this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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We could also all live in cells. Maybe even hook us up to VR so we dont even need to get out into nature. You could maybe even harvest energy, by keeping us in nutrient filled tubs while simulating a perfect world into our neural perception.
If you'd build an apartment tower surrounded by food forest and nice fields everyone would get an amazing view. Better view than from ground level. Make the ceilings high and very good noise insulation and great windows. And it would be cheap because the land could be cheap.
I dont think food forrests are viable solutions. Maybe in very particular places in the world. But globally, commercial food productions will not be replaced by food forrests any time soon
I think there are some trees who are very efficient in creating calories - so maybe with more genetic engineering.
But yeah mostly you'd have smaller fields like potato or wheat or corn between hedgerows, and food forest or orchards for fruits and most of all for a nicer view. The main idea would be that you don't need to transport food except from the surrounding area to the apartment tower. You'd produce / recycle food, water and energy locally.
The theory is great! But i doubt that modern consumers will accept this. Sadly! We want our bananas, and oranges all year round and they must be as affordable as possible.
We do need change to change things but personally i think that what is driving denaturation is the chase of profit not comfort and ease of life. I am not moving into a 1 room condo and stop eating watermelons so that multi trillion companies can increase their proffit margins and make even more money for people who dont live the same life as the rest of us.
We are already producing too much food and too much land is being used to create food that goes into feeling animals that will become food. Eating less meat will have a larger effect that eating locally grown onions to save on transportation
Well for me Solarpunk is about what would be possible - except for our current global regime preventing it. So yeah it's fantasy.
I don't know if the costs work out low enough, but you could build such a lone apartment tower on farmland right now. If you had like a government owned "eco bank" funding this. If the land and construction costs can be kept low enough. It would be really cheap with some advances in premanufactured parts or 3D printing or house building robots. Kite power for very cheap wind energy.
If you could buy in for 50k and get all your living costs, food, energy, water and internet basically for free for the next 20 years, plenty of people would jump at this. And if it's big enough (500 units?) you could justify having a doctor and a kindergarden and hybrid local / remote school. If we were serious about climate change, everyone could live in luxury with a killer view.
so... I love the dream, but it is a utopia.
First of all, farmland is a diversity graveyard. Just because it is green, does not make it natural or even pretty. I live in a country that uses 61% of its area for farmland and although it makes for a cool Windows background, there is not much life in fields like that. Changing the farmland to food forests could maybe change this, but this leads to the second point
The reason why farmland is accumulated into larger and larger fields is, because it is cheaper and easier to run. Going the other way, diving it up into smaller production and mixing it up, will make everything more expensive, complicated and require a lot more (manual) work to run.
500 units is not even enough to support a local grocery store in current times, let alone a doctor or a school.
That said, i had not realized where this was posted in. It just popped up on my feed, so I guess you are right in that it could be a great setup if it could work.
Yeah I have no idea if or how it could work. Commie blocks used to design local neighborhoods with shops and kindergarden. Maybe it would be that when you have kids your move to a block with a kindergarden and school, then it would make more sense.
Maybe it would be harder to farm but maybe it could also be solved through lighter robotic farm equipment. I once calculated that you only need ~250m² for potatoes to produce enough calories so feeding yourself so it's theoretically not that difficult. I also hope in the decades to come we can genetically engineer better food plants. Like higher / better quality protein crops.
But my main idea was how to create a view for people that want to "live in nature". But the hippie ideal for a farmstead is unsustainable with so many people. An apartment block would save a lot on heating, cooling and infrastructure. The proper sci-fi utopia would then be to have underground railway tunnels connect thousands of such apartment blocks in nature. Then much surface area could be rewilded instead of having roads and bridges. But tunnels are rather expensive.
They supplement and decentralise food production, building resiliency into our systems.