Below, Anthony Dunne answers the first of our three questions.
There are many! But I think addressing potential future food shortages is a very important one. Science could provide fresh thinking about new ways of extracting nutrition from the environment, maybe even broadening the range of what we currently think of as food, or finding ways to augment the human digestive system to extract energy and nutrition from new sources. A lot of scientific thinking seems to be directed at changing the environment to suit human needs, I'd like to see more thinking about how to change humans to suit environmental needs; maybe by adjusting our physiology, or perhaps more realistically, our attitudes and values.
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Yes, why don't we genetically modify ourselves to ooz and suck all life juices from every other living thing on this planet so the only lifeforms left are humanity. Thus human nature will completely replace nature nature as Gawd intended.
It's not as if it isn't happening now, just slower as humans over run the planet and replace other life biomass (cause extinctions) with ours. Because who can deny the face of a bubbly baby vs a slug?
"Science could provide fresh thinking about new ways of extracting nutrition from the environment, maybe even broadening the range of what we currently think of as food"
Such as "Soylent Green"?
Suggest more people should study Thomas Malthus!
While the commentary shows the issue of scientific innovation on the human form is a loaded one, he is on to something in our changing of attitudes and values as an arena through which we can find efficiency and material value to this problem. For instance if there weren't such taboos around the handling and use of our own sewage, we could remove much of the liability of it and change it into an asset for energy creation and rejuvenation of the food chain. Another example is vegetarianism where those choosing that lifestyle are often doing so as an expression of values with the added bonus of a more sustainable and lower impact food lifestyle.
Perhaps a genetic modification that causes our skin cells to express Chlorophyll. Then, when we get hungry, we just go out and sit in the sun for a couple of hours. Of course, we would then also be green.. perhaps that is one advantage that the little green men already have over us.
The approach should not be more food, but less people. Responsible birth control is the only reasonable possiblilty, not more efficient food production, because this will simply result in yet more people. Plus, feasible birth control methods already exist, and more sophisticated methods are in development.