Damien Raphael Sullivan wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 02:56:02AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> > > Scarcity is not just an issue of lack of resources or
> > > production capacity, it is also an issue of distribution and economic
> > > system. Under a Rob Mugabe even a nanotech society might starve.
>
> True. But after a 30-year drought even the most efficient society will
> collapse, without the right techonologies at hand.
>
Not necessarily. Many societies exist quite handily in places with weather that
would be considered eternal drought elsewhere. Partially that is about water
management.
You're right in that a society in otherwise lush pastures that had a long-term
major drought would have to make some changes.
>
> (Which needn't be strong nanotech. I'm currently mildly interested in
> controlled environment agriculture, as the antithesis of organic farming
> ("hey, soil's just dirt when you come down to it") but it's a lot easier to
> find information on hydroponics and tomatoes and lettuce than on hydroponics
> and staples such as wheat. Except for one NASA experiment giving 6 kg wheat
> in 1m^3 in 60 days, which to me means 5 m^3 would feed a person perpetually,
> which seems like way too little space...)
>
> -xx- Damien X-)
If you go up to a raw stalk of wheat and shuck the wheat seeds from the clump on
the end, throw it in the air a couple times so that the chaff blows away, and
then chew the seeds for a while and it becomes like gum, basically the mucilage
in the wheat. It's a bland gum. Eat a mint leaf. To pull potatoes, disturb
the earth around the plant a bit and then pull the entire plant with the
potatoes from the ground, and shake the plant to shake off most of the earth.
Raspberries and some other types of berries are nice perennials, they sure taste
good when they're warm from the sun.
I was told that in the East that chickens were fed fish byproducts, thus that
the chicken tasted like fish. Yuck. After catching fish, cleaning and fileting
them is a simple enough matter, if messy. If you ever catch some mutant,
diseased fish, report it to the authorities.
Rotate crops responsibly.
Is there a simple home test for various substances? Perhaps what I have in mind
is a kitchen gas chromatograph.
-- Ross Andrew Finlayson Finlayson Consulting Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/ "It's always one more." - Internet multi-player computer game player
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