Agriculture & biotechnology

I am not involved in the farming industry but am coming to have a huge appreciation for the work that goes into the food that I eat every day and want to contribute somehow in the future hence my curiosity.

As an engineer at a manufacturing company, I see the best of the best tech is constantly being adopted by bigger players while it takes quite a long to make it to small to medium players. And I notice a similar pattern when it comes to farming. I am curious what are the issues that farmers face (other than maybe high initial costs and awareness) that delay or stop them from implementing tools like the Internet of Things, digitizing farms, ML models for predicting different key variables, precision farming, etc.

Also, what might help ease the adoption?

Any insights are hugely appreciated.

I’m curious what everyone thinks is the biotech company flying the most under the radar and not getting noticed for their technology and potential growth as they should?

Do crops harvest themselves? Do plant magic users decay the roots to pull them out easier? Does food even exist? Feel free to make your responses as long as you want

Submission statement: Here is a 2019 study found in the NCBI website by :
. It was released in the MaxEnt 2019 — The 39th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering.

The entire study is amazing and it sounds exactly like what Chris Mellon has been saying for the last few years.

Here's the abstract and the conclusions, but the whole study is well worth a read:

Abstract

Several Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) encountered by military, commercial, and civilian aircraft have been reported to be structured craft that exhibit ‘impossible’ flight characteristics. We consider a handful of well-documented encounters, including the 2004 encounters with the Nimitz Carrier Group off the coast of California, and estimate lower bounds on the accelerations exhibited by the craft during the observed maneuvers. Estimated accelerations range from almost 100g to 1000s of gs with no observed air disturbance, no sonic booms, and no evidence of excessive heat commensurate with even the minimal estimated energies. In accordance with observations, the estimated parameters describing the behavior of these craft are both anomalous and surprising. The extreme estimated flight characteristics reveal that these observations are either fabricated or seriously in error, or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth. In many cases, the number and quality of witnesses, the variety of roles they played in the encounters, and the equipment used to track and record the craft favor the latter hypothesis that these are indeed technologically advanced craft. The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel, i.e., if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time.

Conclusions

It is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions at this point regarding the nature and origin of these UAVs other than the fact that we have shown that these objects cannot be of any known aircraft or missiles using current technology. We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft. It is not clear that these objects are extraterrestrial in origin, but it is extremely difficult to imagine that anyone on Earth with such technology would not put it to use. Even though older sightings are less reliable, observations of seemingly similar UAPs go back to well before the era of flight. Collectively, these observations strongly suggest that these UAVs should be carefully studied by scientists.

Unfortunately, the attitude that the study of UAVs (UFOs) is “unscientific” pervades the scientific community, including SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which is surprising, especially since efforts are underway to search for extraterrestrial artifacts in the solar system, particularly, on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and at Earth-associated Lagrange points. Ironically, such attitudes inhibit scientific study, perpetuating a state of ignorance about these phenomena that has persisted for well over 70 years, which is now especially detrimental, since answers are presently needed.

In a hypothetical future where humanity is restricted to Earth and resources have been depleted, it is not unrealistic to assume that technology will be more organic. Simplistically, this would be focused on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur (CHNOPS) though other elements would still be available in lower quantities.

This would undoubtedly include increased use of biotechnology, genetic engineering, synthetic life, DNA nanotechnology and maybe molecular assemblers.

However, what limitations would this produce, if any, on the areas of technology that are viable?

The absence of large quantities of metal is perhaps the most obvious problem though lots of other elements are used in electronics and other technologies.

Can and fill the gap? Would increased use of be useful? What about ?

Perhaps the biggest question is, could humanity ever leave Earth using this type of technology? That doesn’t necessarily mean a bioship though!