It was over 5 months ago when I boasted that I’d got the jump on my new year resolution to build this site, by starting in December. I kept going until Jan 3rd. And then I stopped posting. Even when I got a nice comment (thanks James!) and resolved to not let a month go by before responding…I let over 2 months go by.
But I haven’t stopped learning! And now I’m back to share some ideas, and also to set a schedule. Why a schedule? Posting “when I feel like it” might work fine for social media where your ideas can be totally half baked when you post them; for this site I want at least slightly higher standards, which means preparing what I want to say ahead of time. In theory, that should be an easy balance to keep. In practice, it’s very easy to fall into “oh that idea isn’t fully baked yet I need more time” and then half a year goes by before you know it.
So moving forward I’m aiming for at least one post per week.
Here are some things I’ve been mulling over and plan to post more about shortly:
- Spider Seroculture – the secrets of spider silk have been unlocked, and researchers can now engineer silkworms whose silk has a chosen tensile strength and elasticity. Silk production can and has been done at the individual farm level and at the small community level – this gives you fabric and clothing, obviously. Once you add to it either a genetics lab or a sufficient stock of pre-engineered strains, that means a small community can churn out its own structural fiber and cables, as well as biocompatible stents, implants, and supports for medical purposes. So much to unpack here!
- LEDs – Veritasium has an excellent video on the invention of blue LEDs. Having recently started using grow tents, I am amazed at the efficiency of LED grow lights. The video breaks down metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, along with the fact that the inventor of blue LEDs made his own MOCVD machine, almost from scratch, in under a year. When supply chains break down, and crops are failing due to climate collapse, having the ability to make your own grow LEDs may be crucial. A quick search found one paper on open source MOCVD. Could this kind of manufacturing be brought back down to the cottage industry level? Or does its dependence on high purity chemical vapors preclude this?
- So there’s this company called Solar Foods – they have an allegedly-unmodified single-celled organism that they make into protein powder. “Protein out of thin air” is their claim. They’re talking about scaling up to industrial scale, as industrialists always do. But what about scaling down? What’s the smallest scale at which this is viable? A counter-top bioreactor that feeds a family? A shipping-container factory that feeds a community?
The future seems bleak, and getting bleaker, but there are hints of a bright future – if we can but claim it.
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