A Light Topic (Get It?)

[lawyercaregiver]

Scenario: A giant volcano, asteroid strike, global weather change like an Ice-Age or other some other catastrophe DESTROYS all of your outdoor crops. We grow marijuana indoors and do a pretty darn job at it! Could we grow EVERYTHING indoors>

 

Imagine the miles of corn and wheat field that line the American plains. Wheat is a LOT easier to grown than marijuana, after all.

 

Anyway that is the conclusion of my brilliant son when we watched some Science show about the volcanic winter probably caused by the Toba super-eruption about 70,000 years ago. In case you don't know, very good evidence suggests the human population crashed from 100 million to a few hundred people about 70,000 years ago (yes, yes I know, if you still believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old then I can't help you).

 

Could we do it? Could we grow everything we needed under lights inside homes, caves, warehouses, barns etc.

[welj31]

Scenario: A giant volcano, asteroid strike, global weather change like an Ice-Age or other some other catastrophe DESTROYS all of your outdoor crops. We grow marijuana indoors and do a pretty darn job at it! Could we grow EVERYTHING indoors>

 

Imagine the miles of corn and wheat field that line the American plains. Wheat is a LOT easier to grown than marijuana, after all.

 

Anyway that is the conclusion of my brilliant son when we watched some Science show about the volcanic winter probably caused by the Toba super-eruption about 70,000 years ago. In case you don't know, very good evidence suggests the human population crashed from 100 million to a few hundred people about 70,000 years ago (yes, yes I know, if you still believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old then I can't help you).

 

Could we do it? Could we grow everything we needed under lights inside homes, caves, warehouses, barns etc.

 

IMHO NO! For a number of reasons such as : Our current stockpile of food would would be drained before we even got started on new crops. Most types of crops would be lost due to lack of good seeds. And the seed banks are few and far between. Any type of event like this would also destroy our power grid. Almost all indoor grows depend on some amount of power for (pumps, lights, well, air flow, ect). And some would say if the event killed off the food supply it would have killed us off anyway at the same time. IMHO

[CedarSpringsCG]

Could we sustain our current population with it? No. However if you had enough space and lights, and were feeding a family of say 3 or 4, yes. Problems you would have is good clean water, nutes, and electricity. If you say weren't wiped out by the event itself, and had say 2-3 wind turbines, and a huge supply of nutes and light bulbs, you could in theory keep going a lot longer then without.

 

Scenario would be you live off of the animals, hunting for a few months while you grew. then you could eat veggies while the animal population dwindled.

 

Now, what would be interesting is if you had a large enough warehouse, and used fish eating algae as your source of nutes, algae grew from the waste water from your plants, then you used the "fish" water as your nutes going in. Sustainable given enough light and heat. There are some green houses being set up in other places around the world trying to perfect the idea.so say have a 10,000 gallon fish tank, you supply the lights for that to grow algae, and next to it you have your plants and resevoirs. You could also eat the fish as they would be reproducing. Throw in a could chickens to give eggs and eat dried up algae, and now all your missing is a clean water supply, which could be obtained from boiled/distilled rain water or something. I would assume rain water would be contaminated in this event.

 

Not saying you would get farm fresh produce, but could you get enough to support a few people, imho yes. It would be a lot of work, but you could stay alive, in hopes long enough to outlast the event. Then you start planting seeds everywhere once the sun gets through again.

Cedar

 

P.S. I voted no because it wouldn't be enough to keep everyone alive, just a few outposts of say a few dozen people.

[imiubu]

I've no educated guess or even a reasonable opinion but...

 

 

I had to laugh out loud (literally!) at the answer options you gave!

 

Your son has quite an inquisitive mind!

[welj31]

#4 is a trick answer

[lawyercaregiver]

I just saw an article in Discover Science magazine about "Vertical Farming" in the center of cities.

 

See: www.gizmag.com/go/7500/ for more or just google "vertical farming." It certainly looks to me like we could do it- if it was a matter of life and death.

 

The energy costs are not that much more since you save on most of the transportation costs.

 

Not sure what we do about Africa, not to mention China and India though...