old news is old.

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=monsanto

and yes, they are a bunch of douchebags.

there was a worldwide protest of the stuff in over 400 cities yesterday and today. i didn't see a single blip about it on the news here in the states.

i'm thinking of switching to a paleo diet myself lol.

there was a worldwide protest of the stuff in over 400 cities yesterday and today. i didn't see a single blip about it on the news here in the states.

i'm thinking of switching to a paleo diet myself lol.

I have heard of a company called Monsanto.........

I was preoccupied at the time with being a component of my mothers ovaries, later transitioning in my later build to Embryo.

The wonderful thing about Monsanto is they control the seed supply. Used to, farmers did this sneaky thing of saving back some of their harvest each year. They'd use that for seeds for next year's crop. They did that for, oh, maybe 10,000 years.

But Monsanto put a stop to that nonsense. Now the crops grow infertile seeds. No more saving back part of the crop, farmers have to buy a new load of fertile seeds from Monsanto every year. Great deal for Monsanto, but maybe not so great for the rest of us if the zombie invasion every comes.

Exactly.

"genetic modification" is the least of the issues with Monsanto.

Its an alternative to GM, and creates more room to farm in, though it is a capital intensive process compared to throwing seeds in the ground and growing, but new building techniques are making it more viable over time and cost effective. Little old Singapore could be a net food exporter if it chose to do so, to put into context the density we are talking here

But the food industry contradicts itself and is self defeating anymore from corruption.

The root of the problem is in this example: a Twinkie is still cheaper than a carrot.

And I'm just going to mention the existence of all those EU meat scandals.

Hey, you can combine the two of them, they aren't mutually exclusive. Consider that hydroponics uses electricity to drive its machinery as it stands, though thinking about it a tractor and all agricultural equipment could be converted if needed.

It's an infrastructure issue, and its a technology that works in a few circumstances but isn't yet practical to grow say wheat. And replace the farmland. However it does significantly drop off pesticide usage and a small (relatively) building could grow the worlds cinnamon supply, or a few other spices. We built an Empire for those spices, if we can grow them cheaply domestically, well

One final mention is that ultimately I feel there's just flat-out too many people to feed. And that's just going to get worse.

I just really get angry when I hear about these people having 6 kids. The Octo-Mom. All that. Also, that religion that discourages contraception especially in the poorest of countries. Talk about more self-defeating...............

No, but I would wager that today we have bottomed out what we can do to make it viable short of ripping down areas to make more arable land, or massive water projects to grow in the desert, which are rapidly draining aquifers. Same in the US where the Ogalalla Aquifer is being drained faster than it can produce, that's the water fuelling the prairies and when that thing runs out...

Well there's going to need to be a water treatment plant to make salt water into drinking water, and the infrastructure to pump it to the centre of the North American continent. That in itself will be a major engineering issue. Food prices have gone up and down as the stock markets have, its a commodity and the price can only go up with demand, forcing poor people to starve, riot, then you get the Arab Spring when the people are hungry.

GM could make it cheaper but its banned in the EU, the political position after we starved in WW2 is "never again" and we throw money at farmers to keep some land slack and overproduce so we don't starve again.

Malthusian Catastrophe.

GMO's only helped on delaying it.

Everything humanity has ever achieved as a major scientific advancement has brought us to this point.

Get out a calculator, but in 7billion and multiply by 1.01, 1% annual growth. Within a matter of Aeons humanity composes all the matter of the universe, so at some point we will have to cut back unless we can pull fresh matter out of parallel Branes

My logic is perhaps naive, but here's how I see it. Asteroid mining gives us cheap building materials, which can be used to build Solar arrays, cheap power, and hydroponics farms on the planets as part of the Urban infrastructure, using the cheap energy and materials. Idealistic, yes. Worth going towards, I think its inevitable given a capitalist economy undergoing growth.