1st Sept 2051 -
Water was predicted as the resource which would trigger the next great wars. With 70% of known earth being water, I always doubted this axiom. Why would most of the mafias concentrate on grabbing more and more of land resources when water was to become the scarce commodity? Every don, rogue, politician, and people of similar hue were spending every waking moment dreaming up schemes to grab the next inch of land.
Pray, what value land, if it were to be used for it's god given purpose - to grow food to feed the masses? No sir, land becomes gold only with development. That is where we turned against nature and as we all know, nature scorned is nature infuriated. Now where was the largest opportunity? The largest swathes of fertile land available were in India, China, USA. And rightly so, these were the producers feeding the world's masses. As fertile land kept on being gobbled up in the name of growth and development, India and China in their blind race for world supremacy were the first to turn net consumers instead of producers. The US desperately kept trying to play catch up and hopelessly trying to regain its old glory, saw its big opportunity in 'green' energy - food as fuel. And so came the seven lean years which once again proved the truth of Malthusian economics.
Now, is today's headline the start of the seven good years? One is the attempt to once again conquer the seas and turn them into productive swathes of crop producing areas which came predictably from Japan. The technique is amazingly simple. They had already mastered the art of creating floating airports, floating stadia and floating fun-dromes. Now they have floating acres of land growing crops, insulated from the salty airs of the ocean by green-domes. These floating green-domes are monitored remotely and also contain water filtration cum irrigation plants. The surrounding insulation is covered with equal areas of planktons, mangroves and sea resistant plants while the core growth areas are multi-storeyed fertile land stores, yielding multiple crops. Now there is no fear of whether the rains will be good this year, since these floating green-domes are portable and can be towed to areas which are experiencing rain as and when needed.
The multi-storeyed part of the technology was first tried on land but was not so successful in terms of yield ratios. The main disadvantage of land based multi-storeyed plantations was that they needed an radius equal to their height to be kept open to ensure the lower levels received their necessary sunshine and free flowing air.
Post Script : A week after I wrote this, I found an article in the newspaper mentioning this very concept already being tested.
Water was predicted as the resource which would trigger the next great wars. With 70% of known earth being water, I always doubted this axiom. Why would most of the mafias concentrate on grabbing more and more of land resources when water was to become the scarce commodity? Every don, rogue, politician, and people of similar hue were spending every waking moment dreaming up schemes to grab the next inch of land.
Pray, what value land, if it were to be used for it's god given purpose - to grow food to feed the masses? No sir, land becomes gold only with development. That is where we turned against nature and as we all know, nature scorned is nature infuriated. Now where was the largest opportunity? The largest swathes of fertile land available were in India, China, USA. And rightly so, these were the producers feeding the world's masses. As fertile land kept on being gobbled up in the name of growth and development, India and China in their blind race for world supremacy were the first to turn net consumers instead of producers. The US desperately kept trying to play catch up and hopelessly trying to regain its old glory, saw its big opportunity in 'green' energy - food as fuel. And so came the seven lean years which once again proved the truth of Malthusian economics.
Now, is today's headline the start of the seven good years? One is the attempt to once again conquer the seas and turn them into productive swathes of crop producing areas which came predictably from Japan. The technique is amazingly simple. They had already mastered the art of creating floating airports, floating stadia and floating fun-dromes. Now they have floating acres of land growing crops, insulated from the salty airs of the ocean by green-domes. These floating green-domes are monitored remotely and also contain water filtration cum irrigation plants. The surrounding insulation is covered with equal areas of planktons, mangroves and sea resistant plants while the core growth areas are multi-storeyed fertile land stores, yielding multiple crops. Now there is no fear of whether the rains will be good this year, since these floating green-domes are portable and can be towed to areas which are experiencing rain as and when needed.
The multi-storeyed part of the technology was first tried on land but was not so successful in terms of yield ratios. The main disadvantage of land based multi-storeyed plantations was that they needed an radius equal to their height to be kept open to ensure the lower levels received their necessary sunshine and free flowing air.
Post Script : A week after I wrote this, I found an article in the newspaper mentioning this very concept already being tested.
