Efficient food production

[james_davis_nicoll]

I was noodling around on soc.history.what-if and made a calculation I'd never bothered with before: if a human needs enough food to produce N Watts, how many square meters are required to intercept that much sunlight? OF course I was too lazy to actually look up insolation for various latitudes but the BOTEC I committed seemed to show that it should be a few square meters.

Even Fairbanks, Alaska, gets from 90 to 350 watts/m^2. Say your mark 1 human needs at least 100 watts worth of food to keep functioning [1]: They'd need about one square meter dedicated to collecting solar powers, asssuming no losses. The entire population of North America should require a few hundred to a thousand square kilometers of converters to power themselves. Even a factor of ten losses should mean that we'd need about 300 square kilometers to feed all of Canada, assuming the lowest insolation in Alaska is what we have to work with, and about 3000 square kilometers to feed all of the USA. That's a square less than 20 kilometers on an edge for Canada and a bit over 50 kilometers on an edge for the USA. Feeding the entire planet should require about 60,000 square kilometers or a square about 250 km on an edge (or less, if we pick someplace sunnier than Fairbanks to grow food).

Clearly modern methods of coverting solar (and fossil) energy into human energy are criminally inefficient.


1: Googling says "at least 2500 kilocalories" per day so call it 4000 to be safe. That works out to about 50 watts, which I will double just because.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Oddly enough, this is relevant to a story idea I've been working on. Aliens muck up the sun so its visible-light output drops by a factor of one thousand. The energy goes into near-infrared, above the water absorption band so Earth doesn't get any colder. It doesn't look any darker - human eyes adjust to the dim sun just like they do to artificial light. The problem is that photosynthesis shuts down. The only way to keep people fed is to grow food under artificial lights. With current technology and assuming a strictly vegan diet, how much energy would this require?
Gareth Wilson