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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

We're ~60 years from running out of topsoil globally if we continue degrading it at the current rate: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

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This claim has been contested

https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans#:~:text=But%20the%....

We’ll probably be eating lab-grown meat and hydroponically-grown vegetables by then.

If we’re not all uploaded to a server embedded in the planet’s core or orbiting the sun.

Good news! we're orbiting the sun now, well ahead of target date

Didn’t think the words “in an artificial sattelite” were really needed to convey the idea.

Hydroponically grown vegetables tend to be nutrientless sponges.

Hydroponically grown celery tastes like water. Fresh, dirt-grown celery is nearly inedible because of how sharp and metallic the flavor is.

Industrial and lab-grown meat will face the same problems.

As someone in the industry, this is absolute rubbish and misinformation.

I've heard exactly the opposite about hydroponic vegetables. I suppose it depends on what nutrients the plants are given in the water. What is your experience?

It's 100% the nutrients + minerals. When you get right down to it, you're just trading one growing medium for another.

That said, hydroponics allows for a level of control in nutrients that soil does not, generally leading to weighty, tasteless veggies.

Lab-grown meat will taste exactly the way consumers expect meat to taste, for the same reason orange juice does.

[1] because we will engineer the process to a terrifying degree.

I don't believe that's accurate. The main issue or limitation of hydroponics/aquaponics is that many types of vegetables cannot be grown via the method. It's suited to leafy greens and not, for example, root vegetables.

I googled "hydroponic potatoes" and I kid you not, the first words in the results were "Potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow with a hydroponics system".

I've also had grown and eaten hydroponic potatoes myself and they were great.

Huh, my knowledge is outta date. Thanks for correcting!

Uhm... no.

Ever actually had any? How do you what lab-grown meat will taste like? And why do you think lots of pot-smokers insist on the hydroponic kind? For the weak watery effect?

It can go either way, depending on how much fertilizer you use. Farms that cheap out will have an inferior product.

Where does the topsoil go? Doesn't it, by definition, just become topsoil somewhere else?

It doesn't have to go anywhere, it can just "die" - lose its ability to hold water, nutrients, fungus, microbes - everything necessary for it to be beneficial to plants.

So they've done what's all too common these days... gone and changed what a word means.

Dead topsoil is dead topsoil. It doesn't become rock or subsoil or something else.

The title of this post is "corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil". It should be "a third of the top soil in the corn belt is badly degraded" or something like that.

Have they? It's common vernacular to say we lost something even if it isn't "i lost my keys" but "We lost the last dodo bird"... doesn't mean we can't find it, but, what we had will never be again.

Why would it never be again? The ingredients to making good topsoil aren't a mystery. The topsoil can be fixed.

In many cases of periods of time longer than humans live...

We're shitty stewards... I've seen jeepers drive over tundra and do donuts not realizing their burnouts won't recover in a lifetime and other morons see them out there and think it means they can follow suit and before long the entire basin is destroyed...

sure... it will recover... when humans are dead, or when we pull our heads out of our asses :)

If the soil is dead it isn't topsoil, it is just dirt.

No, topsoil is more than mere dirt, it is an entire ecosystem that lives in the soil. It takes 50-100 years of build up and fertilizer and very careful tending, with less than optimal yield, to turn lifeless dirt into healthy topsoil.

Well no. Just like a rainforest doesn't just fly in the wind to become a rainforest somewhere else if you burn it. Soil is a ecosystem, not a raw material.

Sure, soil is an ecosystem, but topsoil is the top part of that soil. The surface layer. If you bulldoze a rainforest, there's no more rainforest. But if you scrape away topsoil, you have subsoil, and you have a big pile of topsoil.

That was a spectacular analogy.

It gets eroded by wind and water, with the end result being at the bottom of oceans and lakes.

Where everything eventually ends up. In the ocean!

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