Ocean Frontier Fertility: The Near Term Possibility of Bluefin Tuna Production

We should welcome and not fear
Fish farms in a Dyson sphere
Or, since there’s no current use for Luna
Why not start with Moon-based tuna?

(I’m not sure why the prior response got cut off but here is a continuation.)

CROZEX found that the natural iron blooms supported the iron hypothesis.

Indeed, the strongest support for the iron hypothesis comes from the highest latitudes where, for example, the SEEDS experiment found a 40-fold increase in chlorophyll.  This indicates that when the learning curve leads to making the higher latitudes more accessible the potential for white population explosion there is great.

PS: Soren, what I find risible is the idea that we are going to overcome our problems politically.  We have a track recod there and it is to lose, lose, lose.  Don’t be a loser while deriding those who think outside the box we’re trapped by.  At the very least come up with a plausible scenario of how we are going to start a global war so we can fight.

AND—the iron fertilization thing could be important, if plankton really fix that much CO2—we might be hearing a lot more about this soon. Thanks for the link.

Soren, I apologize for misreading your poetic license.

Here’s my answer in seirousnes:

Starting with space colonization (not the lunar surface but cis-lunar space greenhouses) might have been viable if the momentum of the space race had not been diverted inward to the computer industry at the same time the barriers protecting the cultures that created that race were battered down by vectorist policies.

As for the far future of a heliocentric collection surface (ie: Dyson sphere)—I suspect it will initially appear as an extension of cis-lunar orbital green houses.  There will be a large population of green “cells” in various heliocentric orbits that favor the availability of materials from current heliocentric mass (the asteroids and planets).  Beyond that, I have heard some proposals for stellar husbandry that involve extracting mass from the sun through very far-out macroengineering projcts but the big gains in carrying capacity will have been achieved before then I suspect.

Fred, there is certainly a lot to be said for returning lands to their rightful owners but the real problem is sustainability.

A rational view of the potential here places the carrying capacity of the Earth at a disappearingly small percentage of the future population.  I don’t want our folk to be left out of that potential.  The Earth really should be viewed more as a museum piece or nature preserve and activities thereupon should be kept at a level of technology consistent with long-range biological evolution rather than technological civilization.

Yes, I certainly want to see Europe returned to our people but I think that is more likely if we have some base of operation for ourselves.  Right now the European homelands are so infected by a pathological form of “civilization” that it is necessary to tear the whole thing down.

I also think restrictions against the use of nonrenewable resources need to be placed upon the entire planet.

The question of man, Nature and technology is very fascinating, and not, of course, without deep political implications.  These certainly extend to environmental and, therefore, civilisational sustainability.

Clearly, the character of that civilisation - what it is for - determines its standing with regard to sustainability and also its potential for change.  Thus, the strength of our free enterprise model lies in its efficiency at translating individual desires into reality.  Its weakness, however, lies in it inefficiency at incorporating constraints on individual desires in a wider interest.

These characteristics are extraordinarily hard to change.  To repeat my favourite scary mental image, which I’ve applied to liberalism in the past, we are flying down a railway track at breakneck speed, and it seems to be increasing.  The horror of our situation, as we are only just discovering, is that there is no driver on the platform of the engine.  Even worse, as we peer into the countryside ahead of us it is clear that there is no track, nothing but virgin earth.  The insane machine is hammering down the sleepers and rails before itself as it goes.

We do not know what it is we are really doing, for the sum total of self-interested free enterprise is selfishness.  Issues of sustainability do not figure because individualism cannot count higher than 1.  In an ethnocentric society civilisational aims would necessarily include sustainability, since our ethnic genetic interests lie with our children.

The Earth really should be viewed more as a museum piece or nature preserve and activities thereupon should be kept at a level of technology consistent with long-range biological evolution rather than technological civilization.

I agree.  I’ve thought for a long time that Earth will end up as you say, a museum/zoo, if humans colonize space rather than destroy themselves.  There will be those radically traditionalist groups that stay, but I think the overwhelming majority will head for space, because Earth’s political/historical baggage will probably always remain in one form or another.

So, if I decide to go and live on an oil rig or in some lunar biosphere the one certainty is that I’d be going alone.

And the male to female ratio of the frontiersmen was similarly large—so large that the primary form of reproduction with via de facto polyandry brothels.

The real fertility expansion occurred with pioneer families.

You have to ask yourself, which is more artificial:  A city or a family farm?

You then have to ask yourself:  If it is possible to have so much control over the environment that life will be suppored where there previously was no life, why wouldn’t the men so controlling the environment do so such that it would be attractive to fertile females?