Agriworlds & Farm Planets
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- In the past, we had entire civilizations devoted to agriculture, but in the future, we might have entire planets devoted to it.
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Credits: Agriworlds
Episode 423; November 30, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by:
Isaac Arthur
Graphics by:
Jeremy Jozwik
Katie Byrne
Ken York/YD Visual
Steve Bowers
Udo Schroeter
Music Courtesy of:
Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.c...
Sergey Cheremisinov, "Labyrinth"
Taras Harkavyi, "Alpha and..."
Apologies to everyone for the video going down for a while. TH-cam screwed up and got it fixed, video back up, had to change the cover for a while but I like the new one better, and the weird Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth' fact-check on the video is also gone. :) The episode did get hammered by the YT algorithm as a result so feel free to re-watch the video or hit like to help restore it.
The Ministry still wants us to know the background context and truth of climate change while watching your video 😂 Thanks for the fun video as always!
@@CJ-xk5ci Another fine example of the real danger of Algorithm-based A"I" that everyone ignores, the ability to allow lazy West Coast tech employees to collect a paycheck without having to do their due diligence checking if these warning labels are even relevant.
Yeah it looks like they put it back on@@CJ-xk5ci
Isaac the farming worlds you described are too idyllic.
They already have plans for us, check out The World Economic Forum. We vil eat de bugs. They will be harvesting crickets, locust, ants and spiders
Looks like the weird Orwellian Ministry of Truth has returned those unwelcome messages from totalitarian ideologues. Apparently TH-cam's political commissars insist that the future will be dystopian if they have anything to say about it.
As a farmer, my favorite episodes are always the ones where you discuss feeding people.
Hello colleague! How's the weather been treating ya? Big rain here yesterday. Currently stuck in mud 20km from nearest town.
Agriculture is our oldest industry, after all.
Me, my favorite episodes is Arthur discussion eating people.
@@arcadiaberger9204 that would actually be sex work
@@max-zv7sf @ryanwilliamson9689 I’m very keen to write a movie about farming-based colonies. Do you have any themes or concepts you’d want explored? My setting doesn’t have FTL travel, so colonies are mostly alone, feeding themselves, rather than feeding an empire. I imagine farmers by day, scientists by night, engineering earth’s plants to better fit the new environment. Like Star Wars, if Luke realized the real heroes are the ones who work to sustain others
I feel like the Warhammer 40k universe has literally everything. I feel every episode starts with "[describe concept] as seen in [insert arthor c clark or phillip k dick novel] and warhammer 40k."
Warhammer 40k is written collaboratively between many authors, and has been around for a while.
It also doesn't really consider some very obvious things as a result of the desire to keep things grimderp
Though for me at least tis fun to try to figure out if a given bit of grimderp would be sustainable, I suspect Wraight does that a lot too. @@Cyberwar101
Warhammer 40k is like a giant toybox full of sci-fi action figures made by a single prolific toy manufacturer. It has everything and manages to make it all work... sort of. Nothing they make is particularly original but it's all fairly well-made.
I like the idea of leaving the planets as galactic parks and growing food in very large O'neill cylinders.
it actually makes more sent to me to do it that way. avoid the gravity well and various hazards of a planet and "fixed" location.
@@SoloRenegadeif you can get all the necessary materials into space in the first place for sure, but it’s like nuclear power: huge upfront cost (getting the necessary farming materials out of the gravity well) for better long term gains.
@@roberthesser6402 If you wish to colonize other planets, you have to do that anyways. But once in space, you can harvest the materials you need to create everything else you need, from space itself. Asteroids and comets contain the resources needed.
Relying on a planet to produce food, you still have to keep launching MASSIVE amounts of material into space constantly. The food you harvested to feed your empire. The material cost per kg of food payload to get that food beyond the planet's orbit is ridiculous.
@@roberthesser6402you really dont need to get THAT much into orbit actully. You would need a power source such as a reactor, a refinery system able to either handle multiple diffrent materials one at a time in bulk or small amounts of lots of matetials at once. Some manufactureing machines and enough material to build a shell as well as a combination of robots to man it. Just find a resource rich asteroid with some water on it to use as fuel and reacton mass for small thrusters and soon enough your initial starting platform could bootstrap itself up and be a case of making tools to make tools.
Even if you need to make all the computer chips on earth, you can fit an awful lot of computer chips in even a small rocket. And the best part is they dont even need to be monsterious computers in most cases. Most manufactureing devices today could and can be controled from something not a lot more powerful then a cellphone or rasberry pi.
@@SoloRenegade The tyranny of the rocket equation.
Thank You Isaac.....I solely listened to you every single night for 4 years .....💚💚💚
@MrNegative101 The moniker you carry certainly fits 😂
Some us actually consider Isaacs pseudo philosophical documentaries far more entertaining than anything to come out of Hollywood or the mindrot frame in the last few decades or do
Falling asleep to isaac is the best
@@MrNegative101name checks out
His videos are so calming. Perfect for sleep
@@Alien-ii2zh Some of them. I don't playlist the war ones a bedtime.
Another thing about agriworlds is that they wouldn't necessarily be limited to just growing food. They could be producing things like cotton, flax, animal leather, etc or growing things that can be turned into biofuel or bioplastics.
That's a good point and I'm sorry I didn't tihnk to give it some discussion.
@@isaacarthurSFIA you could make a smaller video for it. Maybe a short
@@isaacarthurSFIA And... another use for an agriworld's massive food production could be to create a stockpile of goods for situations that call for it.
Like they could have an agriworld producing massive amounts of food, the majority of which is preserved for extremely long shelf life and kept in storage (some foods like honey can apparently last forever if stored properly). Then if a disaster happens like a solar flare hits a planet and disrupts the economy, fortunately they have a stockpile of food to feed everyone for months or years till they get everything fixed.
Or.. if FTL is a thing, and you are running a sprawling interstellar empire or something like the Federaion from Star Trek, having some massive cargo holds filled with enough food to feed a continent for a year could be good to have in an emergency. A disaster hits a planet, you have refugees, and then someone makes a call to have several million tons of emergency meals delivered to the star system to help in relief efforts.
Or if the civilization is planning a massive colonization effort, having massive stockpiles of food to send alongside the colonists to keep them fed until they can get agriculture set up on their new home would make sense. That and having the stockpiles of seeds or cryogenically preserved livestock to grow in said farms.
Soo... I'm imagining an agriworld wouldn't just be for providing the day-to-day meals for people across a civilization. I imagine most planets, habitats, and ships would want to be able to make the majority of their own calories even if it's something like algae or nutrient paste. But a forward thinking civilization could invest in an agriworld to create a massive food surplus and keep it in storage for emergencies, to help in colonization or relief efforts, or in case they forsee a population boom in their future.
@@isaacarthurSFIA You can't think of everything. This was a damned good video even just as it was made. Thanks.
thats a great point
Would seem a water world would make the best place for an Agriworld. No soil erosion a better medium to distribute nutrients, multi-layer planting with artificial lighting
Hydroponics integrated with such a design would also be more efficient and feed more people.
There actually a agriworld like that in 40k were the hole world is a hydroponics farm and most people don't get to see the sun and lives under the kilometers of floors dedicated to hydroponics and turf wars are common
"You come for the soil. You end up part of it." Wow. I've never heard a farmer's life put in terms quite that bleak, but... yeah? That's exactly what happens. You take from the soil until it takes you back. Beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The Lion King makes it sound a lot happier.
I don't find it disturbing at all. Death is a part of life. It's unavoidable.
All I can think of is Montu screaming about how much he hates farmer jobs in Stellaris
To be fair the rule of thumb for 40k is the Imperium gave up on doing anything efficiently a long time ago, when they abandoned true science and understanding the universe and tech for fear of Tzeentch.
You don't need science to run efficient operations though...
If your whole planet only produces one kind of fish, can it be called mono-carping?
I mean the US is already on that path due to carp invasiveness. Dunno about Europe.
I absolutely love your descriptions of some insane future endeavors, be it interplanetary trade or something as "trivival" as growing food. Really wish there was a book or movie or whatever based on your perceptions of the future.
It would not be 40K if even farming was turned into a grimdark dystopia.
To be fair, they just extrapolated the real world tendencies of industrialized monocropping
I’m not a farmer. But I’m from the mid west and we grow a lot of corn out here. But even then we grow tons of over crops here too. Apples, soybeans, leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, pears, and even strawberries and blueberries. I don’t think any planet could only grow one crop. Some places just aren’t suited for come crops. The poles and equator can’t grow the same plants because of the climate. And even if you could brute force a mono crop that’s not the best use of it. I could see entire continents specializing in several crops. Each continent would have its own set of crops.
Even if an interplanetary civilization dedicated one planet to be the "bread basket" of the entire nation, it's always more cost-efficient to farm whichever plants and animals that adapt best to the soil and climate of the place over brute-force geoengineering the surface into mono-culture anyway. Why fill up the water surface of the farming planet just to plant corns? That would kill the native marine lives which could otherwise be bred and farmed on an industrial scale as food sources too. Why level the rocky mountains just to plant corns? Just raise goats on those mountains instead! The entire surface of the planet still get used for food production purpose, and the middle-to-upper class citizens in the capital planet get to have more variety than just corns on their dinner table too.
maybe the species is advance enough to dedicate entire planets to single crop output for its immense demand maybe an alien fruit that tastes like the best fruit youll ever eat while also giving you the same amount of energy as 3 dense potatoes, a species needing and able to dedicate entire planet for food must have tech to also climate control planet, which makes me wonder tho if advance enough could perfect food replication from base junk energy and matter be in use as to reduce or remove large dedicated agri sectors of planets for other uses be a thing?
Don't forget the important of crop rotation! There is no such thing as just growing one crop realistically as you'll sap all of the nutrients in the ground.
To a degree, and its a good point. You will push whatever crops grow best but if the economy is offering 50 bucks a bushel of X and 25 for a bushel of Y, you're gonna grown X even if you're only getting 60% of the Yield of Y out of that soil, especially since it's less transport and storage cost. @@aquapendulum
@@aquapendulumnative life? If there is native life off Earth then we can't eat it. We can't even eat most of the lifeforms on Earth and they evolved here side by side with us. It's absolute nonsense to try and live on a world without first sterilizing it.
I live on a farm planet in Kansas. Wheat, beans and corn on the horizons in all directions.
Home❤
Depends on where you live. I live in Kansas City, and we have more forests and buildings then farms here.
@@loganw1232 Go Chiefs! I know they're in Missouri but still my team. I work in the flint hills near fall River. There is diversity here but out west is a sea of crops. 87.5% of Kansas is farmland. I grew up in the country surrounded by farms. In the Gladiator when he runs his hands along the tops of the grain crops, to me it symbolizes "Home".
There’s a episode of Love,Death and Robots called SUITS it’s about a community of farmers on what could be call a agri-world dealing with a infestation of space bugs… with mechs.
I won’t spoil details but it’s a personal favorite episode with good action and humor.
Only Warhammer can make farming sound so brutal...
That implies to me that you don't know much about farming. It seems all kinds of idyllic to the folks who don't rely on it for their livelihoods; it's really, really not.
@boobah5643 I don't know as much as I would like to, but I do know some. I have done some ranching work and have lived in rural areas half my life. I know that industrial farming is not so pleasant, and I know first hand working a piece of property is not some dream job. I think the future holds more possibility for private subsistence farms than planetary scale, which would perhaps be more idyllic. Perhaps genetically modified plants with super yields.
I'm not a farmer I do grow a large vegetable garden, I really enjoy all of your episodes that cover food production in the future/space. And in my garden I do grow potatoes and corn along with zucchini, summer squash, carrots, etc.
Thanks for covering agriculture in such a nuanced and careful way. As someone who works in the industry, it’s heartening to see the balance between efficiency and sustainability in decision making noted as that’s what a lot of the farmers I talk to do every day
Oh course, in an all digital civilization we wouldn't need any farms. That is, except ironically, Farming Simulator 40,000.
AS someone living in Iowa, I've seen so, so much Corn. an entire flat world filled with the stuff, and it's a horrifying thought. lol.
27:15 Imagine a cargo spaceship which launches with generation 1 of the cargo crop and arrives with generation 6. Now that's fresh.
FIY in Belgium it's usually corn-potatoe-linseed/hey-grain-sugarbeets and/or the occasional forgotten vegetable that can replace one of the other by NPK-value. A five year cycle more or less
25:54 I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at the absurdity of the scale for this whole section. Isaac always catches me off guard with his funny lines hidden in there lol.
26:23 and that headline is hilarious
Another informative video that made my commute that much better.
Good work as always Isaac.
"Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor...Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food, and indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege."
Asimov
Why would you mono crop an entire agriworld? For the Grim Derp
Most of your videos are timeless, but sometimes watching one late yields wild results. "As the harvest season comes to an end" *sees snow outside* I think it's already over XD
In Larry Niven's Ring world series Earth started out has a yeast world for the old Slaver empire. When the empire was destroyed the yeast was left to evolve on its own .
For a nastier example, see Niven's "Ringed in Black." You've still got an ocean full of foodstuff, but that's just feed for the livestock.
I think BattleTech may be more accurate in this regard. Most worlds are self sufficient with heavy imports mostly in luxury or exotic foodstuffs unless the world has a smaller population to feed. Though even within that solar system you may have a breadbasket that would supply a large portion of food. Supplies from in system would be cheaper to transport and get to its end destination much faster.
Yeah, as fun as the concept is as a setting, 100% planetary commitment to any specialization seems like an unlikely development route. You'd want your food supply closer than that, and it should be just as easy to deliver the materials to set up mostly-automated agriculture as it is to deliver the entire food supply for a population, over time.
BAttletech is my toher go-to for military scifi, probably because I played the tabletop of it and 40k a lot in college.
@@isaacarthurSFIA do you still play at all? The rules haven't changed much but the miniatures have gotten a lot better. The Clan Invasion and Mercenaries KS has some nice swag. The look for the old 90s mech has changed and they look even better now.
To be fair, _BattleTech_ doesn't have the interstellar spacelift to move bulk goods, even if they had unlimited funds to do it. In the default setting they barely have the spacelift to move the (teeny tiny) armies to wage the Succession Wars.
@@boobah5643 that depends on which era you want to use. There is also a lot of detail that just doesn't need to be part of the game. You turn any large warship into a cargo vessel and move an insane amount of cargo. Either way though moving that much food across light years just isn't realistic. In system it would work out, just not across star systems w/o FTL travel.
Love you Isaac and the whole team! You guys always have me in awe and optimistic for the future.
Thanks so much!
Thank you to the graphic artists that brought Isaacs' words to life, they are all very inspiring.
I really love how you help us grasp the real scale of future civilizations. The example of the city buried in apples was great. Most sci-fi is sadly still stuck in the planet = small town thing, sadly.
@achillesa5894
Archeologists call that dig site "Mush" or oopsy "Applesauce."
Just think of an air drop of grain onto an open flame. "Poof!" said the Archeologist grinning, I did two summers there for my undergrad.
Can you do a video on Cambrian worlds where life is just starting out and the ethical concerns that surround colonization
Aaaaaahhhh. Isaac Arthur video drops right as I get home from dropping the kids off from school. I can get my brain filled and fit a nap in at the same time ❤😂❤
I can’t wait to see the spaceship equivalent of a rusty double-trailer sugar beet truck with questionable brakes.
Thank you to Isaac, Sarah, and SFIA’s cosmic crew so bright,
You each play a hand in creating the realm of SFIA, where the future takes flight.
Each and every episode is truly a stellar delight.
To SFIA’s artists, writers, and sound sorcerers unseen,
You craft wonders that transcend the screen.
In the vast expanse of future's gleam,
Your brilliance cultivates our Galactic Gardeners' dreams.
For week after week, you produce a voyage profound,
Through the cosmic realms, where our dreams abound.
Using hope as your compass, which is humanity's crown,
You help make our own dreams pass limitless bounds.
For in the echo of Isaac's voice so clear,
A symphony of science and futurism embraces every ear.
Thank you, SFIA team, far and near,
For painting hopeful futures, where Galactic Gardens appear.
If you happen to mirror this comment, just leave a like, so that Isaac’s team knows your delight.
-Proud Patreon Member since 2017
If I was a swinger they would be my first choice of car keys. What do you drive?????
12:54 “Doming…as a way to pay for your terraforming “. Best line yet 😂
I was thinking the line in Starship Troopers “All right, so they grow 'em big and dumb on the farm planet, huh?”
Or the planets Harvest in the Epsilon Indi system, Biko in the Kolaqoa System, & New Llanelli in the Brunel System in Halo.
Well, 'farm planet' can be a synonym for a relatively undeveloped frontier planet that hasn't had most of its population consolidate into cities, rather than the fully-developed world dedicated to food production that 'agriworld' implies.
That's two episodes I voted for. Agriworlds and Cleaning Space Debris.
Another great show, sir!
As a warhammer fan i am surprised how calm are you while speaking about the agri world
Great eposide!! I've been waiting for this since the announcement of the 40k like videos, I have loved the whole series forge world, fortress worlds, hive world, and now agri world! Right up there with my all-time favorite colonizing Titan!! Great work Issac, your videos always make amazing food for thought. I love the SFIA way of looking at 40k stuff, and i for one would still LOVE and Issac/leutin09 crossover episode just for the shere joy if it!!
We better solve right to repair first or the fate of worlds will hang in the balance of John Deere's service department.
Wouldn't make more sense to transport into space only the luxury type of food? Like champagne or caviar and fine cheese.
That's probably what the agriworlds would realistically be used for. Like the more common and easier crops could be done on space habitats but certain foods that are more easily raised on a planet like some seafood or plants that need a particular soil and terrain to get right would probably need a planet.
Hey Isaac I have a suggestion.
This video felt like i am reading a good Sci-fi book.
You should try writing one.
26:20 That is the stuff of nightmares. I actually had spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I would survive such a stuation. Most people would laugh until the horror of it began. I do remember finding a praying mantis who held so still that they could not see it though. Maybe there is something to Jurassic Park after all?
I have a feeling Food World will be the common name while Agriworld may remain as the scientific word in the future.
“In cog we trust” - humbug, we know that if left as it currently stands in the lore…the space bugs will dominate the Milky Way just like they did with all the other galaxies.
Fermi Paradox is not a paradox anymore, the Nids did it.
honestly they additional Nid branches seem mostly about opening up new sectors to battle storylines post-Baal
@@isaacarthurSFIA yeah the Nids are just used as a vessel to further the overall story and to make specific characters’ storyline tie into wherever it needs to be BUT…
What I’m saying is that just by sheer numbers and the speed of their adaptations and “turnaround time”…they will devour all biological mass in the Milky Way and move on to the next one.
Before the space bugs could eat the Necrons, them taking another afternoon nap and hitting the snooze button for another 60 million years would make them the best (only?) race able to survive in the Milky Way - now that they painted themselves into a corner with Nids consuming tin-men as well…who knows 🤷♂️
Happy Arthur's Day to those who celebrate
26:10 HA!!!
That image plus "finger-licking doom"... got me good.
I can assure you I'm well aware of the fact that grass is tricky to grow
YESS I'm so early and ready for this! Happy Arthursday!
If you want monocropping and environmental controls, hydroponic o'neill cylinders are probably the way to go.
That excerpt from the 40K Novel is borderline grimderp...
Where can I buy a one way ticket to one? You'd think that a planet made to support growing food for humans, should also be rather friendly to them.
The four sisters are what are needed for full soil restoration; corn, beans, squash and cloves
While there will be relatively pastoral worlds, they won't have to be strip-mine farmed. Electric food synthesis is already a thing now, here, on earth. A few years ago, Solar Foods of Finland was already able to make high protein food chips (equivalent to fish meat & better than soy powder) with a 3D printer for about $6. The machine uses electricity (i.e. ideally solar panels / renewables), atmospheric gasses, and a few trace nutrients. No soil, no waste, no erosion, no big fields or irrigation needed. Food disks just print out into a bin, and you can mill them to a flour if you like to make hi-pro "bread." When the process gets to a price point below various bulk foods like grains or fish meat, those agro products will no longer be needed except for niche gourmet/artisan settings. The first version of the Star Trek "food replicator" technology is here :)
The day is coming relatively soon, when most of those thousands of miles of grain crops, those vast fleets of factory ships, cease to be. You will just print food locally, pretty much anywhere, and not even need long-distance transport. Then the land and sea can replenish over time, and there will be room enough on earth to convert most of the space back to more vibrant, diverse ecosystems.
Awesome episode
I have never been more intrigued by “fish-stick factory of Io”.
it'd probably be most effective to do whats basically an aquaponics world
Lol, thank goodness Google put that "climate change" card on this video. I may have been confused 😂
Gotta push THE MESSAGE after all.
It's just a bug with whatever bot they have. At least this isn't harmful like the one that falsely demonitizes a video
In a science fiction series I'm working on, pretty much all of Earth's agriculture has moved to O'Neill and McKendree colony cylinders so that all of that farmland could be reallocated to a global reforestation effort (which I realize is probably a flawed concept, but it's part of a long-standing international climate change reversal agreement, so it's probably no more flawed than, say, the United Nations). Only certain luxury crops are the exception (some corruptly so, like French vineyards, which argued that wine-making was a critical part of French heritage that had to be preserved).
"...no more flawed, say, than the United Nations." So, the equivalent of putting nation states famous for abusing human rights on the Human Rights committee, keeping the peace by way of sex slavery (including pedophilia) and embezzling millions and millions of dollars annually?
So we get tens of thousands of annual deaths from forest fires, boondoggles where they 'reforest' the Great Plains, and the like?
Yeah, sorry. I realize that many of my problems are a result of boiling down a complex thing to a sentence or two. Combine with hitting some personal hot buttons.
It all comes down to details, and the brief picture you've sketched out is appalling to me. Which doesn't mean the story is in any way bad; you're only describing a setting, and you've already looked at some of the problems/side effects with the French loophole (which I don't consider all that corrupt.)
You can get all kinds of neat effects by carefully controlling the space grapes' environment, while the Terran grapes are still dealing with the vagaries of weather. And if the Terran wine is cheaper, that implies some nasty things about the price of all the other foodstuffs. Good stuff for a setting.
Permacultre and food forests will go crazy
It might just be me but at 21:17 when it shows the city the Starscape is the Minecraft Night Sky, but without the moon.
I love SFIA! thank you for your content, it is always a treat. (grabs snack and drink)
I like to imagine that, in the future, every planets industry is localised and serves primarly as an agriworld and is also used for chemical as well as light industry while the heavy industry is lifted into space.
I just want to compliment the artist who created the vehicle at 10:40. If I were wealthy enough, I would commission a full set of drawings and have that built as a fuel-cell electric RV.
The economics of terraforming vs. building space habitats would be crucial here. The cost of terraforming a world and building the infrastructure to haul huge bulk cargos to orbit, vs. space habitats that can be built as needed and don't need that infrastructure, would seem to tilt in that direction, unless there are other factors that counter balance. Maybe people would just want their planet grown food, and be willing to pay for it.
Earth wouldn't necessarily need to be the capital of a system wide or interstellar empire to prosper. There are countries now that do very well on tourism and luxury goods.
No, but Earth will have most of the people for a long time which means most of the financial and political workers will be there. And most of the customers. Plus, there's already an established industrial base. And while there _is_ that annoying gravity well, there's going to be a lot of orbital infrastructure, too, so you don't need to climb the well to deal with Earth.
I can imagine great wind farms taking advantage of the strong winds.
Hey Isaac, just wanted to let you know that your Spotify Narration Only and Background Music versions seem to be switched!
Keep up the great stuff!
Love that you have Ground News as a sponsor, but pissed that a product like it is even needed in the first place.
This reminds me of fictional human colonies for both population holding and agriculture form halo called reach and harvest
Remember Reach (but forget Harmony)
harmony is a planey from TITANFALL, i meant Harvest! from halo wars@@RowanRabbey
@@mikeohawk95 Harmony is a planet in Halo as well.
@@RowanRabbey well I’ll be
In the next 10 years or so, it could and should become possible to start turning most of our (desertified, soil-depleted) farmland back into old growth forest that is MORE productive and MORE economically viable than "traditional" (read: radical) big ag practices from the 1940s. All we need are ported Tesla FSD and some significant continued robotics advances. Harvesting has always been the bottleneck. The next generation of automated farming equipment WILL enable industrial-scale permacultural food forests.
Or Bill Gates slows production on his farms while thousands of farms outside his dominion somehow explode and become useless. Why solve the hunger problem when you can solve the population problem?
Off the top of my head, I would guess dedicating an entire planet, say for example Mars, so agriculture would probably be a bit of over-centralization, unless there is some benefit to it I don't see.
However, dedicated farming habitats, that serve the needs of neighboring habitats or the planets they orbit, seem pretty plausible.
I can't help thinking the videogame Stellaris when I hear the titles of these "x-world" episodes. (I assume a fair percentage of the followers of this channel is familiar with it) Of course, that game assumes
a: An invisible, unlimited fleet of FTL cargo ships.
b: An ill-defined, presumably administrative, benefit of having a planet geared towards a main purpose. Planets get bonuses pertaining to their designation, like food production for agri-worlds.
This is just a guess but there might be good reason to have a specialized farm world if it's close enough to worlds that can't grow enough for themselves, if the planet has a predominantly CO2 atmosphere (so more uniform temperature across latitudes, not enough oxygen for insect pests, and plenty of carbon for growth and nutrition), or even just planetary weather/mineral content that may be marginal but substantial at planetary scale to the point where the extra growth can feed an entire continent.
@@RowanRabbey Hm, well that would be an example of local conditions that would create an attractive planet for crops, that would have a good surplus to export.
Another thought: if you have to terraform or dome over a place, that would make local conditions less of a point, so less "fertile valley" planets.
However, bioforming might be the solution here. Like, the hypothetical planet you mentioned might be inhospitable to natural life, but you might be able to bioform crops that could take advantage of the conditions.
My last Agri-world just got Exterminatussed.....😢😢
Well, you can turn it into a manufactorum now.
@@marrqi7wini54 Or a quarry world.
Wow, that opening passage was dark! Then, of course, a great discussion on the future of agriculture. Having been blessed with the opportunity to work with some incredible Ag-Food scientists and systems engineers in the past couple years, my eyes have really been opened to the complexities of our current agricultural processes. To think of the future of Ag and the many possibilities is always a rewarding discussion. Many thanks for your expertise and imagination, Isaac! 😃🧑🌾🌽
I have fun suggesting many of your sci Fi concepts to people of little imagination. It seems that many people can not wrap their mind around something that is not available Right Now. thanks.
Social media brains. No imagination or intellect anymore.
An interesting idea is that exporting crops means literally losing the elements, nutrients, and compounds that normally would get cycled back into the environment. On a small space station I could see there being laws or policies on how much can be exported or on what must be imported. I imagine stations being interested in taking waste products off traveling ships for processing and cycling into any agriculture they have set up. On agri worlds I suspect there would be some of the same ideas, probably shipping in raw waste or processed fertilizer in similar quantities to how much food they could export.
Cargo could take centuries to ship but still be worthwhile and profitable if the demand for volume is high enough
In H. Beam Piper"s novella Lone Star Planet one of New Texas' biggest exports is the meat of the Supercow.
Future Newz: "Future Farmers of America (FFA) gives new meaning to the old acronym, "ffs," with their name change to the Future Farmers of Sol."
Not into every topic you cover, but this was pretty cool
For transporting foodstuffs through space with no FTL, you'd render all the food down to its base components and deep freeze it for the journey across the stars.
You wouldn't have wheat or corn, you'd have powders and oils of plant proteins put to near zero temperatures to then be thawed when it arrives, the same would happen with animal products, then you'd have machines to convert it back into a semblance or exact copy of the actual food you want.
150 years ago 2 out 3 Americans were involved in agriculture in some capacity, today it is 2/3rds of one percent
red light and blue light* you need brted light for cegging plants and UV for flowering although you need a bti of eac hopne in smaller amounts still.
The viability of transporting crops to other planets would depend on travel time . Long time storage in a frozen state of most food stuffs would effect taste and nutrition. So perhaps the Syfy series Firefly hit the nail on the head by transporting food stuffs in the form of blocks of protein bars . The bars even had all the vitamins and minerals . Maybe crops would have to be heavily processed to keep them viable for the voyage.
@isaacarthurSFIA *me playing Rimworld when suddenly:* @4:33 "once new arrivals have made a planetfall and found this out, it's too late."
see whate you did? Now I need to figure out if I can play a agriworld scenario
Don't usually hear Saskatchewan and Alberta name-dropped in this sort of video.
At one point you said that it wouldn't be feasible to send between star systems without FTL, couldn't it be possible to send it off into space to a colony that has not yet been established but set to feed them according to some growth plan they were set to follow.
Might be an interesting story, a colony that was set to be 2 billion but was only a couple hundred thousand due to a disaster and the food keeps raining down on the planet because the infrastructure to capture it was damaged long ago.
I read years ago the Endymion saga from Dan Simmons and i remember one of the exotic and absolute wonderful civilizations were the Ousters and their complete adaptation and evolving into in space living thriving branch of extreme humans who chose to survive in space and the artificial constructions of their civilization also their agrarian satellites and grasslands and forests of incredible dimensions and the humanoids who were genetically induced to thrive in space and worked on those different worlds were just fascinating also many books who tell about gigantic planets inhabited by people who created prehistoric forests with sequoia and other gigantic trees that are reaching into space and the many cities that are built in these trees just awesome lecture i am 62 and i love science fiction from the age of 14 and my first books were from Dragonriders of Pern written by r Anne McCaffrey wonderfull saga
The idea of Agri world never made sense to me without wide usage of some sort of stasis or instantaneous travel, how else do you transport fresh produce across light years? It also takes no account of industrial hydroponics.
"Fresh" is relative. If a good like flour is kept under low humidity, etc., during transit it arrives "fresh". In a future with FTL or other, is no freezer burn tech out the question?
This is one of those concepts that only works as a metaphor to examine human society. We're worried about food miles in the modern world, this is food parsecs. Also by definition the food and the consumer are made of the same elements, shipping the same atoms back and forth across the galaxy just to recycle them is never going to be cost effective. One of the best parts about food production on earth is that the co2 and water are moved by the weather for free, even if you grow pears in Argentina and pack them in Thailand and eat them in Britain, the water and carbon that make them up cycle back into the same closed ecosystem where they can make it back to the farm without being shipped there.
Specialisation isn’t a new concept, just on a bigger scale. However, being dependent on food from outside your own planet is never a good idea. I believe self dependency should be standard setup for each colony.
You should do an episode on food and material replicators and the effect that would have on society
Its hard to imagine a planet, that supplies a different more powerful planet with food, not being a nightmare slave society. Theres every incentive for it, and its far enough that the populace of the consumer planet might not even know... we literally did this with bananas and it was all on earth
@yomanyo327 ok explain the Bananas then. Fyi agriculture is the reason humans invented slavery
@@yomanyo327 that's literally what happened with slavery and banana republics though, and their dependents managed to keep them in line and/or weather strikes they put on. If you want your question answered, learn the historical and (unfortunately in many places) contemporary reality of what happens when there's a lot of fertile land for cash crops and little cheap labor to tend/harvest it.
@@yomanyo327 Based on you seemingly thinking that a banana republic literally means a republic that produces bananas, I'm gonna assume you don't know about agricultural slavery and how revolts get put down.
@@RowanRabbey Yes, that's where the name comes from. The whole corrupt/'incompetent' government thing was a side effect of powerful neighbors that wanted the bananas.
Exactly the subject I needed a video about!!
An interesting book I've read is James Scott's "Against the grain" and one of the interesting comments in that book is that man chose to domestic grain plants like grain over tubular plants because it was easier to store. In a terraformed planet why still stick with grain plants over tubular plants?
The 1950s monster movies got it wrong. It's not ants the size of houses . . . it's chickens the size of houses !
I'm afraid, I'm very afraid !
" You have big sheds, but nobody's allowed in. And inside these big sheds are twenty-foot-high chickens, because of all the chemicals you've put in 'em, and these chickens are scared! They don't know why they're so big! They go "Oh, why am I so massive?" And they're looking down at all the other little chickens and they think they're in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small." - Alan Partridge, futurist
Hi Isaac! Thank you for another great episode. I appreciate the way you bridge some of the bleakest realities that human imagination can create with stark scientific reality, and give us positive ways in which we might inhabit the solar system/stars some day.
There were also agriworlds in Halo Contact Harvest and a short story in Aliens Bug Hunt.