|
rudatron posted:There's also real limits on the technological advancement that has occurred, and no easy way past then, and especially no easy way past them in scientific funding keeps getting cut, to make up for budget shortfalls, in this age of austerity. We grow enough food right this second to feed 10 billion people. Then we throw a bunch away. We already in the west eat so much food that many of the leading causes of death are "ate too much food" We also grow hundreds of pounds of corn then go through giant complicated processes to make them into a couple pounds of hamburger that we then sell for 89 cents. We also grow nearly a billion tons of tobacco per year in the US. Plus uncountable acres of lawn grass that we fertilize just because we want to. Like, human food production has an awful lot of "slack" left before it leads to extinction. Starvation isn't happening on earth because there isn't enough food or agricultural capacity. It is easy to make some hank hill jokes about how a world where steak cost more or lawns weren't economical to fertilize isn't a world worth living in. Or if we had to stop throwing away tomatos with blemishes to feed everyone. But it's a world that wouldn't exactly be a hell dystopia.
|
# ? Feb 12, 2017 18:55 |
|
|
# ? Jun 8, 2024 06:24 |
|
Like 100% the US will decide to have millions die rather than redirect corn production from making mcdonalds hamburgers but that is a political issue not a technological one. We don't lack the technology to feed human, just the will to. I imagine if in 150 years einstein 2.0 invents magic zero point quantum wave dark matter engines that create limitless energy by drawing it from alternate universes or whatever that we'd still manage a way to have poor people in africa. Basically until we stop wanting that to be a thing. It's already not a technological issue preventing us from fixing extreme poverty. Inventing technologies won't solve it since current technologies already could if we actually wanted to.
|
# ? Feb 12, 2017 19:12 |