Things have changed since I was a kid. We've gone from saturation bombing and dropping nukes as the big kahuna to being able to do point assassination strikes.
Some comment I read I keep coming back to. They (elites) will risk everything to give up nothing.
The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.
Solar farms produce 50 times more energy per acre than corn grown for ethanol.
A rabbit hole I started working down was how much ammonia would cost is the hydrogen was from electrolysis power by solar. It's sort of competitive.
Whack bit. 2200 calories a day is 2.5kwh. That's what a 400W solar panel puts out.
Which made me wonder about just synthesizing amino acids directly. Why make ammonia and spray it in crops that use sunlight (2% efficient) to turn it into protein.
You start digging an there are two dozen companies working the bioreactor angle. Hydrogen + N2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
I find this way more interesting than using AI to replace MBA's and code monkeys.
I stumbled on something also interesting. The oxygen from photosynthesis comes from water not CO2. So all the energy from food is essentially from splitting water.
Also I think I read in a book on aeronautics which was published in the 1950's that more energy is required from oil to grow food than the food itself. Trying to look that up again just now the internet spits out an efficiency as low as 10%.
You have to be a little careful about that figure because a lot of the energy comes from natural gas, not oil. Natural gas is a much bigger thing now than it was in the 1950s. Natural gas in the US is mostly "dry", that is not associated with oil production.
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