Vitamins in Agricultural Catastrophes

Source

Michael Griswold, Mohamed Abdelkhaliq, Deborah Cole, David Denkenberger, Joshua M. Pearce, A. Ray Taylor Vitamins in Agricultural Catastrophes.International Disaster and Risk Conferences (IDRC) Conference Proceedings 2016, Davos, Switzerland. pp. 252-256 (2016). open access

Abstract

A number of catastrophes could block the sun, including bolide (asteroid/comet) impact, super volcanic eruption, and nuclear war with the burning of cities (nuclear winter). Prevention of these catastrophes would be preferable, but there are not options for all of these risks. Therefore, a backup plan is necessary and previous work has shown these alternate are technically capable of feeding everyone with macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and lipids) and minerals could be extracted from the ground. The present work analyses methods to viably produce vitamins to fortify the entire human population for this sun blocking scenario and other catastrophic scenarios will be discussed. First the vitamin content of various alternate foods is determined as a percent of the U.S. recommended daily allowance. Many of these alternate foods are not commonly used as food at this point, so the closest available proxy was used for the vitamin content of some of these foods. Next, feasibility of the different alternate food sources was determined to construct an example diet and the calories from each alternative food is tabulated. Finally, the percent of the RDA for several vitamins are determined. The results show the intake of all of these vitamins is below the toxic limit and that it is apparent that the example combination, and many others, are capable of sustaining the nutritional needs of an average human life.

Keywords

solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, computer virus, global catastrophic risk, existential risk, industry, food, electricity, nuclear war, alternate food, vitamins

Vitamins in Agricultural Catastrophes

Contents

Source

Abstract

Keywords

See Also

Davos IDRC Conference

Past work