Can’t you make human food production a lot more efficient with biotech? Algae, for instance? Spirulina maybe? Tastes bitter, grows fast, highly nutritious. (Are plants or algae as efficient at generating sugars from sunlight as new forms of life evolved to directly use electricity from a solar panel would be?)
Even if that wasn’t practical for humans, if such an organism would be very easily imaginable I think that still gives us some weird biopunk menu options for the medium-term future of intelligence?
I saw some numbers for algae being 1-2% efficient but it was for biomass rather than dietary energy. Even if you put the brain in the same organism, you wouldn’t expect as good efficiency as that. The difference is that creating biomass (which is mostly long chains of glucose) is the first step, and then the brain must use the glucose, which is a second lossy step.
But I mean there is definitely far-future biopunk options eg. I’d guess it’s easy to create some kind of solar panel organism which grows silicon crystals instead of using chlorophyll.
Can’t you make human food production a lot more efficient with biotech? Algae, for instance? Spirulina maybe? Tastes bitter, grows fast, highly nutritious. (Are plants or algae as efficient at generating sugars from sunlight as new forms of life evolved to directly use electricity from a solar panel would be?)
Even if that wasn’t practical for humans, if such an organism would be very easily imaginable I think that still gives us some weird biopunk menu options for the medium-term future of intelligence?
I saw some numbers for algae being 1-2% efficient but it was for biomass rather than dietary energy. Even if you put the brain in the same organism, you wouldn’t expect as good efficiency as that. The difference is that creating biomass (which is mostly long chains of glucose) is the first step, and then the brain must use the glucose, which is a second lossy step.
But I mean there is definitely far-future biopunk options eg. I’d guess it’s easy to create some kind of solar panel organism which grows silicon crystals instead of using chlorophyll.