Couple days ago we had an interesting and humorous discussion about serious subject: global food crisis. The discussion was ignited by a recent article in Wired magazine. There is a lot of discussion, should all we accept genetically modified food in order to increase production efficiency of the agricultural industry.
We came to conclusion that is really a narrow point of view if we are just focusing on improving productability. In our daily business lives we try to optimize costs, not only maximize the revenues. So, we should also consider to decrease human energy consumption. Therefore, instead of making for example bigger GM corn, we should start modifying future generations much smaller. We are now in average 170cm and making our kids just to let’s say a size of a 25cm midgets would make a huge difference to food consumption.
There would be a long transition period. Our giant generation and smaller low energy generation would co-exist for almost a century and this definitely would have some side effects. As a Scandinavian I can clearly see a Midsummer party, where drunken grandfather at his 70’s throws his badly behaving grand children to the lake after argument caused by this 145cm generation gap. After 100 years these things wouldn’t of course happen.
What is more interesting, there would be a massive impact to carbon hydroxide emissions, as we would either need smaller airplanes or less airline traffic. Same goes for cars and other transportation. In addition, we wouldn’t need so much cotton or oil based textiles and so forth. Huge impact to world’s energy balance in general. And just by genetically reducing size of humans, we would solve also oil crisis.
On the other hand, instead of reducing the body size, we just could reduce the size of our most energy consuming organs by using genetic engineering. And let’s just start with the organ that consumes the most energy… Well, it seems to be the brain that represent 25% of daily body glucose consumption. After all, the genetically engineered human future doesn’t look too bright. Maybe we should just concentrate to genetically engineer corns, carrots and potatoes.
Photo above published under CC licence, credits to logosberlin.
4 responses so far ↓
PE // August 15, 2008 at 7:57 am |
Dear all,
aviation caused ONLY 1,6% of all greenhouse gas emissions. If stop all airplanes, would this save the planet?
BR,
PE
http://www.swiss.com/web/EN/about_swiss/environmental_affairs/Pages/key_figures.aspx
Eero // August 15, 2008 at 8:29 am |
Hi PE!
Oh, airline traffic is so low polluter. Well then this wouldn’t save the planet directly. But reducing emissions even from tiny polluter like air traffic is a good step also. The biggest effect of reduced size future will be in agriculture and industrial production.
E
jaakkoh // November 12, 2008 at 4:31 am |
Estimates vary a bit but to my understanding the by far easiest way to reduce the human energy need, mostly indirect, would be to switch to vegetarian.
More of my horina on the issue in Finnish via http://delicious.com/jaakkoh/my_comments+conservation .
Eero // November 12, 2008 at 6:55 am |
Hi Jaakko!
That is probably very true. Whole energy efficiency is a tricky issue. You can easily reduce direct consumption like unnecessary air travelling or car, but when figuring out the indirect effects, we are in trouble. What is the indirect effect of eating fish, is the energy consumption lower in a ecological food production value chain or industrial in industrial one. You have an excellent example of water consumption behind the link you provided – that kind of chains should be described to people also in energy consumption side.
Thanks for the comment!
Eero