What Science Should Be Doing Now

I'm a fan of chimaera splicing, providing it is done in a sane and smart way so it can't accidentally destroy the world. We have enough problems with kudzu and rye grass and zebra mussels and all sorts of other imported things destroying native habitat. Still, nitrogen fixing root nodules from legumes on all grain crops so they enrich the soil as they grow instead of depleting it? That would be awesome. Cuts down on the need for nitrogen inputs to crops, which are often made from natural gas better used for other things, and for the need to grow soy during crop rotation. That means you could feed the world and increase the total arable land, provided you have water. This is a good thing. This one thing could feed a couple or three billion people indefinitely. Ponder that for a moment. How many wars would that stop cold? 

 

I was recently watching a travel program where a guy running a fair trade coffee processing plant in Papua New Guinea demonstrated that the fruit of a coffee bean is actually a type of sweet cherry by eating it. Now, at present coffee is only grown in tropical and sub-tropical places but it's hugely popular in cold wet places like the Pacific Northwest. What if coffee was genetically modified to grow in colder places, and that the cherry was appropriately tart and sweet for a good pie? I like cherry pie. It needs to sweet enough to go with coffee and tart enough not to be yucky. Its a tricky mix to pull off. You could shell the coffee bean, make a pie from the cherry, then roast the bean and make the coffee to go with it. Wouldn't that be awesome? I think so.

 

You are probably think I'm being completely silly, but ponder this: everywhere in the Taiga (the area near the poles where its all pine trees before it gets too cold and you have Tundra plains) there are needle leaf trees (pines). The pines are poisonous to wildlife, even bugs due to the sap in them. They grow there because most deciduous trees can't drop their leaves fast enough and drain out their sap to avoid being destroyed in snow storms, which can shatter the limbs if it gets cold fast enough. There are exceptions like birch, alder, and aspen, but most other trees die in the cold. What if fruit trees like apples were modified to survive the really harsh cold? Then places like Northern Canada could have apples growing instead of wasting all the nice summer light growing marijuana and zucchini. I've been to Alaska in the summertime. It was... pretty okay. Apply the same modifications to other fruit trees and maybe grape vines. 

 

Imagine if you could grow good grapes in Britain and Norway? That will require modifying the skins so they don't rot quite as quickly when wet. This is why California wines do so well. We don't have summer rains while the grapes ripen. They only get water when we want them to, via irrigation. We get a higher yield of better concentrated grape juice, ideal in sugar content and acid for best possible wine making.

Now take the basic chemistry of desert plants, namely how they thicken their plant fluids using Selenium oxide and selenium sulphate to deny evaporation biochemically. This allows plants to survive extreme drought and not turn into a husk. This is how cactus works. Apply the same trick to fruit trees and vegetable crops, but put in a filter/membrane that keeps the selenium out of the fruit so the fruit is edible instead of poisonous. Pause and consider what that would for Northern Mexico, Peru, and the Sahara. Suddenly you could grow serious crops there with minimal water. All that bare land would become green and feed a billion people or more. The world's deserts would have a massive increase in carrying capacity.

 

Use coastal vacuum pumps to desalinate sea water, then other pumps to send it inland to the irrigated crops and you've solved world hunger provided the equipment stays maintained. 

 

See, the biggest problems humans face are about food supply, water supply, and energy supply so they can improve their standards of living and keep their babies from starving to death. This makes mothers angry and husbands end up going to war over those resources. Its been like that forever. But it doesn't have to be. If you expand the resources and reduce the demand for them by making them more accessible, then you can have a larger population and stabilize WITHOUT going to war. That's a BIG deal. This is something biotech could do, if it wasn't so damn greedy and obsessed with catering.

 

The best solar panel presently available uses Selenium and Arsenic, and yields 47% efficiency, which is 3 times better than the state of the art panel in production, and about 8 times the efficiency of the kind most people use on their house or boat to run electrical backup charging. Georgia Tech came up with a method to thicken solar panels such that a photon is intercepted and generates power 4 times each. This layering process makes a single panel around 3 times more efficient in the same amount of space. Georgia Tech used federal grant money, and its a public university, but they are pretending to own the patent despite this. I imagine there will be some Supreme Court action to determine public funds means public patents, meaning with the needed coolant backing, the above layered panel using the above SeAs compound means not only can you preheat your water heater using the waste heat generated on the panel, you can also run your house and charge a battery for your car so you can commute to work, assuming we solve the battery problem someday. If hydrogen could be stored safely, this would work too.

 

This is what I keep hoping to see science do for the world. Maybe having enough to eat would allow the more maniacal govts to either calm down or be deposed by the saner mothers who would very much like a copy of good housekeeping instead of yet another genocide. Imagining stuff like this is what scifi writers like me are all about. So its not just for the maniacal laughter, though that is fun too. It's a proven stress relief.