The first step is understanding how much space and matter we have to work with. It’s hard to do that in a qualitative way but my favorite is realizing that every human on earth could have a house with a yard and all fit in texas. And that’s just expanding basically in two dimensions. Obviously a dense city that size could hold one or two orders of magnitude more per square mile.
The second steps is realizing that farming is just a chemical process. Exporting entropy, and directing processes in beneficial directions. Adding energy to dirt (via sunlight and chemicals) and extracting a portion of that energy out as chemical batteries which we consume. (Food.) It’s currently driven by the sun, but it could also be driven by fission, and far more efficiently in terms of anthropocentric concerns.
I’m thinking city sized grow boxes powered by fission reactors ran by robots that import raw materials and export foods of our choosing. We’re soon to be growing meat in vats and skipping the animal phase. I think eventually we’ll do the same for plants as well. What better way to avoid pathogens than completely enclosing the farm?
Think about an apple tree. We don’t care about the tree, we want the apples. All the rest is waste from the perspective of our needs. We’ve already altered all our crops via selective breeding towards a form that is at one infinitely more suitable for our needs and unrecognizably distant from their original forms. The tree can get away that waste because of the super abundance of energy we are all saturated by. That amount in turn is dwarfed by what we could produce ourselves. Did you know that gasoline has the same caloric density as olive oil? That’s carbon bonds. Chemical power. Now compare that to fission… a gram of uranium has approximately the same energy (assuming crude 2% efficient LWR style extraction process) as two million grams of oil. That’s 4,409 pounds. A farm converts electricity into food basically. We can do the same. We can literally eat the dirt.
And we’ll run out of yellow sun (it’ll go red and then eat earth) before we run out of fissile fuel. The ocean thanks to tectonic activity (vents) is an endless supply of fission power. (Like, literally, the sun would run out of hydrogen first before we ever ran out of fissile uranium alone, let alone thorium.)
Power is literally being delivered to every coast line on earth. We just have to decide to act in our own interests with compassion and wisdom. It’s that simple.
