~ writing, programming, art ~

<< Previous next >>
27 October 2015

Over 9000

In an extremely short piece, a cowboy of times yet to come chats with a friend as he sets a new fibrous-protein synthesizer out to pasture in a bio-dome. This new model, with appropriate repairs, has an operational span of nearly four years, during which time it is expected to produce over nine thousand ounces of artificial beef.

He boasts of the system’s efficiency and low cost, but the irony is its production capacity has essentially reached that of a cow, albeit accruing a far steeper cost in resources and production time.

Rather than writing of the consequences of absurd optimizations, I wrote here of the difficulty of achieving an efficiency equivalent to that prevalent in the natural world. Despite its extravagant claims to hyper-efficiency, technology would be hard pressed to replace a cow.