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.

Let me give you an example. The majority of your food depends on plants, growing plants. If you were to get every single scientist into the same room, ask them to build a 'replacement' for a plant, could they design something as equally complex? No, they couldn't. Not in a 100 years could they even try, we're nowhere near that level of technical capability. Living things right now are far, far more complicated than your stupid smartphone or whatever, all human beings are doing is tinkering a bit with them to make them more useful.

Part of this is increasing the 'harvest index' (the proportion of biomass that is a useful product) of plants, but you can't take that too far - you actually need like, roots and leaves and poo poo for the plant to grow. Part of that is using fertilizers, to meet all nutritional needs of the plant. Part of that is killing every other living thing in the field, with herbicides and pesticides, so said nutrients only go to the plants you want.

But at the end of the day, the 'medium' you are working with is a loving plant, and in needs arable land, and water. You cannot innovate around that, you cannot push past that limit, because it's a fundamental limitation of the tool you're working with. As such, bringing up analogies with microprocessors or flight or whatever is missing the scale of the problem here.

That's not to suggest that the problems are intractable, or that technology can't solve the problem - in a real sense, it has to, there's no other option. But you've got to be realistic about it, you can't be flippant about the problem, and you can't just dismiss it.