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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

A rational, fact-supported argument is not sufficient to convince some people of anything.

If I want to convince all of my friends, I will also need an emotionally-loaded propaganda documentary with more anecdotal, scripted illustrations of the human impact on a handful of stereotypical everyman characters.

I have been convinced for about 20 years that large-scale indoor farming will become cost-competitive with standard industrialized farming around 2040. The epic drought in California may have accelerated my estimate to 2035.

We won't be at the tipping point until a profitable cornfield is replaced by a greenhouse-like structure with a roof 30m above ground level.

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Exactly.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine about vertical farming. He's big into his food, cares about food quality.

Anyway, I bring it up, he's not impressed, in fact far from it. The impression I got was that it ruined the emotional impact behind the origin of food. Instead of growing in fields, in natural time-honoured traditional way (I should mention at this point that my friend believed in buying organic, just to nip the pesticides/herbicides argument in the bud), we'd be replacing that with what amounted to growing in a lab.

If you're going to convince anyone, beyond tech heads and those that only care about cost, you're going to need to address the story of food, its role in our culture. I strongly doubt it would get anywhere close to the mainstream without the type of emotionally-led marketing that logfromblammo suggests.

Why do you need to "convince" anybody? If companies want to build urban farms, let them compete and we'll see what happens.

My money says that if you are really hung up about the energy transport costs of food, you should just build an electric transport system into the city, from the farm outside the city.

A lot of this research is very interesting for things like space colonies, so I pay attention, but on earth it's a solution in search of a problem.

It looks like it could also be useful for seasteading but maybe you feel the same way about that.

> "Why do you need to "convince" anybody?"

I don't. However, I was pointing out for those that want to try, there's more to it than listing the technical benefits.

To use another example, most people accept that investment in public transportation is a very good thing (both for the environment and the vitality of a city), yet people still plow huge sums of money into their cars, because cars = freedom. In cities like New York where many people don't seem to own cars, is their freedom restricted? Doesn't seem that way. Cars only = freedom if your other options are subpar.

Why bring this up? Reliance on cars is an example of what results when people think individualistically, whereas investment in public transport (and investment includes use) is an example of when people think collectively. Some changes require an amount of consensus. Whilst I agree you could let companies try it and let the market decide, I expect you'll encounter NIMBYism before too long. It's no problem to me though, I've got no horse in this race, will wait to see how it plays out.

Organic is a big point in favor of indoor farming. Animal pests can be discouraged by displacing the air in the grow room with 90% N2 + 10% O2 + 0.15% CO2 [1] whenever humans or pollinators don't need to be present. Weeds can be controlled by ensuring that live weed seeds cannot enter the facility.

[1] Lower oxygen may lead to root stress. Flooding-adapted species, like rice, could make do with less during sunlit hours. Higher CO2 can damage some plants. The 90:10:0.15 mix of N2:O2:CO2 is probably as hostile as you can make it to animals without damaging the plants in some way.

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