BewaConsensus Science

> And just think, that beef would be preheated for you (by microwaves!).
> By-the-way, as far as food is concerned, I had read some figures indicating
> that beef (and other large animals) is an inefficient food source - using a
> lot of arable land for a given amount of calories/nutrition, as opposed to
> crops. Have you heard that? I ask while thinking about what would be the
> most efficient food source for space habitats, or even moon or martian ones,
> where space and resources are at a premium.

In general, they do "[use] a lot of arable land for a given amount of
calories/nutrition" and so growing grain and feeding it to animals is
not a good environemntal proposition in terms of resource use -- except
that in a water deprived area like rangeland where cattle feed directly
on grass they may still be the best use as far as producing human food
with minimal impact (because you can't grow crops on rangeland without
depleting aquifers, reducing biodiversity, etc.) and planting and
harvesting grains may also lead to unsustainable levels of soil erosion
from cultivation using conventional farm tractors. Of course, people
like Wes Jackson have a vision of self-reseeding grains for prairies...
http://www.landinstitute.org/

It is often a case of matching the proposed use (or non-use) to the
characteristics of the environment. In the case of technologically
advanced space habitats, I'd expect if people want beef, they would
mainly grow some genetically engineered version it from cell cultures
growing on a structured matrix in vats (and to keep Ryan happy, perhaps
fed on a growth medium of beer and with automatic systems for massaging
in Saki? :-). The same is likely on Earth as well at some point.

IIRC there is a sci-fi story with this premise -- Earth's major
royalties after contacting advanced aliens came from licensing human
cell cultures from the intial contact astronauts which the aliens used
for growing "beef" (headless, of course. :-) I don't think the
astronauts were very happy about this.

> Of course, the good Dr. Atkins may have other ideas...
>
> Val
>
> P.S. I think that you could call it organic, since microwaves are
> non-ionizing, and therefore shouldn't change the molecular structure from au
> natural. Also, you could graze them in much colder climes due to microwave
> heating :)

Now you have the beginnings of an idea -- trying to make multiple uses
of the microwave heating to increase the cost and environmental
effectiveness of rectenna farms (maybe in the Arctic?). That is the
basis of concepts like for "bioshelters".
http://biorealis.com/bioshelter/BioshelterNarr.html
Or the latest proposal for replacing the WTC in NYC which involves an
office tower with a wind turbine on top to produce 20% of the needed
power and also reduce pedestrian level wind gusts:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/12/20/freedom_tower_reaches_for_sky/
(all competing with SSPS in some respects).

Of course, Thor Olson's point in his post related to global dimming
suggest that heating up an Arctic area will expose the ground and may
just cause more encvironmental problems... Maybe there could be an
aquatic rectenna farm? Either under water? Or maybe floating on
"Aquarius" type seacrete systems (from the Millennial project )?
http://www.distant-star.com/issue8/3dimages.htm

--Paul Fernhout