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Euler

Member

From: Corvallis, OR

Registered: 2003-02-06

Posts: 922

Re: Artifical food production

Terrestrial plants only photosynthesize with about 1% efficiency.  They also require a large amount of space, soil, etc.

Solar panels convert solar energy to electricity with 30% (and improving) efficiency.  A nuclear power plant might be an even more efficient power source.  So the question is, can we use this available electrical energy to create carbohydrates, protein, or fats?  If this could be done, it would save a great deal of space.

MarsDog

Member

From: vancouver canada

Registered: 2004-03-24

Posts: 852

Re: Artifical food production

Synthesize the basic ingredients and blend them together, like a  milkshake !
-
Then sell the secret recipe to McDonald's ?

Trebuchet

Banned

From: Florida

Registered: 2004-04-26

Posts: 419

Re: Artifical food production

Terrestrial plants sabotage their own photosynthesis, for the most part. There are very few plants which aren't crippled in this mystifying fashion; one of them (sugarcane) we cultivate.

Maybe we could figure out what gene mutated in sugarcane and genetically engineer it into other plants. Actually, that would be something useful for here on earth, too, not just on Mars. Even sugarcane isn't perfect, though, but IIRC it has an efficiency of about 8%, a rather huge jump.

MarsDog

Member

From: vancouver canada

Registered: 2004-03-24

Posts: 852

Re: Artifical food production

Plants need to make chemicals to become unpalatable.
Has a balanced or sustainable diet been synthesized ?

TwinBeam

Member

From: Chandler, AZ

Registered: 2004-01-14

Posts: 144

Re: Artifical food production

I've got a "theory" that plants originally evolved to be a lot better at photosynthesis, and grew like crazy (no need for seeds - they just shot out runners and roots) - but they also stored a lot of energy in oils and sugars.  As they converted the atmosphere to O2, fire became a problem for them, but their rapid growth allowed them to survive for a long time.  Their high energy formed the basis for coal, maybe oil, and their rapid growth and high energy content fed the dinosaurs so they could get huge just from grazing or eating other huge dinosaurs.

But the repeated fires allowed other types of plants to evolve that grew slower but generated less stored energy, and also put a lot of effort into creating seeds that could survive a fire and get them established before the high energy plants grew back into the burnt-out area. 

So if there was an asteroid impact associated with the death of the dinosaurs, it might have been due to the combination of a global fire followed by global darkness long enough that the high energy plants used up their store of food - so they all died off - while the more modern plants recovered from seeds when the sun came back out.

But I haven't done any fact checking on that - I just think it's a fun idea.

mboeller

Banned

From: germany

Registered: 2004-05-08

Posts: 53

Re: Artifical food production

Well;

all this talk about artifical food reminds me a little bit about the old "Manna-Machine" using algae to feed the people. Maybe you should think in this direction when you think about artificial food. Algae are the best food available to mankind. So the best way to produce food could be to cultivate Algae like Spirulina or Chlorella within an machine or system. Algae together with Soya would certainly be good enough for most things we eat. The Algae could be used as the basic food and the Soya ( beans, milk, yogurt, cheese, tofu, tempeh, miso, shoyu ) to fill the holes and simulate a lot of different products like meat, cheese, milk etc....

http://www.fernhouse.com/mannamachinepi … nepic.html
http://www.soya.be/]http://www.soya.be/

Rxke

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2003-11-03

Posts: 3,669

Re: Artifical food production

Heh. That mannamachinepic is a *very* thinly disguised joke.

But I liked the soyalink, been reading it through, lots of very good info, heavy on the make-it-yourself stuff...

And only afterwards saw it was a Belgian site. Figures. Soydrinks are very popular here, and one small producer got quite big virtually overnight by selling flavored soydrinks. Come to think of it, that producer started the whole rage...

(I bet that producer is behind that site, hehee!)

I loved soysprouts since i was a kid, and i simply adore soybased chocolatedrinks and icecreams...

mboeller

Banned

From: germany

Registered: 2004-05-08

Posts: 53

Re: Artifical food production

Heh. That mannamachinepic is a *very* thinly disguised joke.

Well at least you can buy an book about the Manna-Machine.

Look here : http://www.fernhouse.com/mannamachine.h … chine.html

Well, I don't want to talk about the strange theories of this guy, but IMHO the technology could really work. In Germany some companies already produce Algae that way, using small but long tubes filled with an Algae-Soup and exposing all that to sunlight. So if you substitute the Sunlight with highly efficient and tuned laserlight (quantum-point lasers are around 80% efficient) then it should be possible to shrink the system down quite a lot. This could make it possible to produce really healthy food in an very compact system. And because of that I mentioned the Manna-Machine as an way to produce (sort of) artificial food.

Rxke

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2003-11-03

Posts: 3,669

Re: Artifical food production

No problem with the idea of algae production, it's only his weird description of his machine-God that made me grin...