Hacking Photosynthesis

> Food production will need to roughly double to fully feed ten billion people, the world’s expected population by 2050.

I wish people would quit saying this.

There are 8-ish billion people now. About 3 billion of them have amounts of food well in excess of dietary requirements - nearly double.[1] That's after processing, distribution, and storage losses. About 1 billion don't have quite enough food, or quite enough variety.

We may need better food distribution and storage, but we don't need more food production.

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1. In normal years. The global harvest this year will be very interesting, due to major droughts in China and Western Europe and the war in Ukraine. The huge heatwave in India earlier may also have lingering effects. Food is "vital to national security", though, so we may never get an accurate picture.

One of the predicted-for-later-on effects of climate change is that it greatly increases the chances of simultaneous harvest failure in two or more of the six major food production regions of the globe. (Failure being reduction by 10% or more from expectation.) From "one in a thousand years" to "one in ten years", or more often.

I wasn't expecting to have a preview of this effect just yet.

Here's my stupid idea: It's my understanding that plants only respond to a fairly narrow band of light, somewhere between 400 nm and 700 nm wavelengths. All the other solar energy is more or less wasted on them. Could we have a solar panel that collected energy from a wide range of light wavelengths, and then used that energy to create light that is concentrated mostly in the 400-700nm range, thereby possibly giving a > 100% efficiency from the perspective of plant growth.

yeah but we're getting more and more plants that are bigger and heavier but contain the same amount of nutrients or even lower so you're paying for calories instead of shit you need