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Solar Foods - Food Out Of Thin Air

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@markkujantunen
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2 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QQOUfHodhY

This video is a good overview of what Solar Foods is about.

That slogan isn't entirely true, though, because they in fact need ammonia as a nitrogen source - and some amount of minerals. Yes, there's plenty of nitrogen in the air. In fact, 80% of the mass of the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen but it is in the form of N 2 , which has a very strong covalent bond, which makes it impractical to break it up to get reactive nitrogen molecules. This is why agriculture - and this process - relies on ammonia as a source of nitrogen, which is a crucial building block of protein molecules. Also, you cannot do without the minerals.

But what's remarkable about the efficiency of this process is that they get one gram of the protein they're making from two grams of carbon dioxide.

Here's the rest of the video series:

https://solarfoods.fi/blog/liberators-of-protein-production-video-series/

I think moving away from relying on agriculture for food production will be necessary for a number of reasons. Global warming is already underway and causing problems in some areas of the globe. Extreme weather events are getting more extreme, which will put agricultural production at risk. To alleviate poverty, the cost of food will have to come down. Agriculture is taking up so much land that biodiversity is at risk. Access to water is a significant cause for conflict in regions suffering from drought. That was what triggered the Syrian civil war, for instance.

One of the goals of Solar Foods is to create a bioreactor capable of producing all the proteins the crew of a Mars mission would need.

Solar Foods is a startup founded in Finland in 2017.

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