Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe

Feeding Everyone No Matter What presents a scientific approach to the practicalities of planning for long-term interruption to food production. The primary historic solution developed over the last several decades is increased food storage. However, storing up enough food to feed everyone would take a significant amount of time and would increase the price of food, killing additional people due to inadequate global access to affordable food. Humanity is far from doomed, however, in these situations - there are solutions. This book provides an order of magnitude technical analysis comparing caloric requirements of all humans for five years with conversion of existing vegetation and fossil fuels to edible food. It presents mechanisms for global-scale conversion including: natural gas-digesting bacteria, extracting food from leaves, and conversion of fiber by enzymes, mushroom or bacteria growth, or a two-step process involving partial decomposition of fiber by fungi and/or bacteria and feeding them to animals such as beetles, ruminants (cows, deer, etc), rats and chickens. It includes an analysis to determine the ramp rates for each option and the results show that careful planning and global cooperation could ensure the bulk of humanity and biodiversity could be maintained in even in the most extreme circumstances. Summarizes the severity and probabilities of global catastrophe scenarios, which could lead to a complete loss of agricultural productionMore than 10 detailed mechanisms for global-scale solutions to the food crisis and their evaluation to test their viabilityDetailed roadmap for future R&D for human survival after global catastrophe INDICE: 1. Introduction to the Challenge- How do we feed everyone on the planet if we lose mass-scale agriculture due to one or several problems from a long list of global catastrophes?2. Worldwide Crop Death: Six crop-killing scenarios:2.1) abrupt climate change,2.2) super weed,2.3) extirpating crop pathogen,2.4) complete loss of bees,2.5) super bacterium, or2.6) super crop pest.3. No Sun: Three sunlight-killing scenarios3.1) asteroid or comet impact,3.2) a super volcano, or3.3) nuclear winter.4. Food Storage: If we were all Mormons on steroids.  Present supplies, capacity and implications of storing more, technical evaluation of lone survivalism, and cannibal mathematics.5.  Stopgap Food Production: Fast food6. Fiber Supply for Conversion to Food7. Solutions: Stored Biomass/Fossil Fuel Conversion7.1 Natural light (ocean fish)7.2 Chemo-synthesizing bacteria7.3 Bacteria eaten with fiber7.4 Industrial digestion7.5 Ruminants, other grazers, and rabbits7.6 Outdoor mushroom growth7.7 Beetles7.8 Rats7.9 Chicken7.10 Leaves7.11 What will probably not work: shipworms, termites, gribbles, earthworms, and reptiles8. Practical Matters: Energy, water, nutrition, taste, biodiversity, cooperation9. Moral Hazard (knowledge of a solution may make people less motivated to reduce risk)10. Serious Prepping: A guide to necessary research

• ISBN: 978-0-12-802150-7
• Editorial: Academic Press
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 128
• Fecha Publicación: 20/11/2014
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés