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Comment by jtlienwis | Hacker News Reader

The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvation. Haber-Bosch process.

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Basically there would be ~2 times less people on Earth and over half of them would work in farming if not for this one invention.

Sadly, in my professional opinion as a chemist, I would say that the the haber process, is not actually that simple, either in its original conception or as implemented now.

Well it's better than Mościcki's process :)

What a coincidence, I passed today in front of his house and the chemical plant he was in charge of. The whole area is named after him too.

I did not expect to see his name in HN.

The description on Wikipedia makes it sound trivial if you have high-pressure, high-temperature plumbing, and a lot of risk tolerance. What is it leaving out?

I think those 3 things are the complexity

Development and discovery of appropriate catalysts and ability to organize the large industrial scale needed to produce meaningful amounts of product.

Can't you just use finely divided magnetite, or am I thinking of the wrong process? That sounds like "you can build it yourself" to me.

Lab demo scale, sure. The research and testing of catalysts for the industrial scale was a significant part of the development effort. Lifetime of the catalyst, temperature and pressure of the reactor, input energy, and output rate were all considerations and the result was much more than just throwing some magnetite powder in a reaction chamber.

There's a great book on the development of the process The Alchemy of Air https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discove...

Thank you very much!

For anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bottleneck because it's so much less ubiquitous than the other three, which are three of the four most common elements in the universe.

less ubiquitous in a bio-available way. Nitrogen is most of the atmosphere.

I meant it in an "elements occurring in the universe" sort of way, but this is a great point too. If we could get at atmospheric nitrogen naturally, there'd be no bottleneck.

Surely the three most common elements (by any measure) are hydrogen, helium and lithium?

It's complicated. Helium does make the list, but lithium doesn't. Carbon and oxygen are higher than you'd expect if you're just going by atomic weight.

I remember from my astrophysics course that Lithium was formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang. I would imagine that interstellar space is full of Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium.

I can imagine that stable nuclei such as carbon or iron would form as a result of stellar fusion but I would be hard pressed to imagine that these outmass the more primordial elements. I would be interested to see references if you have any.

Wikipedia has a good writeup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem...

TL;DR: Stars burn it up.

That table is for the milky way though, not the universe.

Yeah but all the elemental matter in the universe is like three dust specks floating in a lecture hall. You can ask about the dust specks or the lecture hall interchangeably.

This is a common misconception. Intergalactic space is filled with about half of the matter in the universe. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm–hot_intergalactic_mediu...

As to your original point though, there doesn’t appear to be too many elements here apart from ionized hydrogen and hydrogen.

Great point. I almost missed this. It really seems like there should be another separation in the article I linked, between "Universe" and "Milky Way."

now imagine being someone who dislikes being around lots of people, and especially dislikes being around city people...

Imagine you could move to a small farm town population 62

Yeah but some people enjoy being miserable, so simple solutions like that won't work. :)

Imagine thinking one's choices are completely independent of status games played in the society.

Would the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?

It eliminated one bottleneck (regular mass starvations) and allowed us to get to the next one faster (global warming).

Choose your poison :) Both result in wars and death of millions of people.

Thanos, is that you?

May as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route.

There's more people living better lives, so things are better. There are new problems caused by our previous success that we solve next.

Grading the state of the Earth is subjective, what's good for plants or bacteria may be bad for mammals or fungi, and there's a few mass extinctions every million years anyway.

If you don't care about homo sapiens, then global warming isn't really "bad" - the ecosystems will adapt.

> May as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route.

No, that most certainly doesn't follow. It's entirely usual and normal for an amount of something in a system to be fine but then an excess of the same thing to be not fine. This is a very common situation in medicine, for example.

It's also a common situation in the rest of population and community ecology. For instance, removing wolves as a predator here in Michigan has caused an explosion in the deer population. That, in turn, changed the makeup in undergrowth as they eat more now, which has all kinds of extended effects. Not to mention the propagation of diseases in a more sense population.

We only care about the state of the system as it relates to humans.

That's certainly not true for a sizeable number of environmentalists. Have you never heard the 'humanity is a virus on the planet' take?

You really have to define and defend what you mean by better to get a meaningful answer.

Worse. We are able to produce more calories on less land than would otherwise be required. If you check out some photographs of the countryside of the East Coast of the US, particularly, from the turn of the century, and then look at those places today, considerable reforestation has occurred.

> over half of them would work in farming

Why would throwing more people at the problem solve or mitigate lack of fertilizer?

More land would necessarily be farmland (i.e. there'd be less land "free" to dedicate to other things); so there'd probably need to be more farmers to work the additional land. Even in the modern world where a farm is mostly robots, one person can only manage so much land and so many robots (essentially the amount of land they can easily traverse in a few hours to check up on.)

And large-scale automated farming is less productive per acre than small-scale labor-intensive farming.

Yeah I think he is wrong there. More people would work in farming than now but only like 1% of the population are farmers right now. 2% farmers covering atleast if not more than double the land area is not crazy.

Not to mention relying on natural processes and top soil health and would be extremely sustainable long term and be a huge carbon sink.

https://blog.resourcewatch.org/2019/05/30/map-of-the-month-h...

> The chart below shows data from the World Bank on employment in agriculture over time. Globally, about 1 billion people* work in the agricultural sector, about 28% of the population employed in 2018. This is down from 44% in 1991.

Currently 1/7th of the global population works in agriculture, and 28% of the employed population.

If that doubles it would be over 50%.

World isn't just USA.

I think the point is that fertilizer makes it possible for big agriculture to operate at a certain scale.

If we didn't have fertilizer, farmers would be tending to smaller plots and using locally available fertilizers, such as locally available compost and mulch.

Not to mention Norman Borlaug's development of dwarf wheat which kicked off the green revolution and saved billions from starvation.

An almost unbelievable life history is Dr Pandurang Khankhoje who came to San Francisco from China in 1906, got a PhD in agriculture from UC Berkeley and ended up in Mexico helping the farmers develop high-yielding varieties of corn and wheat before Dr Norman Borlaug. https://www.livehistoryindia.com/cover-story/2020/02/09/dr-p...

Yeah but it is also a mixed bag because in order to satisfy the massive energy requirements we cheat by using fossil-fuel derived hydrogen which contributes to pollution and global warming. Without cheap fossil fuel hydrogen the energy costs of fertilizer production would rise multiple times over and likely dwarf every other industry in the world. Currently fertilizer production takes 1.2% of total world energy generation, but 10% or more without fossil fuel reagents is not unreasonable. 60% of the world's total crop yield is the direct result of fossil-fuel derived artificial fertilizer.

At some point we have to decide if the goal of humanity is continued population expansion or some other project. Of course, good luck with the latter.

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