional constraints mentioned so far are pretty close to the fundamental biological nature of animal cells, it seems unlikely that we can do better than a lower bound of $3.87/kg. Unfortunately, there are other constraints.

I... (read more)

Good point, but I don't see how you can produce a version of this meme without specific assertions of effectiveness of each of the interventions (without killing the funny) . Alas, it did not pass peer review.

I suppose this was briefly touched upon as part of Objection number 1, but could you comment on the apparent coupling between economic growth and energy use? See for example: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natural-gas/our-insights/the-decoupling-of-gdp-and-energy-growth-a-ceo-guide#

Is there reason ro believe AI could produce a decoupling of the two?

Hello, Juan here. Here's the final version of the paper I mentioned we were working on during my talk for those who would like to know more: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2020.08.011

Thanks for taking the time to transcribe the talks

Potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in catastrophic scenarios

My name is Juan B. García Martínez, research associate of the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). My colleagues Joseph Egbejimba, James Throup, Silvio Matassa, Joshua M. Pearce, David C. Denkenberger and I have researched the potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in global catastrophic scenarios.

As members of ALLFED we are concerned by the fact that the current global food system is critically ... (read more)

One important caveat regarding flour fortification with vitamin D3 is that if the flour is used for baking bread, you could be losing 70% or even more of the added vitamin due to thermal degradation: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-3841.14764

Regardless, experts seem to think it is a cost effective measure even without accounting for the COVID-19 prevention potential. These researchers estimatd the effectiveness at £9.5 per QALY gained, which admittedly sounds too good to be true: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-019-0486-x