Vertical farming does not save space

Hydroponics is how many commercial growers operate their greenhouses

Author also makes mistake because he assumes all land to be equal. Then second assumption is that power source has to be in the same place as the farm.

Vertical farm can be set up in a place where normal farm would not be possible. One can also imagine that solar panels can be placed on a piece of land that would not be suitable for growing crops.

There is loads of empty land on the world. Land that is worth a lot is close to where all people are and in places where it is fertile and ideally flat.

It's beyond my pay grade. I have no idea if 'optical fibers' are an option here. I suspect 'not' only because it hasn't been done already and feels like it if worked for vertical farming, it would also work to supplement office lighting so there is some monetary incentive to get such a system implemented in some way.

The other problem is that you still have the same issue. That is, for every square cm of sunlight you collect the best you could do is direct that light to a square cm of a plant. That is, you can't just increase surface area of collected light so to provide sunlight for vertically stacked plants, you need the equivalent horizontal surface area to support those.

But I have no idea.

A YouTube video is not the ne plus ultra of scientific presentations, you know.

I remember the first time that someone was telling that fusion would be producing a lot of power by the end of the decade, but I can't remember whether this was the 70s or the 80s.

Considering that humans have yet to produce one joule of net energy from fusion, and the longest anyone has ever run a fusion reactor was 20 seconds, I think you're wildly optimistic.

Indeed, I would say that if America today had working plans for a commercial fusion power plant handed to it by benevolent aliens, between a deliberately broken bureaucracy and the awesome power of the fossil fuel industry, I would be quite surprised if the first plant opened by January 1, 2030. (And I'd suspect that literally billions of kickbacks and graft would have to be paid for the gatekeepers to allow it in.)

(Other more rational, less kleptocratic countries might do better - I'm looking at you, Germany - and paradoxically, fully authoritarian states might also do better.)

> But is it more expensive than...

Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie.

> We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with.

Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references).

> It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable.

Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance.

> I'd pay a few more pennies than that to figure out the rest of this issue

Economic incentives is only part of the problem in my view. We in the industrialized world are aiming for ever-growing (ideally infinite) energy production and consumption, which necessarily leads to ecocide and other environmental damages. Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem? There are many strategies we can put in place to reduce energy consumption, but these would contradict basic tenets of capitalism. For the most obvious example (from HN's perspective), see planned obsolescence or how/why we build more devices every few years than there are humans on earth (and yet we keep on having to buy new ones, which is severely damaging the environment).