TheMonster wrote:With the fusion plant providing plentiful, cheap energy, that's exactly what I'd expect. The crops could be bred/genetically-modified to live in 24/7 light and grow faster than natural sunlight could do. You'd have vertically-stacked hydroponic tanks with the lights between them, providing very dense "farmland". Then you arrange for the crops to slowly move down the line, seeding at one end and harvesting at the other.Northstar wrote:If one doesn't mind the population density, I could see city towers with internal agriculture being a thing of the not too distant future, actually. Needs sunshine replicating practical lights for the ag levels, park levels, whatever like that. Imagine how much fresh produce could be grown on the roof of your average supermarket.
If we assume the technology to produce membranes that can allow O2 and N2 molecules to pass, but not CO2 (and others that filter impurities out of water) we can have air-handling systems that pull the latter out of the air and heavily concentrate it into the hydroponic tanks, which would boost the growth rate of crops while making the air healthier for the humans and their pets living in the towers. It might even be popular for individual residences to have smaller-scale "garden" units, especially for herbs and spices.
I've long thought that ships with similar arrangements ought to be part of the fleet train, if not integrated into the warships themselves to save having to transfer food/oxygen/water for waste periodically. There might be some kind of algae that's insanely proficient in processing the waste products back into consumables to let this be done in very little space. With two millenia of bioscience progress, the algae might even produce special flavors and textures, such as "meat" that feels and tastes like the real thing.
This is almost exactly the same thing accomplished in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Mars Trilogy . Red, Green, Blue Mars. It is one of my most fascinating reads.