Using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe | David Denkenberger (2021)
Originally released November 2021. If there’s a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, probably we would, because humanity hasn’t done much to prevent it. But it turns out that an ounce of forethought might be enough for most people to get the calories they need to survive, even in a future as grim as that one.
Today’s guest is engineering professor Dave Denkenberger, who co-founded the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), which has the goal of finding ways humanity might be able to feed itself for years without relying on the sun. Over the last seven years, Dave and his team have turned up options from the mundane, like mushrooms grown on rotting wood, to the bizarre, like bacteria that can eat natural gas or electricity itself.
Many of these ideas could turn out to be misguided or impractical in real-world conditions, which is why Dave and ALLFED are raising money to test them out on the ground. They think it’s essential to show these techniques can work so that should the worst happen, people turn their attention to producing more food rather than fighting one another over the small amount of food humanity has stockpiled.
Learn more and see the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episod...
Chapters:
• Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• The interview begins (00:02:36)
• Resilient foods recap (00:04:27)
• Cost effectiveness recap (00:08:07)
• Turning fiber or wood or cellulose into sugar (00:10:30)
• Redirecting human-edible food away from animals (00:22:46)
• Seaweed production (00:26:33)
• Crops that can handle lower temperatures or lower light (00:35:24)
• Greenhouses (00:40:51)
• How much to trust this economic modeling (00:43:50)
• Global cooperation (00:51:16)
• People feeding themselves using these methods (00:57:15)
• NASA and ALLFED (01:04:47)
• Kinds of catastrophes (01:15:16)
• Is New Zealand overrated? (01:25:35)
• Should listeners be doing anything to prepare for possible disasters? (01:28:43)
• Cost effectiveness of work on EMPs (01:30:43)
• The future of ALLFED (01:33:34)
• Opportunities at ALLFED (01:40:49)
• Why Dave is optimistic around bigger-picture scarcity issues (01:46:58)
• Energy return on energy invested (01:56:36)
• Nitrogen and phosphorus (02:03:25)
• Energy and food prices (02:07:18)
• Sustainable Seaweed with Sahil Shah (02:21:44)
• Locusts (02:38:33)
• The effect of COVID on food supplies (02:44:01)
• How much food prices would spike in a disaster (02:50:46)
• How Dave helped to save ~$10 billion worth of energy (02:56:33)
• What it’s like to live in Alaska (03:03:18)
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