[HN Gopher] Gene banks aren't enough to save the world's food
___________________________________________________________________
Gene banks aren't enough to save the world's food
Author : WithinReason
Score : 98 points
Date : 2024-05-02 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (longnow.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (longnow.org)
| cjk2 wrote:
| _proceeds to eat humans_
|
| I get the point but it's an extremely nuanced point to the point
| it might be a poor generalisation even with the content of the
| article considered.
| waynecochran wrote:
| How far are we from just saving the genetic code digitally and
| then synthesizing the seeds by arranging a sequence of amino
| acids to instantiate viable nucleotides? Is this still science
| fiction?
| cjk2 wrote:
| Seeds are more than just a program. They are more an embryo
| than a cell.
| waynecochran wrote:
| How far are we from instantiating the proper embryo then?
| margalabargala wrote:
| Quite far. Not only do you need to synthesize the proper
| genomic sequence (barely possible), but it needs to be
| packed into a valid chromosome structure with a valid
| epigenome.
|
| Then that needs to be placed into a cell with valid RNAs,
| compatible chloroplasts and mitochondria, compatible
| proteins in a compatible configuration, etc.
|
| Creating all of that de novo for a plant is well beyond
| current capabilities.
|
| This is why when we clone e.g. a sheep, we transfer a
| nucleus from the cell of one individual into the cell of a
| different individual. It is much easier to mix and match
| pieces of different cells from the same species, than to
| create those pieces from raw materials.
| dflock wrote:
| Creating artificial seeds, from scratch, based on a stored
| DNA sequence? Pretty far - that's still SciFi at this
| point.
| Suppafly wrote:
| You're making a distinction without a difference there.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Seeds are much more than single cells. Embryos are much
| more than single cells.
|
| The comparison is apt, and highlights a relevant
| difference.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, it's not. Seeds and even embryos are to DNA what a
| running piece of software (and especially, a Lisp/Smalltalk
| image) is to its source code: the latter stores only a
| fraction of the former.
|
| And then consider that life is always built by other life,
| there is no bootstrapping from source code happening.
| Compare with Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting
| Trust", and realize that the most important bits about life
| _may not even be encoded in the DNA_ , but rather in the
| runtime state that's passed "out of band" from generation
| to generation.
| redundantly wrote:
| I wonder what would be achieved first: genetic synthesis or
| matter replication.
| jacobolus wrote:
| I recently came across the videos of Oregon State
| horticulturalist Andrew Millison, who is an amazingly clear
| presenter about permaculture:
| https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos
|
| For example, he has nice videos about chinampas in Mexico
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs , a medieval Indian
| canal tunnel of a style found throughout Iran
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kplvq0C-cdE , efforts to return a
| Hawaiian watershed to something like its historical state
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7q8friw1p8 , the Indian Paani
| Foundation's "water cup" to revitalize drought stricken villages
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc , and the difficulty
| of using ancient iron-saturated aquifers for irrigation in
| western Egypt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBC5wOLF1hQ
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I had some time several months ago and happened to look through
| a copy of Lo--TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism instead of
| reading on my phone. It has some good sections about the styles
| of permaculture you mentioned. But it is more of a collection
| of short chapters on each technique rather than a deep dive
| into any one.
|
| https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/julia-watson-lo-tek-design-b...
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Home gardeners seem like a pretty good option here. For more
| regular vegetables, this is already a thing that exists with seed
| libraries and exchanges, and programs that preserve heirloom
| varietals and sell the seeds to gardeners. Buying these seeds is
| basically just a way to help pay for the continued cultivation by
| the breeder (unfortunately, unless you _really_ know what you are
| doing and are quite careful, preserving a specific variety on
| your own in a home garden is difficult-verging-on-impossible,
| despite what 1000 online guides to "seed saving" will tell you).
|
| The harder thing is the grains, since those typically require so
| much more work to get from the plant to the plate. I've looked
| into growing my own wheat before (I already have a large garden
| and have enough space that I could theoretically grow enough
| wheat to cover a substantial portion of my annual flour use), but
| the small scale/DIY options for threshing, sorting, grinding, and
| sifting are just not quite practical (for the level of effort I'm
| willing to put in, which I'm quite sure is higher than most home
| gardeners).
|
| If a small scale solution to harvesting and processing wheat can
| be made relatively cheap and simple, I'd bet you could get home
| gardeners to support the continued cultivation of these varieties
| in the same way that they frequently support heirloom tomatoes
| etc.
|
| Again, to be very clear, the gardeners themselves are (mostly)
| not doing the preserving. The plants home gardeners grow are a
| dead-end genetically (usually not being preserved at all, and
| even when they are, almost certainly representing mixes of
| several different varieties), but buy purchasing seeds from the
| larger scale growers, they are paying to support the continued
| cultivation of those varieties.
| greetings wrote:
| Wowa, something I have experience with.
|
| I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my
| city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of
| the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.
|
| I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This
| actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would
| probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good
| strategies on youtube.
|
| The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well,
| I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you
| were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build
| something that would help mechanically.
|
| I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a
| while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to
| do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills
| are fantastic.
|
| There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale
| Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do
| this kinda stuff.
|
| In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood
| chipper which would be incredibly effective.
|
| [1] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/small-scale-grain-
| raisi...
| schoen wrote:
| How did that boulevard end up planted with edible wheat?
| lm28469 wrote:
| I'd be more worried about how polluted it is
| giantg2 wrote:
| I did a small patch of wheat and barley. I also malted it to
| make my own beer.
|
| I just used a box fan for winnowing. I built a 5 gallon
| bucket thresher to use with a drill. Worked really well.
|
| I'm doing winter wheat this year for bread.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear about the bucket thresher. Most
| of the DIY options I found when I was looking where larger
| with custom flail mechanisms and bike-chain drives etc.
| Honestly, building the thresher itself seemed like kind of
| a cool project on it's own, but it was just more effort
| than I was willing to put in. But a 5 gallon bucket option
| that runs of a drill sounds much more my speed.
|
| How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you
| think you would have been willing to process with that
| method?
| dheera wrote:
| > are a dead-end genetically
|
| Is this on purpose or a technical limitation?
|
| Can we create a new plant that (1) tastes good (2) is not a
| genetic dead end (3) is easily spread to other farms by
| squirrels and birds (4) low maintainence, and put an end to
| this DRM?
|
| I mean it would be kind of nice if there existed a forest full
| of food that nobody had to maintain.
|
| > they are paying to support the continued cultivation of those
| varieties
|
| The plants are living beings, if they are allowed to behave
| like living beings without being crippled, perhaps the
| varieties will continue to exist naturally without said
| support.
| groby_b wrote:
| > The plants are living beings, if they are allowed to behave
| like living beings without being crippled, perhaps the
| varieties will continue to exist naturally without said
| support.
|
| Alas, there are too many humans for that. So, either you
| support the plants, or one of us has to give - plants or
| humans. Humans aren't known for giving in, which means slim
| odds for unsupported plants.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I meant dead end in the sense that their genes aren't going
| anywhere. 90+% of home gardeners don't save seeds, and the
| few that do are almost certainly not preserving the strains
| they think they are since, most gardeners grow multiple
| varieties at the same time that are all getting cross
| pollinated. It was not meant to imply anything about the
| viability of the strain they are growing, many of which are
| fantastic heirlooms that have been around for generations.
| favorited wrote:
| What's with the 5-digit year format? Premature prep for y10k?
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| That's longnow's whole deal. Getting people to think about the
| future far beyond a human lifespan.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The Long Now Foundation's mission is "Our work encourages
| imagination at the timescale of civilization -- the next and
| last 10,000 years -- a timespan we call the long now."
|
| The leading zero is a way to trigger people to think about the
| next 10,000 years.
| favorited wrote:
| Interesting, thanks! I'd never heard of The Long Now
| Foundation before.
| prox wrote:
| Interesting. Gets you wondering what else you might not
| have heard of.
| karaterobot wrote:
| If there are hundreds of thousands of plant varieties in that
| massive seed bank in Svalbard, and only 150 plants are cultivated
| for consumption today, how the heck is eating a more diverse
| range of plants supposed to replace seed banks? Is it that
| everyone on earth is going to eat 1000x more plants than we do
| now, or is it that there will be 1000x more farms, each making
| 1/1000th as much money?
|
| I know the author is not arguing to tear down all the seed banks,
| they're saying we should keep plants alive by growing them. But I
| don't see how it pencils out. To me, this article makes the case
| for seed banks _stronger_ by pointing out how that proposition is
| just impossible in reality.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| If I understand correctly, it's that everyone will still eat <
| 100 plants, but they'll be different ones from everyone else.
| Maybe every grocery store won't have the exact same kinds of
| squash in it. Maybe we'll have more region-specific crops! The
| example given about olive trees is illustrative, I think.
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's where the economics question comes in. How do you make
| a living as a farmer selling a very specific variety of
| squash, when there are now (let's say) 9000 varieties of
| squash on the market, and the same number of people out there
| buying squash?
| aeternum wrote:
| My idea can't be wrong, it's the world that must change.
|
| That about summarizes these types of articles. Solutions that
| do not require the world to change its behavior should be
| favored. Perhaps we could launch seed containers into low
| orbits such that they automatically and safely return to earth
| centuries in the future just in case.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I want my own small farm, but I think that I want to make food
| instead of money. It's a different proposition, I suppose.
| groby_b wrote:
| This is likely not an answer. Small-scale sustenance farming
| is not enough to support humanity at scale. (Without ag-
| industry methods, we're about 4 billion people past the
| planets carrying capacity)
|
| Also, if that small farm is something you dream about, I
| strongly suggest actually working on a farm for a while. It
| is surprisingly not fun. I know "I'm gonna have a farm" is a
| popular escapist things for many folks in tech - it is for me
| as well, the fantasy is great :) It's just good to know what
| that _actually_ means, and then deciding if you really want
| to do that. (For me, it means I have three plants on my
| balcony to keep the dream, and skip the full experience
| because I know I wouldn 't enjoy it)
| chefkd wrote:
| This may be a little tangential (sorry) how is the planet's
| carrying capacity calculated? The malthusian school of
| thought never made sense to me
| karaterobot wrote:
| What I'm saying is, he's either proposing that every farm
| grows 1000x as many types of plants as they do today, or that
| a massive number of small farms (let us say 100 times as many
| as exist today) each grow a huge variety of plants (let's say
| 10 times as many types as they do today).
|
| But, crucially, these small farms could _not_ grow the plants
| they chose to grow, instead they would have to grow an
| assortment of diverse species or cultivars, for no other
| reason than to support a living diversity. 99.9% of the
| plants you 'd be growing would be plants that people decided
| a long time ago that they didn't want to eat, or use for any
| other purpose, because there was a better alternative.
|
| Ignore the money part. That was me saying that, if
| consumption/purchasing of plants is more or less stable, then
| if you introduce 200,000 varieties of plants into the world,
| every plant would be sold a lot less. It would be more or
| less impossible to make a living as a farmer.
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| Okay, I'll eat it. I am sure it will be all flavorful and
| delicious.
|
| But how do I get it, to eat?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Apparently loot a seed bank ?
| resolutebat wrote:
| For most HN readers, the practical answer is to go to a
| farmer's market and pay $20 for a bag of weird-looking heirloom
| tomatoes.
| genman wrote:
| E.g. make it distributed and live.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240502200255/https://longnow.o...
|
| https://archive.ph/lmdjF
| just_1_comment wrote:
| Why are the years in this article preceded by a zero? For example
| instead of writing the year as 2011 it's written as 02011.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| From the homepage of the site:
|
| > The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996
| to foster long-term thinking.
|
| Seems that it's adding a zero to make you think of the future,
| and thinking over long periods of time. Looking at scales of
| thousands of years instead of tens or even hundreds.
| prox wrote:
| Some people seem to think its a long way to the chemists, but
| thats peanuts to space.
| 8372049 wrote:
| Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely,
| mind-bogglingly big it is.
| sratner wrote:
| It's a Long Now thing - emphasizing that they are
| thinking/talking about problems on millennia timescales. They
| also did the 10000yr clock:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
| aeternum wrote:
| To subtly imply that the articles are of such sublime quality
| that they will still be referenced in 10,000 years.
| 8372049 wrote:
| "Svalbard Island" isn't an island, it's a Norwegian archipelago.
| None of the islands are called Svalbard, and the vault is located
| on Spitsbergen.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-02 23:00 UTC)