Feasting on metacrops

Definitely we are not efficient, you know as to ourselves as humans we are spending our lives as we would have unlimited amount of time and attention. And the same thing we do as civilization. We spend resources as if they're endless. I would like to remind that the Earth is not flat, and it's not square, I mean, it's round, and you're not gonna find any more resources behind the corner, like there's no corner to find them at. We only have what we have, and we can only use them certain way. Like, imagine if we spend these resources on trip to Mars, we lose the ability to use these resources to build paradise here on Earth. And today, with technologies, we can make Sahara blooming gardens, like literally, this is not a metaphor, we can use the resources to build vertical farms in the middle of Sahara and use underground water to make them blooming gardens. Instead of that we send bottles of water, plastic bottles of water there to kind of help people.

Yeah, as you said, kind of help people. And this is what we're always doing. But it's not even funny to observe how we are so inclined to, you know, explore the dead ends and sending people to Mars, and spending enormous amounts of time and efforts and money on going to a dead planet. What are the benefits? We know the conditions there are not suitable for human life. I think it was almost two years ago that we had Dr. Michael Summers on the interview, he told us about the numerous exoplanets totally suitable for human life. We are so conditioned by everything, by the media, by the movies, this romantic trip to Mars to the red planet. But why would he go there? I can't understand.

And we spend trillions in the wrong direction. Our universe has unlimited amount of exoplanets just like ours, and even better. But you know what's interesting, it wouldn't make sense to go there to replicate the same model of living as we have here on Earth, because like colonizing them would be same as colonization of, let's say, America by the Europeans centuries ago, it was just mass extinction of people who already lived there. First of all, let's treat our planet and coexist in harmony with it. And then possibly, when we create this model of livable space here on Earth, we can extend it to other planets. Otherwise, what would we bring to those planets like think about it this way, we want to bring the same wars, tyranny, and everything? We're gonna have life on another planet, and then that planet is gonna threat to nuke our planet with possibly more developed rockets, missiles and other ways to kill each other. Or we build a united civilization here on Earth that creates amazing, beautiful, wonderful condition for every human to live, values human life, and then we bring life to other parts of our universe and make other planets beautiful, better, fill them with life. That's worth that's worth achieving. But first of all, it comes to building the Creative Society here on our planet. What do you think about that, Lex?

Totally 100% with you on this. If we go back into what we saw in the movies - always intergalactic wars, someone against someone, it is fighting for resources, but there are unlimited amount of resources, there are asteroids. The same Dr. Summers told us that there are asteroids completely made of gold or of diamonds. And you can, you know, just we could if we really need these materials, we can go there and get them from the asteroids without even touching our planet, or another planet where we could live. What even bothers me more is that we are trying to replicate the same way of living in a virtual game, in a virtual reality, in the metaverse. What we see here today, on this planet, we see grown up men queuing up to pay millions of real money, I mean, money that we have here, for a piece of land in a video game. Isn't that the pinnacle of absurdity? It seems that this Earth is not enough. So they've got a new Monopoly board and a buying up all the real estate to tax us for living in this virtual universe. In a virtual universe, it's only our imagination, that is the limit and every person could have everything they want. Why would you go build replicate the same miserable conditions as we have here for everyone? What's the point? I mean, maybe these people haven't read the 2011 book by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One, or watch the movie or maybe they did They liked it so much that they are trying to replicate it here. Guys, it's really up to us if we want to continue replicating the same not so nice place to live, as we have right now, everywhere in a virtual reality, or you know, in on another planet, we have to wake up guys, it will not be nice if we continue acting the same as we always did for the past centuries or even 1000s of years.

Yeah, Lex, we're so much tricked to believe that the current consumerist way of of living, of existing, is the only model that's possible to be replicated in this world, like based on animal nature, based on dominance, based on material things, based on greed, based on power of money, money and the power, that we're not even trying to change it in VR. Virtual reality, you can literally put any model, you can test anything, you can build a Creative Society, beautiful prospering, you can try different economic models, you can try different resource models, you can try anything in the VR, and then whatever works good in there, just apply it to the real life. Instead of that we're trying to replicate in virtual reality the same miserable world with built here today with this consumerism, greed and the power structure. So now people instead of investing into new ways, technologies, in new ways of production of goods, of food, because apparently we are on the edge of food crisis. So instead of solving that problem, we have a lot of money being invested into metaverse, into creating virtual food in the metaverse, in the virtual reality, in your virtual world. But you know, what's real, the money resources, your time and attention are real, they're being wasted for that thing. While in real life, you're gonna go on a real diet, when the price is gonna go so high, you can only afford beans. And that's gonna be your real metaverse diet, you're gonna eat beans, while in the VR, so you're gonna see salmon and beautiful food. That's where we heading right now.

Oh, yeah, totally! A funny thing in one article. We can link to it in the show notes. It said that food industry right now has one problem to solve. And it is how to develop a smell generator for the metaverse. I mean, when I'm reading this, I'm trying to understand how will it work? Will you satisfy your sweet tooth by smelling an image of an ice cream cone? How will you be fed in this game? And why would you want to have these metacrops? Feasting on metacrops is not something that you can apply to your body that lives in this reality. It will not be possible to sustain living just by escaping into another reality and seeing pictures of food or pictures of water there. Oh, try not drinking for 24 hours, you will see that you will pretty much be upset by the results. What we see there, people are investing money, real money, not only to buy land, to buy houses there, but they are also intending to spend their two resources that are not replenishable. You can not get back neither your time nor your attention. What we see people are buying everything. I've already said that it looks like they're playing Monopoly, and they just got a new Monopoly board for them. And they're trying to occupy all the spaces there so that they can after making us buy or even worse work on the metafields to raise metacrops. Will we have to pay for these metacrops as well? Will we have to pay for public metatoilets after we consume these metacrops? Or, will we have metahunger and metaslavery? This is the problem. We are trying to replicate this world that really needs to be changed. Time has come. We cannot live like this anymore. Yet, we are doing exactly the same in a video game. Wow!

That's very interesting that you say that we trying to build a society in VR, where we're still going to have slavery, we're going to have different classes of people, we're going to have the elites. And you know what's interesting, we're being pushed this idea upon us that that's the only way to exist for us. And even if you remember the Matrix movie, one of the characters he says the first matrix was just too perfect, everyone was living happily, but people did not enjoy that. And I want to say that this goes against directly from our history because more than 6000 years ago there were these cities all around our planet, beautifully designed cities with nothing that would say that they had anything to do with war. And different tribes or groups of people were moving, relocating, settling right next to one another and living peacefully and there was no wars, no consumerism, no consumption, no slavery, nothing. And then 6000 years ago, this whole aggressive model of consumerist society started building up and catching us and those who obtained power in it, were pushing the idea that this is the only way to go. And, in fact, it's not and the fact that you are being offered to smell something that's going to generate the smell of stuff that you want it to smell but cannot afford in real life. It reminds me the videos by Shawn Baker on Instagram where people trying to replicate food that they would like to eat using some other sorts of food, which... eventually, just funny, I would really love to see Shawn Baker's reaction on this smell generator that's being offered to us. Although as a technology, it's not bad. It's just that the way that society is offering or being offered to use it. That's what's funny.

We could have the smell of the ocean, for example, in a recreational environment. Somewhere that after you come from, I don't know your work, and you would like to be transported virtually to another place on this planet or any other, then we could use these wind generators, smell generators, and maybe like heat sources. I don't know to replicate the sun, the sun rays. Okay, I can see a use case for this kind of technologies. Metaverse is not new. It's, let's say it's about 30 years old. The concept was invented by an American writer Neil Stevenson in his 1992 book Snow Crash. It's a very grim reality. Looking at Ready Player One, when you see people in this virtual reality, maybe as a kid, the kid inside you likes this kind of things that oh, you could be doing these crazy things and everything. But these guys live in some sort of piled boxes somewhere and they have poverty, and they have forced labor inside this metaverse. Why would you replicate this? This is beyond my understanding.

That's very interesting, especially considering that right now we have this tremendous technological potential to solve all the problems, like production of any goods, anything we consume becomes so cheap, with applied automation and the modern technologies that basically human labor is not going to be needed at all. And if we apply technologies in the way that they wouldn't hurt any living human on our Earth, and only benefit the society, this is what we're talking about. Instead of virtual farms, use that money to build actual vertical farms. Imagine how much land would that free to build new cities and develop our civilization, provide housing for everyone, like actual good housing. That would be great, but unfortunately, what we have to do for that is to let people wake up, and just request it, demand it.

Luckily enough, that there is a way we just need to wake up. I mean, I'm not saying"just" because it's easy, but I'm saying that once we do that, all the rest, all the technologies are already there. They're just not serving humanity. We see, for example, in Dubai, during the last two years, the amount of locally grown produce, locally grown crops has been so extended. I mean, the range of these foods now includes all the berries - strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, you name it, everything is already grown here in the UAE. And it's very good quality. And you know, there's no land here. How do they do it? Well, it's vertical farms, its aquaponics hydroponics may be I don't know if they already use this kind of technologies, where you can have these closed systems. For example, when you have fish farming, and you connect this fish tank with your crops producing facility, then you can have this closed circle, and one nourishes another. And you don't need much space, you can put it everywhere, even in the desert. This is what can already be done today. Why we are not seeing this everywhere? Well, this is the question that we need to ask openly. Once everyone starts asking these questions, we will hear the answers pretty soon, because people that are in power, that are in politics, they are listening to the electoral demand, what people want is what they will be implementing. But if people say nothing, they don't know what we need. So it's time for us to make these changes and request these changes to put these technologies. And we're not even talking about all the rest. All the technologies that exist already for let's say energy supply.

Yeah. People don't even know the possibilities of what they can demand, request. How can we change the society you know, and what can we do right now with it? It's so easy just to demand a different way of living. Creative Society in which power belongs to people. And in which human life is valued, I mean, your life, my life, everyone's life. If one person is valued, then everyone is valued. This is something we are missing in our society where money is on the first place. So when there is a technology, first of all, we can apply it, but then we're going to lose jobs, we're going to lose other stuff. People say they're concerned about waste, like we have so much waste. Well, here it is, as you said, vertical farms, there is no waste - whatever is being the side product of producing crops can be consumed by the fish. And whatever the fish that left after the fish has been produced, can be used to water crops, and it's even infused with all the natural things that you want to be there. And then they use additional CO2 in there to make everything grow faster, which you cannot do in the open field. So this is tremendous possibilities and amazing technologies that are simply not being applied because we as people do not demand it, simply because we don't know about them. We should... things we probably should know more about, rather than what Elon Musk is buying today or buying tomorrow, is he buying Twitter or not buying. Maybe we should be more concerned about our actual life and food on our table, because it's gonna affect each one of us.

What we learned from a guy who is building these vertical farms, here in Dubai - the most complicated thing, and the most expensive, but when he told us the amount of money, it's only $100,000, to learn a cycle of life of a plant, and how you should supplement it in minerals through the water and in the air. Because when you increase the amount of CO2, or some other gases in the atmosphere, that you have in the in the greenhouse for these plants, it can grow much faster. So you can have many crops per year. What I want to say is that$100,000, and we are talking about trillions of dollars to go to Mars. Where's the logic? Where is the logic? We know that these things are possible. They exist already today. They're giving good results in some parts of the world. Why don't we replicate them everywhere? Well, people just want to have more money for them, and not for everyone to live happily. This is why we are seeing the guys who go for buying land in the metaverse, they are buying pictures of monkeys for hundreds of 1000s of dollars just to brag. I don't know, do they like this reality so much that they want to expand their Monopoly playing board by building the metaverse and buying and selling stuff there. We will not escape this reality, no matter how we want it. It's not by building another virtual reality that we can escape this one. But what we can do is build a reality that's even better than any virtual reality, here in this three dimensional space. And we can live much, much better and explore other planets and doing things. But you know, for this we need really to switch to a Creative Society, we need to leave behind the consumerism where human life is not valued, where everything that counts is profit, and the only thing that counts is profit. I like this quote from Jari Roomer. Even though it's about self improvement and side projects."Use the weekends to build the life you want, not to escape the life you have." Creative Society has become more than just a weekend project for many. But to build it, it has to become a vital priority for everyone living on this planet. And this is why the only thing, the only thing that we need to do, is start talking about it, start speaking, start explaining to your neighbors, to everyone you know, that guys, we can live differently. And if you also feel and know that this world has to change, you can become the one that is spreading this news to everyone you know, so that we all start living better, differently.

OK, Lex, that was super inspiring. But let's make it clear one more time. Did you just say that there is existing technology which can eliminate hunger on Earth and not just that. Eliminate waste and produce enough food, high quality food much better food than we have right now. All over the planet and we do not use it?

Oh yeah, definitely. This is what I said, yes.

Like how is that? How is this even possible?

This is what I was thinking many times while researching for this episode. We are not using technologies even that are already available today. Can we even describe ourselves as intelligent species?

Let's make it clear! Vertical farms is the solution to end hunger and any lack of products on Earth and we're not even using it. And even as you said in Dubai in the middle of the desert where nothing but sand, they produced a better strawberries than we do here in California. Right? Is that correct? That's what you said?

Well, tasted better for me. I mean, maybe, it depends on the crops or season. The best part is that we can create the conditions for growing plants everywhere because they are artificially created and this is the artificial environment that we want to spend time and money for. Because this will change our lives for the better not just, you know, escaping in some video game. And then when you take off your headset, and you see that you still are sitting in your room where you have nothing to eat, you have your old clothes, and you can barely walk outside because of the air pollution. Wow, I don't like this reality picture but this is what we are going for if we are going to escape into the metaverse, because while we're working in the metaverse, we are not doing anything in this reality. We will not be able to escape there forever.