While it's more ethical for the animal, I must question the carbon footprint and efficient and effective use of resources to make synthetic beef.
Firstly, to make it scale you'll need a lot of machinery. Then you'll need the right nutrients. It will need a lot of technology, because to make beef grow it will need to have everything maintained and provided for it. In nature, beef cattle can be run on reasonably unproductive land (feed lots notwithstanding). Cattle, as it turns out, are very effective and efficient factories of meat production all by themselves.
>An independent study found that lab-grown beef uses 45% less energy than the average global representative figure for farming cattle. It also produces 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 99% less land.
I'd really like to know how something that is 200,000 times more expensive could currently have less of an environmental impact. I just don't see how you move that much money and don't make an impact.
It is currently far more expensive. Currently. Look at the prize to synthesise DNA, which has crashed like there is no tomorrow. If these prizes follow that then in a decade or two this will be cheaper than real meat.
Yes, currently I believe the cost is due to a single professor making it in a lab with lab assistants, ordering small amounts of materials, preparing in small batches.
The thing is, having an actual cow means making a ton of methane. The unproductive land is actually questionable, also, we actually need that unproductive land to stay unproductive. And, finally, there's than small "sentient being" issue.
Early indications suggest based on graphs, empirical laws, and irrational extrapolation that I can run a datacenter off a AA battery for a year.
I always find it hilarious when wild guesses are presented with multiple sig figs like 55% as opposed to 56% or 54%. I suspect an error analysis would show a standard deviation of a couple orders of magnitude.
Firstly, to make it scale you'll need a lot of machinery. Then you'll need the right nutrients. It will need a lot of technology, because to make beef grow it will need to have everything maintained and provided for it. In nature, beef cattle can be run on reasonably unproductive land (feed lots notwithstanding). Cattle, as it turns out, are very effective and efficient factories of meat production all by themselves.