Artificial meat was in the news this week as the results of one of Sergey Brin‘s alternative investments was unveiled. The Economist has a look at the environmental benefits of artificial meat (quoting a 45% energy saving for meat produced in this way) as well as an interesting quote from long ago – Appetising prospects.

“THE war is won,” declared Winston Churchill in 1931. The victory in question was not military, but technological. Developments in tissue engineering prompted the future British prime minister to enthuse that soon “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing”. The optimism proved premature. But now, eight decades later, scientists have finally come close to realising his dream. On August 5th they cooked the world’s first hamburger made of meat grown from scratch in a laboratory.The historic patty was not exactly a Porterhouse steak—and a bit bland, according to two volunteer tasters. At the same time it cost a juicy €250,000 ($330,000), so India and Brazil, the world’s biggest exporters of beef, need not tremble in their cowboy boots anytime soon. But it is nonetheless a welcome addition to the world’s menu.

People have, pace vegetarians, evolved to love meat, which contains many necessary nutrients, and especially protein, in higher concentrations than plants do. The rub is that livestock, the main purpose of which is to pack goodies found in flora into a more condensed form, does not do the job very efficiently. Only about 15% of plant nutrients find their way into muscle. That makes animal husbandry extremely resource-intensive. It already takes up 30% of the world’s ice-free land—and a whopping 70% of its arable land. It also produces 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, more than transport (cattle are notorious sources of methane, a greenhouse-gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide).

Meanwhile, as poor countries grow richer, so does their appetite for flesh. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation forecasts global demand for meat to increase by three-quarters over the next 40 years. This is unsustainable. In contrast, growing meat in factories—or, one day, in your home—is estimated to use up to 45% less energy, 99% less land and 96% less water than farming, as well as to spew out 78-96% fewer greenhouse gases.

The NYT’s Dot Earth blog has a post on the “Frankenburger” which included an interesting graph of the benefits that may await.

 

TED has a talk by the creator of the meat, Mark Post – Meet the new meat: Mark Post at TEDxHaarlem.

 

The Independent’s article on the topic had a look at some of Brin’s other investments – ‘Close to meat’: Foodies underwhelmed by first synthetic beef burger to be eaten in public.

With a personal wealth of $20bn, Sergey Brin isn’t afraid to take a punt on outlandish business ventures. As well as the first lab-grown burger, the Google co-founder has backed asteroid mining and driverless cars.In 2008, Brin invested $4.5m in Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space tourism company, which is selling trips to the Moon for $100m (£65m). Last year, Brin joined the film director James Cameron by investing in Planetary Resources, a new company set up to exploit the precious metals contained in asteroids, seen as a potential alternative to the Earth’s depleted supply of natural resources.

Brin is an evangelist for driverless “robot cars”. He invested in Tesla Motors, developer of the Roadster, an electric vehicle with a range of 244 miles. Google has put its prototype self-driving cars through 300,000 miles of testing. Brin believes robot cars will be available to the public by 2017.

Philanthropic ventures play an important role in the Brin portfolio. He created Passerelle Investment Company, which buys property in Los Altos, a Silicon Valley town, and rents them at below-market rates. Brin also has an interest in a genetic testing start-up 23andMe, co-founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, which gives people data about their ancestry.

Another billionaire who is making some interesting investments (albeit not in the same league as Sergey or Elon Musk) is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was in the press this week for his purchase of The Washington Post – Crikey has a look at some of his other investments in the future – What’s a dot-com genius going to do with The Washington Post?.

Big clockThis isn’t as much of an investment as it is a pet project, but a couple of years ago Bezos spent $US42 million of his own cash on a 10,000-year clock in the middle of the Texas desert.

3D printing

This new craze has taken tech-heads by storm, and Bezos is right at the forefront of the revolution — he has a modest investment in Makerbot, a manufacturer of 3D printing machines.

Rocket wreckage

This is a strange one. Bezos founded a wreckage recovery business, which is all about finding discarded parts of rockets and spaceships that have fallen into the ocean as part of the Apollo program, way back in the 1970s. Last month he even wrote a blog post from a ship on a mission to find lost parts.

Quantum computing

At least this is related to technology. Last year, Bezos joined the CIA in pumping cash into quantum computing firm In-Q-Tel.

 

peak energy

7 Comments on "Meet the New Meat"

LT on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 1:21 pm 



In times of scarcity such as today, I would resort to vegetables, fruits and grains, and fishes if available. I would also grow as much as I can in my backyard.
Actually, I have a lot of fruit trees already.

DC on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 2:51 pm 



See above for yet another fine example of the madness of our age. Our madness seems only limited by our ability to imagine it.

Only a madman could honestly believe make-believe meat would be either healthy to eat, or consequence free. Or that robo-cars are somehow desirable or necessary, or should even a priority in a resource constrained world.

Still, madmen are if anything, seldom boring:

Q/the Google co-founder has backed asteroid mining and driverless cars.

And, how are both of those working out for him? Paying off big dividends are they? And just what, I wonder, does that guy think he would use all those mythical space metal for?

Why build space robot cars of course! Perfectly sensible!

BillT on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 3:36 pm 



DC, not only is the oil resource becoming scarce, so is intelligence and common sense.

Arthur on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 4:31 pm 



Yeah, Brin the great innovator who will let the NSA ‘help’ him adding code to google android, so that google and the NSA together can snoop even more efficiently into our private lives…

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12ejpdrptjxcbu5t04cfn1ynzj5j3uakek

… now his money has helped creating a revolutionary artificial kind of food. Associations with genetic manipulated food comes to mind. And it does not sound very tasty; the first testers did not exactly praise it into heaven. I guess it will have a similar taste like tofu. The likely effect will be that ever more humans will replace ever more cows. Admittedly humans fart far less methane than cows, as the smooth talking inventor Mark Post argues, but can be pretty demanding in almost every other field of life. Where a cow is content in leading a static life dedicated to converting grass into milk and dung, a human wants to go places, preferably in a car, or even better in a plane. And wants to live in a heated home and consume at least 20 kwh electricity per day.

Using brin’s tool you will quickly discover that there are about 1.3 billion cows on the planet. Postulating an avery weight of 400 kg per cow, one can conclude that there is roughly as much human flesh as there is cow meat. The latter take up a lot of space. In Holland for instance 1.5 million dairy cows in their green meadows occupy much more space than nearly 17 million Dutch. Less cows is not necessarily a bad thing, but even more humans is.

DC on Sun, 11th Aug 2013 10:36 pm 



I am doing my best to cut the through the clutter Bill. I like to think things are clearer to me now, than they have been for a long time. There was a time, when I too bought into the idea of ‘tech’ as the great savior. Well, no more. My life is about half over to so give or take, and thus far, besides the internet, the world looks, acts and sounds pretty much exactly the same as it did when I was in high school, or grade school even. There is not one thing, besides the net, that I can genuinely point to and say, wow,-breakthrough.

Its easy now to ridicule robot cars and synthetic meat, asteroid mining and geo-engineering, hydrogen cars, because its clear its all bullstein. Most of the high-tech we see now is being used to build an orwellian police state or goes to build trillion dollar boondoggles like the F-35 that don’t even work. High-tech means mass-spy dragnets and weapons systems designed to kill people that cant even fight back. High tech is not making peoples lives better-asteroid mining and robots cars sure as hell wont accomplish that.

Arthur on Mon, 12th Aug 2013 6:38 am 



“There was a time, when I too bought into the idea of ‘tech’ as the great savior”

All your observations are correct DC and no, tech is not the great savior. But the opposite conclusion, namely abandoning all tech, just because it is tech, is equally wrong. I always have to laugh when I think when the great anti-techie Bill is preparing to move to the jungle and one of his first concerns is to install… **satellite based internet!** And when Bill finally will be installed in the hot jungle (airconditioning?), waiting for a desaster that is not going to happen in his lifetime, he will be travelling by car at least once a year to Manilla airport to fly home over the vast Pacific to the States to his relatives and friends as well as regularly by car to the nearest Philipino town with an ATM to withdraw his pension money… then I become a little sceptical about all that anti-tech propaganda . Pot/kettle.

BillT on Mon, 12th Aug 2013 7:14 am 



Ah, Arthur, yes, I am going to hold onto some tech for as long as it lasts (not long) as you will hold onto the internet and such things as toilet paper and coffee. I’m glad I make you laugh. There is so little that is funny in today’s world.

It’s not abandoning tech that will happen, it is the disappearance and inability to maintain the tech we have once this whole thing collapses.

And, no, I will NOT have A/C. I will not need it. The Pacific will provide me with breezes 24/7 and the open design will give them freedom to circulate whereas, my condo in 30 meters form another building and the two windows do not allow circulation. I grew up with coal fired furnaces for the snowy cold days and open windows for the hot humid summers of Pennsylvania. What comes eventually goes.

As for travel, I do not expect to go back to the States after my Mom passes. She is 87. Yes, I have family there, but they will manage without me. Friends? A few, but again, not worth going back to the Police State. The Philippines has a great retirement plan for expats and I will just live here for the last decades of my life.

As for my income. I fully expect it to end sometime soon when the Us finally loses it’s dollar hegemony. I am getting ready for that event. Are you? Oh, I forgot, you live in the great continent of Europe where the real world will not bring down your lifestyle.