The Glade 4.0

John Galt survived in the book, pretty beat up, but he was alive at the end. He did not heroically die for his ideals.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

We've had to advance our technology several times in order to keep up with the growing population in our own hemisphere. So no, we can not feed the world without breaking a sweat as we've already had to break a sweat as it were. If our current rate of agricultural advancement keeps up we'll be alright. Unfortunately, we're the only country in the world keeping that pace. Moreover, the rest of the world is still behind our WWII food production in terms of quantity of food per acre. That includes the "first world" countries that are supposedly technologically on par with us.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Calories consumed per person has been going up each year as well:

http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorM ... bd=0$inds=

It's not as if our technological advances in agriculture has been some crash program to stave off imminent starvation. Advances have largely been at the same rate as everything else has advanced. A hundred years ago we were just beginning to experiment with flight; less than 70 years after the Wright Brothers we put a man on the moon. 70 years ago mechanical and analog computers like the Norden bombsight and the Mark 37 were state-of-the-art; 40 years ago my dad was an engineering student telling my mom about the incredible possibilities of solid-state electronics, and today we can fit enough computing power in a desktop to rival acres of the computers used to send men to the moon.

I'd also like to know where you get the idea that first-world nations are generally pre-WWII in terms of agricultural technology.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

http://www.missourifarmertoday.com/

It was in one of their print articles.

Here's the thing about first-world countries that aren't the United States: They're the same countries that are starving Africa by refusing to give any sort of foreign aid if they embrace modern farming technology used in the United States. It's not the lack of foreign aid itself that's starving them, mind you. It's the insistence that Africa use Europe-approved farming methods. Europe's food production is dominated primarily by the sort of people who frequent Whole Foods and other "organic" food markets. The simple fact of the matter is that those farming methods simply don't produce enough food to feed people. The reason they're viable here in the United States is because we have people who do use stuff like pesticides.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

VEry interesting, and farm from surprising in terms of Europe's behavior. It seems the issue is not that these countries (1st and 3rd world alike) don't have access to the technology but that they won't use it.

However, that indicates that the problem is not so much lack of ability to produce enough food or clean water, but rather lake of willingness to do so out of European "if it can't be eco-concious (or whatever the reason they have these views is) we can't have it at all."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Interesting theory.