so it occured to me that if everything on earth flammable on earth spontaneously combusted a few times a year people might still like food. One approach to that is to grow fire restant trees that produce lots of nuts. Many varieties of trees are already fire resistant.
sounds nutty, yet science magazine 2012 has a letter noting that an acre of nut trees can produce over 6000 lbs of nuts a year. so thats more than sufficient calories to feed 7 people on almost no land. Genetically engineering nut trees to provide nutritionally complete proteins is likely quite possible as things like methionine enriched grain have already been engineered.
Thus prior to some notable disaster of some kind I urge people to genetically engineer drought tolerant highly productive hazelnut or pecan trees that produce food that is absolutely sufficient to human nutritional needs.
as a slight suggestion as to a way to that I note that histones, the spool like cytostructures that regulate the rate of DNA transcription are modifiable. removing histones at yeast causes them to grow 3 to 5 times faster. I am not aware of what minimizing histones at human edible vegetation does, yet possibly noticeably faster growing plants or much higher yields may be possible.
Edited by treonsverdery, 25 October 2012 - 01:26 AM.
