There is another Vertical Farm mostly scripted, I'm planning on releasing the sources/calculations spreadsheet for the whole series with that video. There's so much information/data/calculations in it that it needs tidying up so that it makes sense and is easy to follow. If you have any specific sources/calculations you want to know, I can post them for you.

How would we do on steel consumption though?

@@raztubes that wouldt be to much of a problem tbh

Every first world nation has sub-replacement birth rates, and it's not because of farm land.

In many european countries, the area of forests increases, because we need less farm lands compared to several decades ago. And with productivity gains way smaller than the productivity gains we could achieve with vertical farming. So, I think at least in Europe, we could have a lot of lands returned to nature.

@@Guik1er Challenge: convince the person who owns the land to stop getting any money from it.

@@Molikai Easy. Wood is valuable. When they no longer can compete with the farmers producing their lettuce in plant factories they can switch to producing lumber instead.

This may be a little utopic, but if everyone knew how important forests are, we wouldn't have deflorestation.

"Is vertical farming a growing industry?"

@@ExaCognition @zalxder - oh, both of you grow up.

Thanks! It's actually just me, not a team, but I appreciate it all the same.

Generic Stockage :( Thinking about it, I could write my own for these shots and it wouldn't actually have to work either.

It was bugging me as well. lmao that's funny.

Awesome, thank you!

It's great to hear that you found it helpful, I think framing emerging technologies in a useful and understandable way is one of the hardest, but most important challenges to deal with when communicating about them.

No problem. I hope to post more in the not so distant future, along with sources and calculations. Though it may take me a while sadly.

Thanks very much

Thanks a ton

Utilizing inedible mass is a good idea indeed, though you still want to mimizie it from an energy perspective. Using say solar panels for vertical farms isn't actually a loss comapred to direct sun. This seems unintuitive because there is an efficiency loss from both panel LED in the conversion loss. Yet this efficiency loss is made back through the control that CEA provides, this can be seen in the 4 times greater harvest rate, yeild and edible mass%. If you use sunlight you forfiet some to all of the following: spectrum, PAR and DLI, Photoperiod, CO2 enrichment, Temperature, Humidity, Airflow, Pests. The degree to which you limit control of these factors depends on if you are growing outdoor or in a greenhouse, but all of these factors will be at least somewhat limited compared to full indoor 100% artificial light.

Much appreciated!

I'm glad you enjoyed the video! Hopefully it gives you a general idea of the vertical farming landscape and gives you a bit of insight on what areas you might need to research further.

Great to hear! I certainly think you have a point. I've seen a few suggestions that technology paradigms look more like S-Curves than a clean upward trajectory (although the frequency of each S.curve may be increasing). This makes technological progress look more like a series of steps than consistent progress. It's certainly true that many consumer electronics are following the path of exponential progress in their cost/performance. I think it's pretty interesting the reasons why we tend not to see innovations, after researching it, it certainly seems a lot more complicated than I initially thought.

This is certainly an option. If you have none arable land near a population center, then it's likely to be a decent opportunity for the likes of vertical farming and clean energy. There are many other factors of course, but it will be interesting to see if this sort of land can be put to good use.

I think you are probably right. There is no need for AI or GMO for plant factory production, though those that utilize such technology would have an advantage. I have been wondering to what extent this technology will democratize. You don't need much space for a plant factory, and a lot of the technology is relatively cheap. On the other hand, there certainly is a scale advantage for the high tech plant factories. I'd imagine our future food production will be a balance of big and small industry much like it is now. I don't know whether the ratio big to small will change significantly or not going forward.

De nada!

Why go micro tho. Bigger is better efficiency and radiation blocking. Micro reactors are nice if you need to move them. If we don't need to move them... We'll go big

The Problem with big reactor designs is the construction time and investment cost. Basicly u pay a shit ton of money and it takes a dacade or more to go net Profit and in that time things can change making it a risk to invest.

When we get fusion reactor's and we are close and we wont have energy concerns

@@janikbeyermann6064 This is a problem because of often rediculess overregulation, unnecessary beaurocracy and the lack of standardised and mass produced reactors. Additionally the prices of reactors are often so high because they need expensive pressure vessels. Using designs without pressurised water like helium, molten salt or liquid metal cooled reactors can dropp the price significantly as well.

@@janikbeyermann6064 Actually any kind of modern reactor would be cheap to run once its built.

I'm glad you liked it. When I started researching the series, I found it particularly difficult to get good numbers for this industry. I could find plenty of positive and negative articles, but not many had enough/reasonable data to be able to draw any conclusions. It wasn't until I was quite a long way into my script and research, that I actually was able to form conclusions that I felt were roughly in the ballpark. It's great to hear you are working on such a tough but important problem. Wheat is definitely one of the harder plants for this industry, but it's also one of the most important. Increasing the edible mass % is a critical part of making it viable. I'd be interested to know what approach you end up deciding on for this.

@@ExaCognition I will make sure to come back here with some form of food for thought when I finish thought on the subject.

Thanks, certainly a few interesting points. Regarding solar energy, it was certainly simplified for the purpose of scope, although I have started an energy series that looks at this in more detail. The Cost of solar as been halving in priced around every 4 years for the last 2 decades, which is a big part of why it's projected to be so cheap. Even then, there are some important caveats, namely location and storage. The location has a fairly large impact on the cost, due to local solar irradiance. Having cheap and effective storage capability is required to make solar viable for this type of application, while the cost of storage is falling quickly, it's still fairly expensive. In terms of scale, and locality of food production, this is certainly an interesting area. I don't think there is a definitive optimal location, rather it varies on a number of factors. Some people are willing to grow at home, others are not. Some products are easier to grow at a small and local scale than others. Phase 3 produce is extremely difficult to grow cost effectively, and if/when they arrive, they are only likely to be viable in large scale plant factories for quite some time. On the other end of the spectrum, Phase 1 products are relatively easy to grow, and small vending machine size solutions are already on the market. It makes sense that as technology progresses, growing locally is likely to end up being cheaper and more efficient. In principle you can grow phase 2 at small scale right now, but realistically, it's not going to be a very efficient approach, so it would be unreasonably expensive. The trend is towards local and smaller, but it's still helpful to think of it rolling out in stages. Size and Scale Stage 1) large scale plant factory with regional distribution Stage 2) Small vertical farms with local production Stage 3) Individual production Current Viablity Phase 1 - is moving towards being viable in stage 3 now, but is expensive Phase 2 - is at stage 2 Phase 3 - is not currently viable at any scale Gradually each of the phases will becomes progressively viable through each stage, as technology progresses. Though the time frames are relatively slow, it's better to think and plan for it sooner rather than later. --- I hope this helps give my perspective.

@@ExaCognition It does...thanks for the reply.

That's super interesting. I did come across some of these during my research but at the time, it was quite early stages, so it was difficult to get much data. That said, it sounds like it would be a good thing to look at as an addition to the series. If you have any information or know any good resources, It's something I'd like to look at in the not so distant future. I definitely agree with the premise. I'd imagine a lot of people like the idea of micro agriculture but don't have the time/space/knowledge to do it. For it to be a consumer level product, it does need to be really easy and I'd imagine it could work so long as it's not substantially more effort than having say a break-maker in the home. Plus, many people do love the idea of being more involved in the food they eat. I'm assuming this sort of Micro Agriculture can only really be supplementary. I'd imagine it's quite difficult to achieve significant growing density in home based units?

@@ExaCognition I've been continually shocked that in home aeroponic methods haven't taken off yet, NASA's been using the technology for decades, but I think the problem has been getting an adequate level of yield from something that doesn't take up a lot of space. More of a design problem then a technological one in my view. Plus I think lighting wasn't ideal until recently, now with mid-power LEDs you can get your light very close to the plants and they're incredibly efficient when ran under full power, hardly giving off heat. I've combined different orientations of plants and lights into the space of a common fridge, and I'm implementing a consecutive growing schedule that allows all the users food requirements to be ready to eat each week with no waste. No pesticides, chemicals, land use, harvesting machinery, processing, packaging, shipping, refrigerating... just whole food right there in the home. I'm meeting a manufacturer today actually to begin the build of my prototype. There's surprisingly little information out there regarding aeroponics, mostly basic technical stuff, but I haven't come across anything that goes into the detail and great presentation that you've done with your series on vertical farming. The way you've studied and put the information together is incredible, awesome work! I believe you and I share the same concerns over our current state of agriculture and the ways in which we must overcome its problems and what the future of farming might look like. I see you have an email on your youtube page, I'll have to send you any good info I come across regarding aeroponics, otherwise I can keep you up to date with my project and business. My plan is to publish a document on Micro Agriculture (or Distributed Farming, more details on that to come...) and all the details regarding the components and methods of growing food inside the home using aeroponics. I just have to prove that I can actually fully replace the grocery aisle with my concept!

I think you have a point. There are a few breakthroughs that make this sort of product far more viable now, even if the core technology has been available for a long time. As you say, cheap efficient LED's can be placed closer without tip burn, so your growing density is much higher, the sensor and electronics are cheaper and more capable than ever. I think staged growing makes a lot of sense, so that you have continual harvest, that's always a challenge for small systems. I was wondering about the reasons you might chose such a solution over say growing food in soil at home, I assume the reasons are: not enough space, ease of growing/all the plants surviving, increased growing density/higher yield, higher harvest frequency, also I can see how faster growing cycles means less planning ahead. It's probably quite a long list. I'd imagine you are limited in your use of light recipes, though I guess it depends on how much lighting control you have for each level and the LED capability. It seems one of the really interesting capabilities is the user could grow such a broad ranges things, thanks to the lighting and climate control. Would you run off presets for different plants or could you download say "optimal cherry tomato conditions", it's certainly challenging. A lot of the most advanced aeroponics I've come across are proprietary systems, which probably explains why good technical data is hard to come by. I would have recommended aerated hydroponics, as a solution since it seems to carry a lot of the benefits of aeroponics. However, if you've got a working system successfully delivering nutrients and maintaining suitable misting, then it sounds like you've already got a good system. Good luck with it, I'm interested to see how it goes, and I'd been keen to read the document on micro agriculture.

@@ExaCognition Yes primarily it was for all the reasons you mentioned that I wanted to move away from soil, as well as keeping a system that is as low-maintenance as possible. I have designed a new plant medium that is reusable and which also allows the germination process to happen, this way I have no separate cloning stage; when the seed is placed it will stay in that same spot until the plant is ready for harvest. Continual harvest was one of my main goals to avoid waste and to have a system where everything is conveniently ready for consumption at the time it is wanted. I wanted to avoid over producing because then you have to figure out how to preserve or give away all your extra produce. But, this means that I will be using general levels for both nutrients and lighting. I'll probably be running light 16 (maybe 18) hrs a day, all year, and during that light cycle I'll have plants starting, maturing, and being harvested all at different times, I'm also going to be testing out how to extend harvest periods (say if you're making a meal that requires two leafs of kale, cut them both from the plant but leave the plant to continue to grow, instead of cutting the plant down for harvest, we should get more harvestable mass that way). I know there is great advances to be had with creating granular recipes of lighting, nutrients, and CO2 for every single plant out there, where commercial operations could really drill down on how to fully "maximize" what we can extract from these plants. I think there's lots of market room for this where companies could make their own specific version of a food item too. But I think this amount of specificity and customization is very difficult or impossible to do on a distributed farming level inside dwellings, there just isn't enough space to have multiple growing environments. And you know what? I'm not so sure if those specific recipes provide much of a tangible advantage. Sure, they might be bigger, greener, have a unique taste, maybe increase amount of such and such vitamins, but personally I feel as long as there's a way to eat truly fresh and whole food that's grown 10-20 feet away from your plate, you'll be so much better off anyway, nutrient-wise, without having to get specific with each plant. Perhaps what relationship my product could have with larger companies that have the ability to optimize plants, is I could source seeds from them. But I doubt I could explore that facet of modern agriculture currently and will avoid it for now. Certain plants that are photosensitive during their growth cycles (such as the ol mary jane), I don't think I'd be able to accommodate them in my general machine, but once I've established this product my next one is an automated weed machine, I live in Canada and there's tons of money in the industry, too big to ignore! My manufacturer approved of my designs yesterday, looks like my prototype will begin construction in the coming weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to report that I'm the first to make a commercial product that grows root vegetables like potatoes and carrots. If I can get my projected yield from it, I might do a youtube series where for a month I live only on the food that this unit can produce, that would be wild!

I think the skyscraper farm concept is fading quickly, although the man who is credited with the term "vertical farming", was initially talking about Skyscraper farms. Since the architectural concepts are often quite visually appealing, they were latched onto as a concept quite easily. I've seen a few instances where Plant Factory type vertical farms have been conflated with Skyscraper farms, but not so much recently. I suspect the increasing presence of profitable vertical farms has had a lot to do with changing sentiment over the last few years, there are so many emerging now that it's becoming hard to ignore.

@@ExaCognition Good to know, and yes they do look rather impressive. While back I watched a video about growing towers(which seem like a good idea for private use, but wouldn't you get more plants per meter squared in a proper farm using other methods?) and several commenters were talking about the plastic getting into the food, which seems like easily avoided issue. Do you know of any weird reactions to hydroponics or vertical farming like "it drains all the drinking water" or "we would run out of LED lamps"?

I haven't come across that many weird objections recently, most of the misconceptions I've come across are somewhat understandable. They generally come from the theme of "too expensive", "too much electricity", which certainly used to be true and is still true for many plant types such as wheat and rice. One of the themes I see a lot is "why use solar to produce the the electricity to turn back into light through LED's, when plants can capture the light for themselves". It's an understandable critique, intuitively this is a wasteful process due to a double conversion loss. It's not necessarily obvious that this waste can be overcome through the growing control seen in plant factories, that is enabled through artificial lighting. I want to address stuff like this in a future video.

It's a tough balance, the custom graphics are more interesting but they take a long time to make. the better I get at producing the graphics, the more efficient I should get though.

There are examples of vertical farms in abandoned mines and underground subways. It helps quite a bit with thermal regulation, but if you aren't taking advantage of a pre-existing structure, it can be quite expensive and very unlikely to be cost effective to dig your own site. Making use of cheap surplus electricity is a very good idea if you can find a plan that allows for it, and of course plant factories can set their photoperiods to whatever time works best. There certainly are some examples of existing farmland adding a vertical farm component for extra diversity, and adding some solar to the land is often a part of that.

I'm glad you liked the videos! I've had a lot of comments regarding nuclear and I don't necessarily disagree. My next main series is on energy, and I will be making a video on next generation fission. The focus on renewables here was in part for simplicity and in part because the focus was on the first viable scenario. There are a lot of challenges with solar from a grid/storage and locality perspective. Solar's in particular is highly location dependent. With that said, on an absolute cost basis, solar (even including storage) is the cheapest form of electricity providing you can be selective of your location. The analysis for the first phase 3 viable farm suggests it's likely to be in a location of high solar irradiance and close to the equator (as that minimizes the storage seasonality challenge). This essentially means that you would expect the electricity cost to be lower here than in any other location, making it the first place were the energy cost constraint of phase 3 is likely to be overcome. While it might be the first place you would expect to see phase 3, that doesn't mean that solar will be a singular and scalable solution worldwide. There are many benefits of next gen fission as a power source: stable production, relatively cheap, carbon neutral and the ability to place them more or less anywhere. This gives the next gen fission plants the potential to be a key source of global energy going forward. With that said, I would imagine the first phase 3 plant factories will likely be solar powered and relatively equatorial for the reasons I stated earlier.

@@ExaCognition That's understandable, certainly. I do look forward to your next series.

I know this is a year old topic, so if you don't want to respond that is fine. The cost these days for new nuclear plants is actually higher than for solar or onshore wind. It is now around $0.07/kWh for the production of electricity in new nuclear power plants (I guess this is also what you meant). However for onshore wind this is $0.05/kWh and for large scale PV it is $0.04/kWh. I honestly doubt that maintenance fees for nuclear is lower than solar. Considering solar doesn't actually need much maintenance. Overall a cleaning of at most a few times a year (though many PV on roofs are only cleaned once a year) will be most of your maintenance, with nuclear plants, that can be a lot more. Wind turbines might need more maintenance per MWh, but clearly the difference in construction and dissassembly costs make up for that. As for waste, this arguably is even more in favor of solar. You need to understand that when you talk about solar pv waste, you are talking about dismantling the installation, this isn't akin to nuclear waste management, but rather the complete dissassembly of the nuclear power plant. As of now the most used way of decomissioning a nuclear reactor is just encasing it and let it be for a few decades, then followed by a not to easy dismantling. With pv panels it is just removing the pv panels and support structure and moving them to recycling sites. Recyling of solar panels already has reached an efficiency of around 95% for a cost of around $15-30/panel (where the original sale price is around $200-300/panel). Wind turbines overall are pretty easy to recycle also, except for the blades, which might be problem for now, but in the future there might be a good and relatively cheap way to recycle them, untill then we just have to store them. In the end you could at end of life have no indication that there were wind turbines/solar panels at a location within problably a year or less after dissassembly begins, with nuclear this at best takes decades (for now). Even in land use nuclear has much less on an advantage many people think. For example wind turbines actually use less space per MWh. This seems weird, but remember that it is their footprint at the base (tower is only around 3-6m wide) and the exlusion zone around it. For most of the apparant surface use (under the blades) you can still do things like farming, storage, (small) trees, ... For solar it is less good, but not too bad either. Apparently nuclear only is around 7-10 times better than solar, however this didn't include the mining space used. In the end it might be around 2-3 times. Now, the main benefit nuclear would have imo would be the ability to power human activities during the day and power food growth during the night, essentially being able to run 90% of the time (what nuclear reactors need) and for see in 2 necessary energy demands without having to install around twice the production capability.

@@MDP1702 honestly, one of the biggest issues nuclear has at this point is how heavily regulated it is, and that most numbers with real world values look at half century old designs, anms there has been so much hesitation in building newer power plants of better design. It's also important to note that solar's cost per kwh is heavily dependent on latitude.

@@SCComega Nuclear has to be heavily regulated. The reason it is as safe as it is now (safer than anything else) is exactly because of that. And no, they don't look at half a centuries old designs (the first real large scale build nuclear plants are from around half a century ago). They normally look at the last 1-2 decades. If they looked at the older designs to get the values, it would be much cheaper. There is a reason there is so much hesitation, with the price of a nuclear power plant it would be extremely costly if something goes wrong/didn't pan out. True that solar's cost depends on the latitude, but unless we are speaking about very northern latitudes (like +- above Germany), large scale solar is still quite cheaper than new nuclear plants. Small scale (roofs of houses for example) not so much, but then we are talking about generation that should optimally be used on site to prevent extra costs like taxes, transmission, distribution, ...

Thanks! I'm working on the next video in the series, should be posted in the next few weeks, hopefully sooner rather than later. I have started to think about Patreon, it would help make things a bit more sustainable. I will look into it!

It was a general statement, it has to be said that for most crops this actually isn't an issue anyway, but your right if the farm is located near arid land then its even less of an issue.

You lose a lot of growing control (spectrum and photo period) when you try to supplement artificial light. Generally it's better to go all sunlight (at least in summer), or all artificial light, the middle ground of mixed sunlight and artificial light loses a lot of the advantages for artificial lighting.

There are multiple examples of commercially successful plant factories and as an industry it's growing fast. That said, the commercial viability depends on crop type and location. Rice is only being grown indoors for research purposes and won't be commercially viable for some time. Lettuce on the other hand can be grown profitably in the majority of locations. It's best to think of Vertical Farms as a technology that is viable in small niches of product and location, though it's important to remember that the convergence of improvements in Absolute Yield, LED Efficacy and Solar Efficacy (or other cheap energy sources) effectively multiply together. The resultant growth appears to be exponential (though it will likely be an S-curve in the long run), and we are already see that the size of the niches are expanding fairly quickly. It will be quite a while before Vertical Farming is commercially scalable to the point where is a has a significant impact on farming in general, so farmers swapping fields for warehouses likely to be a very gradual process.

Thanks! The energy section is definitely oversimplified, this is in part because it felt slightly beyond the scope of the series and because the future of energy is my next major series. With that said, the analysis used for this model is a very specific use case. In the case of a phase 3 farm that can be placed anywhere, we can place it in a location optimized for cheap energy. If you place your vertical farm in a location of high solar irradiance and close to the equator, the cost of solar is much lower, and you are far less exposed to the seasonality storage problem of solar +Li. This is essentially already the cheapest source of energy and is projected to be going forward in the near future. That doesn't mean that solar + storage will be the cheapest solution everywhere, far from it. In locations that get less sunlight and more variance in seasons, the cost goes up and the storage becomes a lot more challenging. Li- is not well suited to long term storage. Without storage capacity, solar largely delivers is peak generation at the wrong times from a grid perspective. I will be covering the next gen nuclear in the energy series, it offers a carbon free, cheap, reliable energy that can be deployed pretty much anywhere, making it a promising option. That said, while it may good choice generally, it's not necessarily going to be the cheapest in all locations. The first phase 3 vertical farms are likely to appear in locations with the cheapest energy and will most likely use solar.

I still don’t get why people fall so easily for the nuclear PR. A widely spread system of renewables has so many advantages over any type of resource depleting, centralised power generation.

@@petergoestohollywood382 well Peter, to criticize one subject you must at least understand it. 1) solar panels aren't made of thin air, a huge deal of mining and industrial transformation must be done, not to mention the huge extensions of land needed to produce meaningful energy. 2) nuclear plants normally function with in situ leaching, and uranium can be extracted from sea water... you see, only a can of coke volume of uranium is needed to provide enough energy for your whole life, that right there is called energy density. How many tons of material would it require to achieve the same goal by producing panels that are littered every 25 years? And batteries? Renewals have a place, but it's not for powering our whole civilization, just look at Germany's failure... you might be drinking too much of the renewables cool aid.

There's a table on Page 220-221 of a book called "Plant Factory, An Indoor Vertical Farming System for Efficient Quality Food Production" which links to a number of research papers. The table compares Rice, Lettuce, Tomato's and strawberries. It highlights the values used in the test such as CO2 ppm, Daily Light Integral, Harvest Index, Dry Matter Ratio etc. It's an interesting book if you have access to it.

@@ExaCognition Thank you so muchh.

For a while using Thorium. But it cannot fix resource depletion problem nor pollution.

@@davidpesce6571 better than fossil fuels though

I was supposed to do this on video release but I've going to have to do it retroactively. I'm going to add some links to source sheets in the next few days, and add the sources I've used for it over time. Hopefully it will be useful resource in the not so distant future.

Yeah, I've tried to tone the music down a bit in future videos.

What is the point in vertical farming when rice can be grown and harvested every 3-4 months? You can then have no seasonal limitations and multiple harvests compared to open field farming, using 10% of the water requirements.

Funny you say that. Apollo is an example I was going to talk about in the video.

idk do the math yourself

They can yes. It's not got a huge focus historically, since the Plant Factory market is small. That said, it's getting a lot more attention now, so seed specifically for Plant Factories will become more common.

​@@ExaCognition Does the higher efficiency of plants under low light conditions counteract the low efficiency of solar panels? By the way, your videos about farming are really awesome.

Imagine that, a world where we could disarm the warheads uselessly stockpiled and convert their radioactive matter in to something useful like fuel cells for power plants. Heck, the whole world could invest more in to nuclear warhead defense and share the technology so we're all secure against smaller nations striking with one, we'd be making enough revenue. Imagine that, bringing energy to the world instead of burning it down and making nuclear warheads useless for anything but lighting your cities.

​@WhiteDragonDancer Please don't lecture me on M.A.D. when that argument became obsolete the moment a third party got their hands on a significant amount of warheads. We need a way to take these things out of sky instead of relying on a mexican standoff to keep us safe, savvy?

@WhiteDragonDancer The whole world investing in to nuclear warhead defense systems will lead to a... nuclear winter? Nobody's talking about magic or anything vanishing, we're talking about turning these useless stockpiles in to something we can use without compromising on our defense against nuclear attack. You're right, it only takes 100 warheads to transform a landscape in to hell, so how long until those who hate America so much they'd kill themselves to destroy it and its people get their hands on enough nukes to pepper a western coastline? Is MAD going to stop them? Is MAD going to stop North Korea from being idiots if they get their hands on any number of nuclear devices? MAD is obsolete, we need to develop legitimate defenses against a nuclear attack. We can't do that without Russia losing their shit because such a move would make their nuclear stockpiles a non-threat and they'd lose their end of the protection agreement, that's the only reason we aren't doing it. If we could work together with them, we could even fund the building of nuclear powerplants in russia from their old stockpiles and help provide them with laser defense grids. Seriously, if one nuclear warhead can power a laser defense grid capable of shooting down nuclear missiles for 2 years on one warhead, you're telling me that this leads to absolute mayhem? What good is MAD with oil barons and psychotic dictators having their own arsenal? We need to be able to shoot them down because this eye-for-an-eye protection will leave us all blind, and you think we don't need some safety goggles?

@WhiteDragonDancer 11 aircraft carriers and over 100 million armed american citizens might have something to say about that. The American Militia is made up of every armed citizen and is possibly the sole reason that japan didn't invade us, because "there is a rifle behind every blade of grass". I know America is the only one, but I'm just stating why nobody's dumb enough to invade our soil by conventional methods. Are you suggesting that convential warfare of cataclysmic sizes aren't already happening under the knowledge that nobody's going to launch, it'll be the same with nothing to launch. The electricity that could be had from the nuclear materials in there is enough to power entire fleets of aircraft carriers, submarines and power-plants to bolster infrastructure which invariably means a stronger military economy for defense. MAD is really only a thing between the former allied nations and russia, it's something that still needs diffusing. I'm not saying get rid of them all, but we have enough nukes to terraform mars locked away, it's wasted energy resources bleeding out its halflife in storage. Use the shit.

@WhiteDragonDancer Trust me, neither Russia or America is going to invade one another's soil because it's a near guaranteed loss either way it goes. Nobody's dumb enough to try it and anyone who has in modern history has failed. Conventional warfare on either side will not favor the invader.

you know that i were paraphrasing the "matrix", don't you?

that's okay. i admit that it was a rather obscure joke. it's sometimes difficult to find the right balance.

The solar area required is a fair bit less than would have been taken by equivalent land for crop production. Whether you would want to use solar, wind or other sources such as nuclear depends on your location. That said, if high Q-factor fusion becomes viable, then the energy problem largely disappears altogether. I don't see that happening in the short to medium term, but it would be huge if it happened.

@@ExaCognition I don't believe the energy problem would disappear even with nuclear fusion energy. The believe that nuclear fusion would make energy almost free is an all around wrong assumption. A singular nuclear fusion reactor, if it works as we imagine it will, will cost around 60 billion dollar. Even if it produces extremely high amounts of energy, it will still need to offset that insane production cost in some timeframe.

Nah, micro nuclear fission reactors are the cleanest, safest, and cheapest form of power ever invented, and have a footprint smaller than a box truck. This scalable, stable, and reliable form of power is far better for farm factories than anything else.

@@GodActio Thorium nuclear reactors hold the promise and are said to be safer than Uranium. One day entrepreneurs will give it a better chance.

Phase 1 and 2 vertical farming products have a shelf life advantage over outdoor crops because they have a longer shelf life because of their low bacterial loading and they be produce close to where they are consumed.

Yes it is possible to grow a very broad range of products, however as a general rule of thumb, the more calorific the food, the harder it is to produce economically with artificial lighting. Since the cost/efficiency of artificial lighting is improving, there are vertical farms starting to grow product economically beyond leafy greens (tomatoes, cucumbers etc.). It will be a quite a while before anything like wheat or rice is economically viable though.

Wind. 💨🔌💡 👌😀 Also, we've got 10 years to reshape the energy industry. Fission plants take years to plan and build (Hinkley Point) and are far to expensive to be worth it, in the UK 🇬🇧. Maybe it's a good idea for Algeria 🇩🇿 or somewhere where they've got the Uranium etc and lots of space to put it.

@@Robbythegod you talk about space efficiency. You should look on space efficiency of nuclear reactors vs all other methods and you will see nuclear is the king of efficiency. And environmentally speaking efficiency is the most important thing. You say reactor are expensive to worth it but you can just look for the numbers and see that solar, wind etc are in fact more expensive per joule of energy (so they are less profitable). And poor countries aren't the problem here, the rich countries are the one how consume extreme amounts of food energy and other resources. And they are the second biggest pollution producers (after "not yet rich" developing countries) On the categories you choose, nuclear power out match any other energy source The "good" arguments against nuclear power are: nuclear waste, spread of nuclear weapons, safety and Satan worshipping lizard boiis All of which can be solved with currently existing tech (except the latter)

Thanks for the feedback. I've upgraded my microphone since I recorded the vertical farm series. It should be better in the next video!

@@ExaCognition Looking forward to your next upload. Worth the upgrade for such quality content.