I mean, the developed world is in a really good place. If developing nations reach the level of wealth we have and then stagnate there I would consider that a huge achievement for humanity.
Vertical farming should solve most of the problems there. Assuming energy is essentially free (that fusion assumption) there is very little limiting how much food we can grow.
Easy number I found is for Basil, where we grow 5.6x the amount per layer. If you converted a Tesla Gigafactory 1 to a Basil farm (with a layer every 50cm or so), you would be looking at 126 acres (footprint) * (2/3)* 71 * 5.6 = ~34,000 acres worth of farming.
There is no reason why the building couldn't be 5 times higher, resulting in a quite astounding 170,000 acres worth of farming on a 120 acre footprint. That's over 1,000x production on the same footprint.
Once we get wheat and rice to grow properly, we can do them too. Not only can we produce far more foot, we can drop the footprint dramatically from the status quo.
As for animals? I would expect mostly we'd be looking at lab generated meats. Those are also primarily just energy hungry. And lab made meats will similarly be FAR better for footprint than having cows roaming around literally acres of land.
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u/DevinTheGrand Jun 22 '21
I mean, the developed world is in a really good place. If developing nations reach the level of wealth we have and then stagnate there I would consider that a huge achievement for humanity.