Thank you, Jennifer, for the introduction. Some more background on me: I have read the sequences and the foom debate. In 2011, I tried to do cost-effectiveness scoping for all causes inspired by Yudkowsky’s scope and neglectedness framework (the scope, neglectedness, and tractability framework had not yet been invented). I am concerned about AI risk, and have been working with Alexey Turchin. I am primarily motivated by existential risk reduction. If we lose anthropological civilization (defined by cooperation outside the clan), we may not recover for the following reasons:
• Easily accessible fossil fuels and minerals exhausted
• Don’t have the stable climate of last 10,000 years
• Lose trust or IQ permanently
• Endemic disease prevents high population density
• Permanent loss of grains precludes high population density
Not recovering is a form of existential risk (not realizing our potential), and we might actually go extinct because of a supervolcano or asteroid after losing civilization. Because getting prepared (research and development of non-sunlight dependent foods such as mushrooms and natural gas digesting bacteria, and planning) is so cost-effective for the present generation, I think it will be a very cost effective way of reducing existential risk.
Why should there be a permanent loss of grains? It seems to me like reserve seeds are stored in many different places with some of those places getting forgotten in the time of a catastrophe and people rediscovering the contents later.
Grains are all from the same family-grass. It is conceivable that a malicious actor could design a pathogen(s) that kills all grains. Or maybe it would become an endemic disease that would decrease the vigor of the plants permanently. I’m not arguing that any of these non-recovery scenarios are too likely. However, if together they represent 10% probability, and if there is a 10% probability of the sun being blocked this century, and a 10% probability of civilization collapsing if the sun is blocked, this would be a one in 1000 chance of an existential catastrophe from agricultural catastrophes this century. This is worth some effort to reduce.
I haven’t read your book yet but I find your work pretty interesting. I hope you won’t mind a naive question… you’ve mentioned non-sunlight-dependent foods like mushrooms and leaf tea. Is it actually possible for a human to survive on foods like this? Has anybody self-experimented with it?
By my calculation, a person who needs 1800 kcals/day would have to eat about 5 kg of mushrooms. Tea (the normal kind, anyway) doesn’t look any better.
Bacteria fed by natural gas seems like a very promising food source—and one that might even be viable outside of catastrophe scenarios. Apparently it’s being used for fish feed already.
Here is an analysis of nutrition of a variety of alternate foods. Leaf protein concentrate is actually more promising than leaf tea. No one has tried a diet of only alternate foods—that would be a good experiment to run. With a variety, the weight is not too high. Yes, we are hoping that some of these ideas will be viable present day, because then we can get early investment.
What’s the advantage of alternative foods? In the context of an agricultural catastrophe, presumably you’d want to maximize the calories per whatever resource is the bottleneck (might be arable land, might be energy, might be something else). I can see mushrooms being useful, but leaves are not likely to be particularly efficient in this respect, would they?
In the case of the sun being blocked by comet impact, super volcanic eruption, or full-scale nuclear war with the burning of cities, there would be local devastation, but the majority of global industry would function. Most of our energy is not dependent on the sun. So it turns out the biggest problem is food, and arable land would not be valuable. Extracting human edible calories from leaves would only work for those leaves that were green when the catastrophe happened. They could provide about half a year of food for everyone, or more realistically 10% of food for five years.
I also work on the catastrophes that could disrupt electricity globally, such as an extreme solar storm, multiple high-altitude detonations of nuclear weapons around the world creating electromagnetic pulses (EMPs), and a super computer virus. Since nearly everything is dependent on electricity, this means we lose fossil fuel production and industry. In this case, energy is critical, but there are ways of dealing with it. So the food problem still turns out to be quite important (the sun is still shining, but we don’t have fossil fuel based tractors, fertilizers and pesticides), though there are solutions for that.
Extracting human edible calories from leaves would only work for those leaves that were green when the catastrophe happened. They could provide about half a year of food for everyone
What kind of industrial base that will continue to function in the catastrophe’s aftermath do you expect to be able to collect and process these green leaves while they are still green—on the time scale of weeks, I assume?
And what is the advantage over having large stores of non-perishables?
Also, it’s my impression that the biggest problem with avoiding famines is not food production, but rather logistics—storage, transportation, and distribution. Right now the world has more then enough food for everyone, but food shortages in the third world, notably Africa, are common.
In the catastrophe scenario you have to assume political unrest, breakdown of transportation networks, etc.
Governments do it all the time—see e.g. this. Also, in this context feasability is relative—how politically feasible is it to construct emergency-use-only machinery to gather and process leaves from a forest?
I’m also uncertain about the gathering-leaves plan.
On the other hand I could imagine solutions that are easily scalable. If you would for example have an eatable fungi that you could feed with lumber that might be very valuable and you don’t need to spend billions ,
Sorry for my voice recognition software error-I now have fixed it. It turns out that if you want to store enough food to feed 7 billion people for five years, it would cost tens of trillions of dollars. What I am proposing is spending tens of millions of dollars for targeted research and development and planning. The idea is that we would not have to spend a lot of money on emergency use only machinery. I use the example of the United States before World War II-it hardly produced any airplanes. But once it entered World War II, it retrofitted the car manufacturing plants to produce airplanes very quickly. I am targeting food sources that could be ramped up very quickly with not very much preparation (in months, see graph here. The easiest killed leaves (for human food) to collect would be agricultural residues with existing farm equipment. For leaves shed naturally (leaf litter), we could release cows into forests. I also analyze logistics in the book, and it would be technically feasible. Note that these catastrophes would only destroy regional infrastructure. However, the big assumption is that there would still be international cooperation. Without these alternative food sources, most people would die, so it would likely be in the best interest of many countries to initiate conflicts. However, if countries knew that they could actually benefit by cooperating and trading and ideally feed everyone, cooperation is more likely (though of course not guaranteed). So you could think of this as a peace project.
Thank you, Jennifer, for the introduction. Some more background on me: I have read the sequences and the foom debate. In 2011, I tried to do cost-effectiveness scoping for all causes inspired by Yudkowsky’s scope and neglectedness framework (the scope, neglectedness, and tractability framework had not yet been invented). I am concerned about AI risk, and have been working with Alexey Turchin. I am primarily motivated by existential risk reduction. If we lose anthropological civilization (defined by cooperation outside the clan), we may not recover for the following reasons:
• Easily accessible fossil fuels and minerals exhausted
• Don’t have the stable climate of last 10,000 years
• Lose trust or IQ permanently
• Endemic disease prevents high population density
• Permanent loss of grains precludes high population density
Not recovering is a form of existential risk (not realizing our potential), and we might actually go extinct because of a supervolcano or asteroid after losing civilization. Because getting prepared (research and development of non-sunlight dependent foods such as mushrooms and natural gas digesting bacteria, and planning) is so cost-effective for the present generation, I think it will be a very cost effective way of reducing existential risk.
Why should there be a permanent loss of grains? It seems to me like reserve seeds are stored in many different places with some of those places getting forgotten in the time of a catastrophe and people rediscovering the contents later.
Grains are all from the same family-grass. It is conceivable that a malicious actor could design a pathogen(s) that kills all grains. Or maybe it would become an endemic disease that would decrease the vigor of the plants permanently. I’m not arguing that any of these non-recovery scenarios are too likely. However, if together they represent 10% probability, and if there is a 10% probability of the sun being blocked this century, and a 10% probability of civilization collapsing if the sun is blocked, this would be a one in 1000 chance of an existential catastrophe from agricultural catastrophes this century. This is worth some effort to reduce.
Thanks for posting!
I haven’t read your book yet but I find your work pretty interesting. I hope you won’t mind a naive question… you’ve mentioned non-sunlight-dependent foods like mushrooms and leaf tea. Is it actually possible for a human to survive on foods like this? Has anybody self-experimented with it?
By my calculation, a person who needs 1800 kcals/day would have to eat about 5 kg of mushrooms. Tea (the normal kind, anyway) doesn’t look any better.
Bacteria fed by natural gas seems like a very promising food source—and one that might even be viable outside of catastrophe scenarios. Apparently it’s being used for fish feed already.
Here is an analysis of nutrition of a variety of alternate foods. Leaf protein concentrate is actually more promising than leaf tea. No one has tried a diet of only alternate foods—that would be a good experiment to run. With a variety, the weight is not too high. Yes, we are hoping that some of these ideas will be viable present day, because then we can get early investment.
What’s the advantage of alternative foods? In the context of an agricultural catastrophe, presumably you’d want to maximize the calories per whatever resource is the bottleneck (might be arable land, might be energy, might be something else). I can see mushrooms being useful, but leaves are not likely to be particularly efficient in this respect, would they?
In the case of the sun being blocked by comet impact, super volcanic eruption, or full-scale nuclear war with the burning of cities, there would be local devastation, but the majority of global industry would function. Most of our energy is not dependent on the sun. So it turns out the biggest problem is food, and arable land would not be valuable. Extracting human edible calories from leaves would only work for those leaves that were green when the catastrophe happened. They could provide about half a year of food for everyone, or more realistically 10% of food for five years.
I also work on the catastrophes that could disrupt electricity globally, such as an extreme solar storm, multiple high-altitude detonations of nuclear weapons around the world creating electromagnetic pulses (EMPs), and a super computer virus. Since nearly everything is dependent on electricity, this means we lose fossil fuel production and industry. In this case, energy is critical, but there are ways of dealing with it. So the food problem still turns out to be quite important (the sun is still shining, but we don’t have fossil fuel based tractors, fertilizers and pesticides), though there are solutions for that.
What kind of industrial base that will continue to function in the catastrophe’s aftermath do you expect to be able to collect and process these green leaves while they are still green—on the time scale of weeks, I assume?
And what is the advantage over having large stores of non-perishables?
Also, it’s my impression that the biggest problem with avoiding famines is not food production, but rather logistics—storage, transportation, and distribution. Right now the world has more then enough food for everyone, but food shortages in the third world, notably Africa, are common.
In the catastrophe scenario you have to assume political unrest, breakdown of transportation networks, etc.
To me it seems politically unfeasible to pay for the creation of a multi-year storage of non-perishable food.
Governments do it all the time—see e.g. this. Also, in this context feasability is relative—how politically feasible is it to construct emergency-use-only machinery to gather and process leaves from a forest?
I’m also uncertain about the gathering-leaves plan.
On the other hand I could imagine solutions that are easily scalable. If you would for example have an eatable fungi that you could feed with lumber that might be very valuable and you don’t need to spend billions ,
Sorry for my voice recognition software error-I now have fixed it. It turns out that if you want to store enough food to feed 7 billion people for five years, it would cost tens of trillions of dollars. What I am proposing is spending tens of millions of dollars for targeted research and development and planning. The idea is that we would not have to spend a lot of money on emergency use only machinery. I use the example of the United States before World War II-it hardly produced any airplanes. But once it entered World War II, it retrofitted the car manufacturing plants to produce airplanes very quickly. I am targeting food sources that could be ramped up very quickly with not very much preparation (in months, see graph here. The easiest killed leaves (for human food) to collect would be agricultural residues with existing farm equipment. For leaves shed naturally (leaf litter), we could release cows into forests. I also analyze logistics in the book, and it would be technically feasible. Note that these catastrophes would only destroy regional infrastructure. However, the big assumption is that there would still be international cooperation. Without these alternative food sources, most people would die, so it would likely be in the best interest of many countries to initiate conflicts. However, if countries knew that they could actually benefit by cooperating and trading and ideally feed everyone, cooperation is more likely (though of course not guaranteed). So you could think of this as a peace project.