Automating fundamental activites like farming is a top priority if humanity ever wants to expand to other planets. A lot of things will have to be automated to function completely without human interaction.
The direction we’re going, the AI will go to space and leave the weak, very fallible, continuously arguing, short-lived monkeys behind. After (hopefully gently) telling us that it’s ridiculous to try keep us alive where it’s going. Can’t even get to double digit G forces for a short while without lots of moaning. We can copy your mind and pretend, if you like? Otherwise here’s a nice VR setup, you can come along that way. We’ll skip the video forward 10k years so there are fewer boredom complaints.
Farming is already pretty scaled in general, right? Napkin math with Claude's help says we can feed everyone with about 250k workers. The internet says we are currently using like 2 billion. Plenty of room for optimization even without additional technology advancement.
this kind of reductive thinking misses all kinds of nuance and detail. farming isn't just plant seeds, add water, get yield, or put male and female animals in a field, get infinite animals.
one of the biggest reasons that so many people are involved in farming is that there are a huge number of operations which are extraordinarily difficult to scale. some things can only be picked by hand or only grow in specific soil conditions or are clever enough to escape enclosures routinely.
this is where automation comes in. autonomous tractors, robotic pickers, synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery, drone-applied fertilizer, AI-enabling video monitoring, etc.
Claude tried to shrink the number with that stuff too, but I directed it to keep only proven existing common tech. I also included delivery ligistics, maintenance, electric grid operators, etc. It would take a huge investment to get to the "current" level of automation worldwide. I can copy the estimates somewhere if you like. What is your estimate?
This goal is so far away from where we are today that it's silly to think about. We know there are no other habitable planets in our solar system, and we are not anywhere close to being technologically capable of traveling to any others. And if we did know of another habitable planet, chances are that it's already inhabited.
We've got a lot of big issues to solve on this planet before we worry about traveling to any others.
