It seems that every major scientific or technological advancement is immediately labeled "dangerous" by critics. The printing press was going to destroy our memory. Pasteur's groundbreaking work was followed by an anti-vaccine movement. Radio was going to destroy society; then it was television; then, the internet. Pushback against progress appears inevitable.
Of course, technology is usually morally indifferent. Smartphones can be used to video call your grandparents or order illegal drugs. How we use technology is what matters.
Smart tech, dumb people
The newest fear is that smart technology (smartphones, computers, tablets, the internet of things, etc.) is supposedly making us dumber. But a trio of authors, led by Lorenzo Cecutti, argue in a new paper that smart technology is not turning us into dummies.
According to co-author Anthony Chemero, the idea that smartphones and digital technology damage our biological cognitive abilities is not backed up by science. Instead, he claims that we are developing different relationships to cognition due to smart devices. "What smartphones and digital technology seem to do instead is to change the ways in which we engage our biological cognitive abilities."
The team cites research that found that using digital technology as an external memory system doesn't take into account the fact that short-term effects do not necessarily indicate long-term changes to cognitive functioning. They write, "Relying on external tools when they are available is not the same as losing the ability to engage internal processes when necessary."
Other research disagrees with that conclusion. The famous London cab driver study showed that cabbies had larger hippocampi and better memory than non-drivers. Other research shows that GPS reduces spatial awareness and mental mapping. Studies such as these indicate that — as the cliché goes — if you don't use it, you lose it.
Photo: ikostudio / Adobe Stock
More good than bad
Still, the authors are correct that fear about the dangers of technology is overblown. Technology generally makes life better. In particular, the team considered five ways in which smart technologies are especially useful:
- Complexity. Fields such as data visualization, financial accounting, and statistical analysis all benefited from the speed and accuracy of technology.
- Reliance and skill. Advances in computational ability free up cognitive resources so that coders and data scientists can focus on understanding data and building better programs.
- External access --> Freed capacity. The internet offers far greater access to information than any previous technology. Because we don't need to memorize, our mental resources are free to be used for creativity or learning other things.
- Flexibility. People can freely choose what information to memorize and what to offload.
- Self-insights and self-control. With so much information at our fingertips, we can choose what to focus our attention on. (However, this assumes that smart tech isn't addictive.)
There's always some risk
While the team ably counters the fear-mongering around the "dumbing down" of humanity through technology, they also seem a bit too enthusiastic about championing its advancements. Chemero concludes:
"You put all this technology together with a naked human brain and you get something that's smarter...and the result is that we, supplemented by our technology, are actually capable of accomplishing much more complex tasks than we could with our un-supplemented biological abilities."
That is certainly true, to a degree. But we should also be aware that every benefit comes with a cost.
Here's another thing to consider: what happens if your smartphone or the internet stops working?
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
The need for clean, consistent, renewable energy sources has never been more pressing. Rising energy prices threaten to kick-start inflation and slow economic growth. Control of the supply of fossil fuels has caused wars before and may well cause them again. Burning fossil fuels continues to create greenhouse gas emissions, making solving the problem of climate change difficult.
While low-carbon and renewable sources of power are being used more than ever before, none of them are perfect. Solar and wind power are very clean and increasingly inexpensive but have an energy storage problem. The batteries required to store that energy require rare earth metals, which are messy to extract and increasingly in demand. Hydro power is great but can have negative impacts on the river ecosystem. Nuclear is still a tough sell.
If we're going to solve our energy problems, we either need to find a new way to produce a lot of energy or fix the problems with the power sources we have. A renewable energy technology company backed by Bill Gates and founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Gross called Heliogen has a new approach to an existing model that may just accomplish the latter with a giant, extremely precise magnifying glass and some really hot rocks.
Concentrated solar power
The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project near Las Vegas, Nevada. This project, while not associated with Heliogen is a typical example of concentrated solar power. DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images
In Lancaster, California, a mid-sized city in the Mojave Desert, Heliogen has built a miniature version of their planned solar refinery. While concentrated solar power is nothing new — it has been operating commercially since the 1960s and is said to have been used by Archimedes to build a heat ray to burn the Roman fleet — this plant improves on the concept with stunning results.
Essentially a lot of mirrors arranged in a circle reflecting sunlight at an elevated target, concentrated solar power uses the energy in the sun's light to heat that target, which could be water, molten salt, or even something solid, to very high temperatures. (When this heat is used for something other than producing electricity, it is called concentrated solar thermal energy.)
Heliogen's current test refinery has 400 mirrors, known as heliostats, though it is only a tenth the size of what the company is proposing. Even with this reduced number of mirrors, the refinery has produced eye-popping results. Its operation has produced temperatures as high as 1500° C (2732° F). For comparison, most existing, full-sized concentrated solar power plants are able to produce temperatures in the 400° to 500° C range.
Heliogen's advance is made possible by state of the art software. Using AI and a series of cameras, the heliostats are kept on target as much as possible (currently to a twentieth of a degree) through micro-adjustments to their position throughout the day. By keeping the mirrors on target, the greatest amount of sunlight possible is focused on the target, creating more heat than was previously possible.
Concentrated solar power isn't just for electricity
It's important to remember that this is technically a solar thermal system. Unlike solar panels, this project does not use the photovoltaic effect to turn sunlight directly into electricity. This project is about generating heat. This heat can then be used to produce electricity — and the high temperatures involved mean it can do so very efficiently — but it has applications beyond that as well.
Many industries use intense heat in their manufacturing processes, like smelting or cement making, and they often burn fuels to create those high temperatures. Heliogen's refinery is able to produce similar temperatures without burning fuels and could provide the heat for these industries in the future. Additionally, the heat produced is high enough to make hydrogen fuel via electrolysis.
As Gross explained to CNN, "If you can make hydrogen that's green, that's a game-changer. Long term, we want to be the green hydrogen company."
If not used immediately, the heat energy can also be stored in plain old rocks, which can stay hot for days or even up to a week in a properly insulated storage unit. Their energy can then be called upon when needed or possibly even shipped to a location in need of heat. Compared to the difficulties of storing electricity produced from solar, this is child's play.
How can concentrated solar be applied at scale?
Gross hopes to improve the process by reaching the same results with increasingly smaller heliostats. His are already smaller than usual, which would allow them to be mass produced more cheaply than they are today. The hope is that this, along with other refinements to the system, would help lower the cost of energy produced by concentrated solar until it is cheaper than fossil fuel energy.
Currently, energy from concentrated solar power is more expensive than burning fossil fuels but only slightly. Also, compared to large arrays of solar panels, solar refineries are more expensive to build and operate. But costs are expected to decrease, in part because they are much better at energy storage than traditional solar, as discussed earlier. Furthermore, large scale concentrated solar power operations already exist in Spain, the Middle East, and the Southwestern U.S.
Concentrated solar power could radically change manufacturing
Gross's grand vision is to build many refineries all over the world using their heat to power industrial processes. The electricity produced by other refineries would create vast quantities of cheap "HelioFuels," starting with hydrogen. Since hydrogen fuel cells are extremely efficient and can run everything from submarines to laptops, this would be a huge step toward cleaning up the energy supply.
Similar ideas exist and have been used elsewhere to cleanly produce jet fuel, another industrial process that normally requires burning fossil fuels in order to create high temperatures.
The reduction in carbon emissions due to widespread use of concentrated solar could be substantial. Concrete manufacturing alone is responsible for 8 to 10 percent of all global emissions. Nearly 40 percent of those emissions are caused by burning the fossil fuels needed to create heat for the manufacturing process. Quick mental math suggests that if concentrated solar power replaced fossil fuel burning for heat in concrete production alone, global carbon emissions would fall by as much as four percent. For comparison, that is roughly equal to the share of carbon emissions created by France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Brazil combined.
One day soon, you could eat bananas grown in downtown Manhattan.
It's a way of growing food that turns traditional agriculture on its head. With the required technologies now rapidly maturing, vertical farming is sprouting across the globe.
While there are still unresolved issues with this marriage of technology and agriculture, its promise may be irresistible. If it gets off the ground — literally — in a major way, it could solve the problem of feeding the Earth's 7.9 billion people. And that's just one of the benefits its proponents promise.
Vertical farms could take over the world | Hard Reset by Freethink www.youtube.com
Agriculture through time
When humankind began planting crops for nutrition about 12,000 years ago, the nature of our hunter-gatherer species fundamentally shifted. For the first time, it's believed, people began staying put.
With agriculture as their central mission, communities formed, with the now-familiar arrangement of residential areas surrounded by land dedicated to growing food. Even today, with modern transportation making the widespread consumption of non-local foods common, this land-allocation model largely survives: population centers surrounded by large areas for growing vegetables and fruit and raising livestock.
Challenges facing traditional agriculture
Credit: Genetics4Good / Wikimedia
As our population has grown, traditional agriculture has begun facing some big challenges:
- Farmland takes up a lot of space and destroys biodiversity. Our World in Data reports that half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. As Nate Storey of Plenty, Inc., a vertical farming startup, puts it, "It is probably one of the most defining acts of humanity: We literally changed the ecosystem of the entire planet to meet our dietary needs."
- The demand for farmland — both for produce and livestock — has led to a dangerous deforestation in several parts of the world. This also results in biodiversity loss and contributes to an increase in the greenhouse gases that drive climate change.
- Degradation of farmland, such as through soil erosion, poses a threat to agricultural productivity.
- Agriculture consumes copious amounts of water, which exacerbates water shortages. (Obviously, water shortages also reduce agricultural productivity.)
- Fertilizer run-off causes substantial environmental damage, such as algal blooms and fish kills.
- Pesticides can degrade the environment by affecting non-target organisms.
- The effects of climate change are already making agriculture more challenging due to significant shifts in weather, changes to growing seasons, and realignment of water supplies. Our climate is continuing to change in unexpected ways, and the only predictable aspect of what lies ahead is unpredictability.
Vertical farming proponents expect that a re-think of how we grow food can ultimately solve these problems.
What is vertical farming?
Credit: Freethink Media / Plenty, Inc.
Vertical farming is a form of agriculture that grows plants indoors in floor-to-ceiling, tower-like walls of plant-holding cells. Instead of growing plants in horizontal fields on the ground, as in traditional farming, you can think of vertical farming's "fields" as standing on edge and extending upward toward the ceiling. The plants need no soil or other aggregate medium in which to grow; their roots are typically held in a cell lining, often composed of coconut fiber.
Vertical flora is grown either aeroponically, in which water and nutrients are delivered to plants via misting, or hydroponically, in which plants are grown in nutrient-rich water. These are incredibly efficient systems, requiring 95% less irrigation than soil-grown plants. With vertical farming, Storey says that 99 percent of the moisture transpired by plants can be recaptured, condensed, and recirculated.
Plants, of course, also need light to grow, and vertical farms use increasingly efficient LED bulbs to keep plants thriving.
Vertical farms can increase crop yields by 700 percent
Credit: pressmaster / Adobe Stock
If vertical farming takes off the way its supporters believe it should and will, it may solve many of the aforementioned challenges facing agriculture.
Crop yields with vertical farming far exceed what's possible with traditional agriculture. Plenty, Inc.'s Shireen Santosham notes that the highly controlled growing environment of vertical farming has allowed her company to reduce the growing time for some crops to as little as 10 days. Without needing to consider weather or even sunlight, combined with the ability to operate 365 days a year, their system increases the potential annual yield by about 700 percent.
The land requirement for vertical farming is a mere fraction of that for traditional agriculture. Santosham says it can be done in a building the size of a big-box retail store that can be built pretty much anywhere that has adequate utilities, including within major urban centers. The tightly controlled environment of a vertical farm should also eliminate the need for applied pesticides.
Yet another benefit of vertical farming is the return of land currently needed for food production back to the planet. This could help facilitate Earth's recovery from deforestation and return much needed habitat to threatened or endangered species. Of course, if we ever colonize the moon or Mars, vertical farming will be the go-to option for feeding the colonists.
Several vertical farming company pioneers are already getting their high-quality crops into the hands, and mouths, of consumers. Plenty, Inc. has an eponymous line of greens, and Aerofarms has their FlavorSpectrum line. Both companies claim that their products are exceptionally tasty, a result of their carefully controlled growing environments in which computer-controlled lighting can be optimized to bring out the most desirable qualities of each crop.
Credit: Alesia Berlezova / Adobe Stock
The history of vertical farming
The idea of vertical farming isn't new, and experts have been questioning its viability since the term was first coined in 1915 by Gilbert Ellis Bailey, who was obviously way ahead of the available technology at the time. The first attempt to grow produce in a constructed environment was a Danish farmhouse factory that was built to grow cress, a peppery green related to mustard, in the 1950s.
The modern concept of a vertical farm arose in the New York classroom of Columbia University's Dickson Despommier in 1999. He presented the idea as a theoretical construct, a mental/mathematical exercise imagining how to farm in an environmentally sound manner. His class began with the notion of a rooftop garden before considering a "high-rise" version that might theoretically be able to grow enough rice to feed two percent of Manhattan's population at the time. The eureka moment was a question Dispommier asked: "If it can't be done using rooftops, why don't we just grow the crops inside the buildings? We already know how to cultivate and water plants indoors."
With the technological advances of the last few decades, vertical farming is now a reality. Our sister site, Freethink, recently paid Plenty, Inc. a visit. (See video above.)
Vertical farming today
Credit: Nelea Reazanteva / Adobe Stock
Today, growers across the globe are developing vertical farms. While the U.S. has more vertical farms than any other country, the industry is blooming everywhere.
There are currently over 2,000 vertical farms in the U.S. While more than 60 percent of these are owned by small growers, there are a few heavyweights as well. In addition to Wyoming's Plenty, Inc. and Newark's Aerofarms, there's also New York's Bowery Farming. There are also companies such as edengreen, based in Texas, whose mission is to help new entrants construct and operate vertical farms.
Japan comes in second, with about 200 vertical farms currently in operation. The largest vertical farming company there is SPREAD. Across Asia, vertical farms are operating in China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan. In Europe, vertical growers are in Germany, France, Netherlands, and the U.K. Germany is also home to the Association for Vertical Farming, "the leading global, non-profit organization that enables international exchange and cooperation in order to accelerate the development of the indoor/vertical farming industry."
In the Middle East, whose desert land and scarcity of water present a particularly challenging agricultural environment, vertical farming is taking root, so to speak. The United Arab Emirates' Badia Farms is now producing more than 3,500 kilograms of high-quality produce each day and expects to increase that yield going forward. In Kuwait, NOX Management launched in the summer of 2020 with plans to produce 250 types of greens, with a daily output of 550 kg of salads, herbs, and cresses.The economics of vertical farming
Credit: meryll / Adobe Stock
Building and operating a vertical farm is a costly endeavor, requiring a substantial initial investment in state-of-the-art technology, real estate, and construction. AgFunderNews (AFN) estimates that it can cost $15 million to construct a modern vertical farm. Fortunately, investors see the potential in vertical farming, and the industry has attracted more than $1 billion in investments since 2015. That includes $100 million for Aerofarms. Plenty, Inc raised $200 million in 2017 from a fund backed by such respected forward-thinkers as Jeff Bezos and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt.
AFN is particularly excited by the potential of what they call second-generation vertical farming technology. They cite advances in LED technology — expected to increase energy efficiency by 70 percent by 2030 — and increasingly sophisticated automation that can streamline the operation of vertical farms. AFN anticipates operating cost reduction of 12 percent due to improvements in lighting and another 20 percent from advances in automation.
BusinessWire says that the vertical farming produce market was valued at nearly $240 million in 2019, and they expect it to grow 20 percent annually to over $1 billion by 2027.
A welcome disruption
Veritical farming will be disruptive.
Vertical farming would eliminate the need for the arduous work of harvesting crops by hand from vast tracts of farmland. Current picking jobs, the company says, can be replaced by better-paying, full-time jobs available 365 days a year in better working conditions — and in the variety of geographic locations in which vertical farms can operate.
There are two caveats, however. First, the number of people needed to manage and harvest vertical farm crops will be far fewer than the many farmworkers required for less efficiently planted traditional fields. Second, with automation becoming ever-more capable — and perhaps a key to eventual profitability — one wonders just how many new jobs ultimately will be created.
But the societal benefits far outweigh any costs. As Plenty's Storey muses, "Like most everything in the world, we can only save our species if it makes economic sense." Thankfully, it does make economic sense.
In December, we reported on the imminent clean-up of space junk. With an estimated 129 million pieces of debris currently orbiting our atmosphere, one lucrative contract awarded by the European Space Agency will commence in 2025.
Four years is a long time, however, given the amount of junk we've allowed to float into space. It's not the only issue affecting the crowded ether. New research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, has found that astronomers can no longer find anywhere on Earth to view the night sky free of space junk and satellite pollution.
Although the first satellite was only launched in 1957, as of the beginning of this year, 3,372 are now in orbit, alongside the aforementioned debris—what the research team from Slovakia, Spain, and the United States term "space objects" for sake of brevity. These objects range in altitude from a few hundred to over 35,000 kilometers.
These objects pose an immediate threat to researchers by compromising astronomical data. Space debris and satellites often appear as streaks of varying lengths and brightness in ground-based telescopes. And the problem is going to get worse, says John Barentine of the International Dark-Sky Association.
"It's a bit of an eye-opener. As space gets more crowded, the magnitude of this effect will only be more, not less."
This handout image supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA), shows a view of The Palms, Dubai as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft passes below, in an image taken by ESA astronaut Tim Peake from the International Space Station on April 10, 2016.Photo by Tim Peake / ESA/NASA via Getty Images
Plenty more is coming as the race for consumer travel heats up. SpaceX has already launched over 1,000 Starlink communication satellites as it builds a new global internet infrastructure. Last year, the FCC approved 3,236 Amazon satellites that will all be in orbit as part of the mega-constellation "Project Kuiper" by 2029. While these aren't the only companies in the race to a global internet, SpaceX alone aspires to launch 42,000 satellites into space.
On Earth, we might enjoy faster internet speeds, but in observatories, researchers are concerned. Currently, scientists plan their observations around the orbit schedule of known objects. In a few years, the researchers of this letter write, that might prove impossible. An exponential increase in satellites will likely guarantee streaks in every telescope across the globe.
Slovakian astronomer Miroslav Kocifaj, part of the team behind this new research, believes this logjam in space could create such an intense background glow that we'll no longer be able to gaze out into the farthest reaches of space.
His team points to the 1979 resolution of the International Astronomical Union, which stated observatories should only be built in regions where light pollution adds less than 10 percent more light than normal skyglow. While they point out that "natural skyglow" is a debatable term, they're also concerned that the ambitious plans of private companies will ensure that nowhere will come in under that number. As the team writes:
"These results imply that diffuse night sky brightness produced by artificial space objects directly illuminated by the Sun may well have reached nowadays, and perhaps exceeded, what is considered a sustainability 'red line' for ground based astronomical observatory sites."
Just at the moment when we're reaching further into the cosmos, we seem to be boxing ourselves in. For millennia, we've started into the night sky and dreamed about the stars. Soon, it seems those dreams will be aimed at the junk we've placed there.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
NASA has big plans for the coming decades. The agency's Artemis program has set its sights on returning to the Moon after an absence of nearly 50 years. Once there, the first woman and next man to walk the lunar surface will begin establishing a base camp, laying the foundation for the sustained exploration and economization of Earth's solar sibling. Then it's off to Mars.
But a journey to the ruddy planet, a distance of roughly 114 million miles, will require NASA to solve a myriad of logistical and engineering problems. Chief among them is the problem of food.
Although humans have maintained a continuous presence in space for 20 years aboard the International Space Station (ISS), food hasn't proven an issue as the station orbits a mere 220 miles above our terrestrial home. NASA and other space agencies can easily send astronauts care packages containing fresh fruit and veggies alongside shelf staples.
Mars-faring astronauts, however, will not have it so easy. The time and distance required for the expedition will make regular resupply infeasible. Astronauts will need to bring all their food with them, alongside the means of producing that food, and keep those supplies within the volume constraints of the spacecraft.
It's a problem with no obvious solution. That's why NASA is challenging entrepreneurs, college students, hobbyist investors, and you, if you're up for it, to help them devise one.
The way to an astronaut's heart
An image showing the different challenges a viable space-food system solution must overcome.
Credit: The Journal of Nutrition
In a paper written for The Journal of Nutrition, Grace Douglas, NASA's lead scientist for advanced food technology at Johnson Space Center in Houston, outlined the necessities for food technologies in long-term space exploration. The most critical being, of course, survival.
"In the history of humankind, explorers set off to see what was over the horizon, and literally millions did not return because of food and nutrition failures," Douglas and her co-authors wrote.
The difficulty is that the processes we rely on to cook meals on Earth—such as boiling water, hot surfaces, and food preparation—work as they do because they are bound to an environment with gravity, atmosphere, atmospheric pressure, and even certain microbes. Spaceflight replaces that environment with one of microgravity, scarce resources, cabin pressure fluctuation, and unmitigated radiation, each adding their own variable to the cooking calculus.
To date, space food preparation has been limited to adding water or heating pre-packaged foods. When supplemented with fresh produce from Earth, the system works fine. But as mentioned, such a system would be infeasible for the more than two-year roundtrip to Mars and back.
Douglas and her coauthors conclude that any viable solution must provide safe, stable, palatable, and reliable food, while also overcoming environmental constraints, using minimal resources, and producing minimal waste. It would also need to provide all the micro- and macronutrients a spacefaring astronaut needs.
That alone is a tall order, but there is another wrinkle engineers must consider: the astronauts' mental wellbeing. Douglas and her co-authors note that it's a "common misperception" that astronauts will eat anything to complete the mission. While astronauts are high-performing individuals, they still require moments to revitalize their wellbeing against the stress, workload, and isolation inherent in such a mission.
Delicious, nutritious meals can provide such moments of mental reprieve, but they also must have variety. Even the tastiest meal in the finest of restaurants would become a mental chore if eaten day-in, day-out for two whole years. Substitute that with a tasteless, yet nutrient-dense food paste in the vacuum of space, and even the highest performers will develop a case of cosmic cabin fever.
One tough space nut to crack
To meet these challenges, NASA is crowdsourcing solutions through its Deep Space Food Challenge. In collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency, NASA is offering a $500,000 prize purse for solutions that add some flavor to extended spaceflight.
"NASA has knowledge and capabilities in this area, but we know that technologies and ideas exist outside of the agency," Douglas told UPI in an interview. "Raising awareness will help us reach people in a variety of disciplines that may hold the key to developing these new technologies."
The agency hopes the winning technologies will also bolster food production on Earth. If a system can offer tasty meals with minimal resources in space, the reasoning goes, then it may be modified for deployment to disaster areas and food-insecure regions, as well. The challenge is open to all U.S. citizens and closes on July 30, 2021. Information on the Canadian Space Agency's challenge is available on its website.
If food isn't your forte but you've got engineering chops, you can still help NASA solve the many other engineering and logistical problems facing the future of space exploration. Through the NASA Solve initiative, the agency is seeking ideas for breaking lunar ice, shrinking payload sizes, and developing new means of energy distribution.
And even if engineering isn't for you, you can still call your Congressional representative to request they support NASA and restore funding from budget cuts. We can all play a small, yet important, role in the future of space exploration and the advancing of scientific knowledge.
