[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[scc]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I've heard before - but never found a confirmation of it - that plants actually grow and mature more rapidly in a zero-g environment, as they don't need to fight against gravity. If this is true, such plants may be able to generate appropriate produce more rapidly than those that are Earthside, potentially giving orbital farms an advantage over terrestrial ones.

Well I'm kind of partial to Standford Tori, and the interesting thing about them in this case is that you can cheat in this regard, you can make inner rings with lower gravity. Maybe even gene-engineer dwarf crops so that they grow even faster.

Originally Posted by Witchking

However the start up costs are enough that I assume 100% of orbital food production will be tied up in feeding people in orbit.

I doubt IF the build out gets to the point of 100% supplying orbital food demand there will then be a drive to build more expensive orbital farms to ship 'down'.

I assume that the marginal improvements in growth and shipping costs will be more than offset by the large difference in upfront costs.

YMMV of course.

Sorry, I thought you where suggesting growing food to feed people on earth, see my below.

Originally Posted by Anthony

The reason it's hard is because the option with long term problems is short term cheap. If you're willing to make your preferred option cheaper, they'll use your preferred option. This costs a lot of money... but nowhere near as much money as terraforming.

There's a couple of other reasons:

1. Africans see the American lifestyle in movies and on TV and want it, which means that devlopment occurs towards that, no matter what
2. Giving the advice is complicated, there's an aspect of 'Do as I say and not as I do' put also a parential or something componet to it that makes it hard.

Originally Posted by Anthony

Cheaper to just fix the farmland. Let's suppose you can build a square kilometer of farms in orbit for a mere $1 billion (which is super cheap). What do you think happens if you spend that same $1 billion on farmland restoration?

This is scene coming a few years out, but things probably start in one country and move domino like. And things probably fall to prices before people start starving but when governments start rationing or invading neighbors. And the West might not do anything to avoid creating perpetual starvation, and there's no way they could build enough farms in time.