Goal: Eliminate Competition between Food & Clean Air

We need food and air to live. Photosynthesis provides both.

Farms provide food; forests provide clean air. But, forests and farms are in accelerating competition for land - together they make up a 57% (and growing) share of Earth's total land area. The rest is desert, tundras and glaciers - not friendly places.

On balance, forests have been losing out to more farms. These land use changes account for 1/3 of human emissions. Despite the move from forests to farms, we're still on pace to underserve demand in rice & wheat by 30% within 30 years.

Photosynthesis may be life's engine, but that engine only operates at 0.1-2% efficiency. All life on earth - animals, humans, plants, microbes etc - is hindered as a result. To make food abundant and control CO2 levels, 10+% efficiencies are required. That is our goal.

Table of Contents

We begin with a history of food & CO2 on Earth in four charts. Food is created by taking CO2, keeping the C and releasing the O2. So, naturally, their stories are deeply entwined.

We then outline how we plan to achieve 10% efficiencies by co-evolving photosynthetic genetics and growing environment.

Food Over the last 1000 years, the average person has become 40x more wealthy. Despite a 100x increase in the number of people, the price of wheat has fallen by 5x. However, the price has stopped dropping over the last twenty years. Food production is number of acres times production per acre. We might think to double our allocation of land used for agriculture. We can't. That leaves increasing production per acre. While real yields have continued a slow 0.3% increase year over year. However, max potential yields per acre have stagnated since 1982. Since we can't add land, we must increase output per acre.



The problem is not input energy. Even a single photon has enormous energy relative to biological requirements. A photon of red light - a low energy wavelength - carries 3 ATPs worth of energy. 1000x more solar energy hits a bacterial cell than the bacterial cell requires to live.