Lab grown meat is a scam in the same vein as corn derived ethanol fuel. The inputs required just don't balance out. Tissue cells are not designed to grow by themselves, so you need cell growth medium (made from animals), and anti-biotics, and you need to flush waste out - and they end up stewing in their own filth anyway. If you culture a single cell organism, then it'll be way too easy for some other weird thing to sneak in and contaminate the soup.
If you want cheaper science fiction food for grunts, a better approach would probably to genetically engineer plants to produce more complete protein and fat profiles.
I thought the problem with ethanol is that petrol is just cheaper and so engineers design ICE's to run on petrol. But if petrol became prohibitively expensive, engineers could design ICE's that run on ethanol, even if it would still be a step back from petrol. Hell, small jet engines in cars have been done before, albeit experimentally, so they can certainly be done with today's tech, and they run on ethanol just fine.
As far as lab-grown meat goes, couldn't they just genetically engineer farm animals to have only the most rudimentary brains, so that there's no suffering involved? They would basically be GMO zombies and that would be creepy in its own right, but for anyone concerned with animal welfare that seems like the most obvious solution. Or maybe just lobotomize them when they're young, even simpler, albeit still creepy.
That disturbing possibility aside, fungi are a lot more like animals than like plants, even though they don't move, so with some infernal GMO sorcery there's gotta be a way to develop mushrooms that taste just like meat, have the same protein content, even the same iron content. You could literally splice animal DNA to make meat mushrooms, with something similar to blood, because blood is one of the key things that makes meat delicious.
Digging up new soil to farm corn apparently releases enough CO2 to eat up 30 years of savings from ethanol. And even after that we're talking about a reduction of 2% of total emissions from vehicles, and that's if you believe the good numbers and I've got my doubts.
At some point in the future when gasoline is more expensive, someone will figure out how to do the full ethanol cycle efficiently, and you'll be able to tell it's working because they'll stay in business without government subsidy.
Cancer is more than just cells growing fast. For a cell to be cancerous it needs to have other specific characteristics.
For example, cancer cells lose what is known as "contact inhibition". Cells can sense each other and if they sense overcrowding they'll stop their cell cycle. But cancer cells will grow regardless of cell population density.
That's not saying lab meat would be automatically safe, just that it wouldn't be cancer cells.
Lab grown meat is a scam in the same vein as corn derived ethanol fuel. The inputs required just don't balance out. Tissue cells are not designed to grow by themselves, so you need cell growth medium (made from animals), and anti-biotics, and you need to flush waste out - and they end up stewing in their own filth anyway. If you culture a single cell organism, then it'll be way too easy for some other weird thing to sneak in and contaminate the soup.
If you want cheaper science fiction food for grunts, a better approach would probably to genetically engineer plants to produce more complete protein and fat profiles.
Watch The Science™ create man-eating plants because they now need our fats and protein to grow, like the Ivy Zombies from Resident Evil 2 Remake.
I thought the problem with ethanol is that petrol is just cheaper and so engineers design ICE's to run on petrol. But if petrol became prohibitively expensive, engineers could design ICE's that run on ethanol, even if it would still be a step back from petrol. Hell, small jet engines in cars have been done before, albeit experimentally, so they can certainly be done with today's tech, and they run on ethanol just fine.
As far as lab-grown meat goes, couldn't they just genetically engineer farm animals to have only the most rudimentary brains, so that there's no suffering involved? They would basically be GMO zombies and that would be creepy in its own right, but for anyone concerned with animal welfare that seems like the most obvious solution. Or maybe just lobotomize them when they're young, even simpler, albeit still creepy.
That disturbing possibility aside, fungi are a lot more like animals than like plants, even though they don't move, so with some infernal GMO sorcery there's gotta be a way to develop mushrooms that taste just like meat, have the same protein content, even the same iron content. You could literally splice animal DNA to make meat mushrooms, with something similar to blood, because blood is one of the key things that makes meat delicious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-yDKeya4SU
Digging up new soil to farm corn apparently releases enough CO2 to eat up 30 years of savings from ethanol. And even after that we're talking about a reduction of 2% of total emissions from vehicles, and that's if you believe the good numbers and I've got my doubts.
At some point in the future when gasoline is more expensive, someone will figure out how to do the full ethanol cycle efficiently, and you'll be able to tell it's working because they'll stay in business without government subsidy.
Also in order to grow them fast enough to be mass consumed, they're basically growing cancer cells
Cancer is more than just cells growing fast. For a cell to be cancerous it needs to have other specific characteristics.
For example, cancer cells lose what is known as "contact inhibition". Cells can sense each other and if they sense overcrowding they'll stop their cell cycle. But cancer cells will grow regardless of cell population density.
That's not saying lab meat would be automatically safe, just that it wouldn't be cancer cells.