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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.
Feeding Everyone No Matter What 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.
1. Introduction
2. Worldwide Crop Death: The Five Crop-killing Scenarios
3. No Sun: Three sunlight-killing scenarios
4. Food Storage, Food Conservation, and Cannibalism
5. Stopgap Food Production: Fast food
6. Fibre Supply for Conversion to Food
7. Solutions: Stored Biomass/Fossil Fuel Conversion to Food
8. Practical Matters: Energy, Water, Nutrition, Taste, Biodiversity, & Cooperation
9. Moral Hazard
10. Serious Prepping: A Guide to Necessary Research
Dr. David Denkenberger received his bachelor's from Penn State in Engineering Science, his master's from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patent-pending expanded microchannel heat exchanger. He is a research associate at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and is a Penn State distinguished alumnus. He has authored or co-authored over 30 publications and has given over 60 technical presentations.
Dr. Joshua M. Pearce received his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. He then developed the first Sustainability program in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education as an assistant professor of Physics at Clarion University of Pennsylvania and helped develop the Applied Sustainability graduate engineering program while at Queen's University, Canada. He currently is an Associate Professor cross-appointed in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Michigan Technological University where he runs the Open Sustainability Technology Research Group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and poverty reduction. His research spans areas of electronic device physics and materials engineering of solar photovoltaic cells, and RepRap 3-D printing, but also includes applied sustainability and energy policy. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and is the author of Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs.
