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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

How about we actually do something like increase the reserve food supply from more than 72 days? Yellowstone is not the only potential source of disruption to the food supply and right now if anything happens in the northern summer we are totally screwed.

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If we assume that a supervolcano blocks out the sun enough to prevent crops from growing for two years and that increasing the 72 day buffer is impractical, then how could we ride it out without mass starvation?

I'd guess there'd be a lot of sudden interest in energy-efficient LED grow lights and there'd be an over-supply of beef in the short term because there's no food for the cattle, so we might as well eat them.

Long term, it's all about being able to have enough indoor hydroponic/aeroponic space to grow enough food for ~7.5 billion people, which sounds really difficult and impractical.

I find it interesting that one possible benefit of Elon Musk's Mars plan is that the same space/energy/resource efficient food production technology that will be needed on Mars is the same technology we would need on Earth in order to ride out certain catastrophes. By creating an interplanetary "insurance policy" to ensure human survival, we may improve our ability to survive on Earth.

> Long term, it's all about being able to have enough indoor hydroponic/aeroponic space to grow enough food for ~7.5 billion people, which sounds really difficult and impractical.

I can't find the research I read a few years ago but from what I understand growing indoors is crazy practical. Plants need less sun light, essentially zero pesticides, can grow much faster and if you build your structures vertically you'll be able to farm the same amount of food on orders of magnitude less space.

I don't know if we're at the point where it can be practical today, especially with so much subsidy in farming, but I'm very optimistic about it moving to automated systems within buildings that wouldn't even need the sun.

This is the solution if we have a decade long event, but we need time to implement this - you can't just set up millions of acres of indoor growing space overnight.

Ideally, we need a couple of years food in storage together with detailed plans for how to grow food indoors (if needed).

With that kind of incentive, I bet we could do a lot in a short amount of time. It doesn't have to be that high-tech, does it?

War is probably the best way to estimate the time required. The USA took 18 months to switch over to a full war economy in WWII. We might be able to do it in less, but ideally we have in place a couple of years worth of food.

Oh I agree. I'd still love to see it happen in at least an experimental form. It sounds so ideal if everything works out (especially making automated systems far easier for automatic harvesting).

Space is not an actual problem with farm land. Setting up LED lights outside is a vastly easier solution. Remember, there would still be natural light, just significantly less.

The alternative is we build up a stockpile of food in a similar way to the US strategic oil stockpile. If oil is worth having in storage in case something bad happens it would seem obvious that food should be in the same category.

Food spoils so a stockpile like that isn't quite feasible. Sure we'll be able to get some foods that store well and can last for years but that's a small subset of food and even that food not all of it lasts for more than two years.

It's just not realistic. Sure we can significantly enlarge our buffer but two or more years? I can't see that happening in any practical sense.

Most grains can be stored for years under the right conditions. Sure the quality will decline over that time, but given we are feeding a large amount of grain to livestock this decline is manageable.

Even having a single years buffer would be very worthwhile. As I mentioned in the OP if we have a catastrophic event in the northern summer the poor are in serious trouble.

The problem is the food you are storing is constantly going bad. So you need to recreate the entire massive food stockpile every year or so, in order to have it ready when the time comes. We'd have to find a way to efficiently cycle food through the stockpile and back to consumers before it became useless. But I doubt consumers are going to be lining up to buy old food. The food would be expensive to buy fresh, then wouldn't sell for much when it is old. It would be a crazy expensive program, and it would increase the price of fresh food for everyone.

Not if the stored grain was fed to livestock. We already do this in practice as we keep the high quality grain for direct human consumption, while the lower quality grain is fed to livestock.

Once the stockpile was established and the process of cycling it set up, then the cost should be relatively minor.

More importantly what is the alternative? Let everyone starve?

That does seem like a sensible plan.

It won't be so dark that crops can't grow at all. We would need a lot of indoor agriculture, but there will probably still be areas where we can grow crops outdoors.

Or similarly, try to reduce the population enough so that we are not constantly on the razor edge of famine.

We are not remotely on the edge of famine. Something like 80% of our crop production goes to feeding very calorie inefficient livestock. In any real famine they would be slaughtered and their food intake would be redirected to human consumption. We are nowhere near the limits of the population Earth can support, at least food wise.

Us rich people will probably be fine (unless the situation was decades long), but many people in the world won't be able to pay the higher prices. If you are currently spending 70% of your income on food and prices triple then you will starve.

'Richness' is rather redefined during a calamity if that size. The banks won't work and money would be quite worthless.

This wouldn't solve the problem of a disruption to the food supply, just lessen the number who died. If my family starve to death it won't be much comfort to me that only a billion others die rather than five billion.

Nor would it really work in practice. Reducing the population would reduce demand (eaters), which would eventually lead to a reduction in supply (Farmers).

Moreover, wrt to the 72 days raised by ggpp, one would just shrink the surplus to 72 days for the smaller population.

We're good on a pretty dull razor.

Food insecurity is purely a function of the inefficiency of our society's means of food distribution.

Only while the sun shines though.

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