Size of 'empires'

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Trantor
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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Trantor »

Victor_D wrote:
bunnyboy wrote:The problems are the "living standards". You are living better and using more resources than movie star of the age of black and white. The luxuries are becoming norm and then necessities, but we don't need everything we have to live or even to be happy. Fix this and everything else would be "easy".
And how do you plan to accomplish that?
Hm. I see no way of accomplishing that without severely hampering progress.
sapere aude.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Victor_D »

Trantor wrote:
Victor_D wrote:
bunnyboy wrote:The problems are the "living standards". You are living better and using more resources than movie star of the age of black and white. The luxuries are becoming norm and then necessities, but we don't need everything we have to live or even to be happy. Fix this and everything else would be "easy".
And how do you plan to accomplish that?
Hm. I see no way of accomplishing that without severely hampering progress.
Actually, I believe rapid progress is the only way sustainability can be achieved. We need to learn how to produce our "luxury" (read "decent living standards") sustainably, meaning without overstraining the environment. This means near 100% recycling, clean energy, pollution-free manufacturing, emissions-free travelling/transportation, etc. etc. etc.

My fear with regard to this is that our "window of opportunity" to get to this semi-utopistic future is closing fast as our (well, human, Europe's population is more or less stabilized now) population grows and the developing countries don't give a damn about sustainability because they have hundreds of millions of people to house, feed, cloth, and stuff with consumer crap they've seen in Western TV shows.

We'd better establish colonies on Mars ASAP, just in case we fail here.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by discord »

a good first step would be self sustainable orbital and lunar colonies, after that move'em to the asteroid belt to get a industry going, after that mars. just my thoughts on it.

<edit>
which incidentally requires rather large lift capacity, preferably at a lower cost compared to current practices, see comment in that spaceplane discussion.
</edit>

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Trantor
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Re: Size of 'empires'

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discord wrote:a good first step would be self sustainable orbital and lunar colonies, after that move'em to the asteroid belt to get a industry going, after that mars. just my thoughts on it.

<edit>
which incidentally requires rather large lift capacity, preferably at a lower cost compared to current practices, see comment in that spaceplane discussion.
</edit>
I don´t see that becoming possible with our todays´ tech-level. And no, the Skylon won´t change anything.
sapere aude.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

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bunnyboy wrote:I do support GM research, but not how the GM farming is done. When you buy GM seeds, you aren't allowed to take seeds from your harvest. Make a mistake or when crosspollution happens, the GM company will own everything with their branded genetic code.
That's not exclusive to GM, but virtually all seeds natural or "artificial". Almost all varieties of seeds are owned as "patterned" products. And to certain degree you can understand a seed companies position. It's spends a lot of money and time developing new strains and breeds, the last thing it want's is for it's market advantage to be lost as soon as it goes to market. And then they need to make a profit as to continue their business. And when we have grown opium and sedum, we have no interest in reclaiming seeds.So having a reliable source of commercial seeds is useful for us.

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Trantor
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Re: Size of 'empires'

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Smithy wrote: the last thing it want's is for it's market advantage to be lost as soon as it goes to market. And then they need to make a profit as to continue their business.
So should we people suffer for the shareholder´s value?
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Mr Bojangles
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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Mr Bojangles »

discord wrote:a good first step would be self sustainable orbital and lunar colonies, after that move'em to the asteroid belt to get a industry going, after that mars. just my thoughts on it.

<edit>
which incidentally requires rather large lift capacity, preferably at a lower cost compared to current practices, see comment in that spaceplane discussion.
</edit>
In order to be self-sustaining, a colony would need to be more than just materially- and energetically-independent of Earth. It would also need to be "people-independent", i.e., a population able to be maintain its own growth via birth. With today's tech, we could just about achieve the first two points, but the last is beyond us.

Thanks to Mir and the ISS, we have a pretty good idea of what microgravity does to a healthy adult human being. We have no idea how that would affect a developing fetus. Perhaps the effects would be somewhat mitigated in a gravity well (such as on the Moon or Mars), but the fact remains that we don't know. Here on Earth, we tend to take for granted that gravity affects everything that we do, including our development cycles.

I think a self-sustaining orbital colony will be possible at some point in the future. We can spin it up to simulate Earth-normal gravity. The same can't be said of Lunar, Martian, or even asteroid-based colonies. The solutions to our problems will not be simple.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by fredgiblet »

Trantor wrote:So should we people suffer for the shareholder´s value?
Of course! No go, and consume.

More seriously rational patent law drives innovation by providing funds for more R&D. Of course the key word there is rational.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Victor_D »

discord wrote:a good first step would be self sustainable orbital and lunar colonies, after that move'em to the asteroid belt to get a industry going, after that mars. just my thoughts on it.

which incidentally requires rather large lift capacity, preferably at a lower cost compared to current practices, see comment in that spaceplane discussion.
Uh-huh. Well, I have a comment to that.

1) We need decent cis-lunar space infrastructure. This will come about on its own, because it makes economic sense. Once it gets robust enough, it will start making sense mining fuel and material on the Moon to maintain this infrastructure.
2) Colonies on the Moon will likely never be completely self-sustaining as the Moon lacks many vital materials you simply need (nitrogen, carbon, volatiles in general). You can of course get them in trace amounts from the rocks, but that would be hugely inefficient and it would likely be cheaper to import stuff from Earth.
3) Asteroids as goldmines are a bit of a sci-fi cliché. We may tap into them if we find something we really need in large enough concentration, but as a rule of thumb, it is better to mine stuff closer to the places with the industry which needs them.
4) Mars is by far the most "habitable" planet besides Earth. It has everything we need to build a self-sustaining civilization which, if need be, could be completely independent on Earth.
5) Saturn may be the "Persian Gulf of the Solar System" as Zubrin put it, if we start mining He-3 from its atmosphere and colonize Titan.
6) Mercury is undervalued. We probably just found water at its poles, which means colonization is possible. I think it will be a nice place for manufacturing anti-matter some time in the future.
7) Venus is pretty much useless I am afraid. It's not even worth the effort of trying to terraform it.
8) Large space habitats are in my opinion not a good proposition, because they lack an economic rationale. It makes sense to have zero-g factories, spacedocks, defence installations, things like that, but they likely won't require huge manpower to function. So what would all these people in space habitats do? Unless they were all geniuses selling their inventions, I don't see an economic raison d'etre for them.

So, in the short term, I see our expansion in space like this: Earth->LEO/GEO->Moon/Near Earth Asteroids->Mars->Main Belt Asteroids->Outer Solar System->Mercury->?

:)

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Re: Size of 'empires'

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Victor_D wrote:7) Venus is pretty much useless I am afraid. It's not even worth the effort of trying to terraform it.
I did read some graphs long time ago and found out that if you can build hovering installation (like zeppelin), both pressure and temperature are quite comfortable on 50 km altitude. It just leave the problems of windspeed and corrosive athmosphere.
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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Victor_D »

bunnyboy wrote:
Victor_D wrote:7) Venus is pretty much useless I am afraid. It's not even worth the effort of trying to terraform it.
I did read some graphs long time ago and found out that if you can build hovering installation (like zeppelin), both pressure and temperature are quite comfortable on 50 km altitude. It just leave the problems of windspeed and corrosive athmosphere.
As a research station, yes. But that's about it - you can't do much else on Venus, unless you like a pressure cooker climate mixed with some sulphuric acid for good measure.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Absalom »

Victor_D wrote:
bunnyboy wrote:The problems are the "living standards". You are living better and using more resources than movie star of the age of black and white. The luxuries are becoming norm and then necessities, but we don't need everything we have to live or even to be happy. Fix this and everything else would be "easy".
And how do you plan to accomplish that? Both of us are using computers to communicate now - can we do without them? Hardly, yet for more than a half of humanity, owning a personal computer is pure luxury.
Computers? Why are you bringing those up? The resource hogs are automobiles and climate control. Cars take up perhaps half of the energy used in the US, and those big coolers that you see in supermarkets take so much power that you simply can't stick some sort of surge protector on them. I should know, I asked an HVAC tech who works on them. Computers are low-power devices, which is why your cell phone can go for hours without a charge.
Victor_D wrote:I am positive that if we push for recycling and sane lifestyle really hard, we can reach true sustainability. The problem is this is an option only for countries which already are reasonably developed (I count my own among them, surely to the surprise of many Americans). For the likes of China who are basically trying to mimic the way the Western world used to industrialize itself and get rich in the process, this is a huge problem. China is opening a new coal-fired power plant every week, if I remember correctly, and there are other countries which haven't even started developing (most of Africa included). The problem is, this model won't work in a world of greatly diminished resources. Once these countries increase consumption to approach Western levels, I am afraid it will be the last straw which broke the back of Earth's environmental carrying capacity.
If done smart (and particularly with smart quasi-central planning) it can be made to work. The key is to get most of the population centralized into cities, and use rail as the primary inter-city (and in-city) transport mechanism. Then you add e.g. standardized sorted-trash for the entire place (primarily so that kitchen scraps can be returned to agricultural regions), and require all new construction to use sufficient (very large amounts of) insulation. There are certainly limits to how much this obtains for you, but the US's lifestyle is massively cheaper even if you just systematically add insulation.

The biggie is e.g. water.
Smithy wrote:
bunnyboy wrote:I have seen a plans, where you can give the people of Manhattan all they need (thought not what they want) by products of one building. Thought I'm still little suspicious of that.


Ah yes, what you need, but not necessarily what you want. Kinda spits in the face of free choice, and liberty really.
Free choice is not "get what you want", it's "choose what you buy". Different things entirely. Liberty from need isn't liberty to the person who produces.
Smithy wrote:As to Monocultured, I assume you mean a variety of say wheat with very little gene variation? If so, it hasn't seemed to be too derogatory ever since we have began to selectively breed crops. Which as I'm sure you know once you get the results you want, you develop hundreds of cuttings. All genetically identical, but variation will begin to occur quite quickly with cross-pollination from other growers in the area of the seed crop and through natural mutations of the gene code.
Yes, that's what mono-culture means. The current diversity within the major crops is low, which makes it more likely that individual diseases will wipe out huge volumes of food. Theoretically you'll get cross-pollination, but the crops in the neighboring fields will usually be closely related, so it's rather like marrying a cousin. There used to be dozens of common varieties for the major crops, now there's usually less than a dozen. The vulnerability is obvious.
Trantor wrote:
Smithy wrote: the last thing it want's is for it's market advantage to be lost as soon as it goes to market. And then they need to make a profit as to continue their business.
So should we people suffer for the shareholder´s value?
No, people should suffer for the sake of getting what they want, Econ. 101 ;) .
Mr Bojangles wrote:
discord wrote:a good first step would be self sustainable orbital and lunar colonies, after that move'em to the asteroid belt to get a industry going, after that mars. just my thoughts on it.

<edit>
which incidentally requires rather large lift capacity, preferably at a lower cost compared to current practices, see comment in that spaceplane discussion.
</edit>
In order to be self-sustaining, a colony would need to be more than just materially- and energetically-independent of Earth. It would also need to be "people-independent", i.e., a population able to be maintain its own growth via birth. With today's tech, we could just about achieve the first two points, but the last is beyond us.
Considering that a major reason for space colonies is to relieve population pressures, not a real problem. Habitat production and launch costs are the big stumbling blocks.

Besides, what you actually need is net-sustaining. As long as the "system" sustains itself, individual "nodes" are a small-scale concern.
Victor_D wrote:3) Asteroids as goldmines are a bit of a sci-fi cliché. We may tap into them if we find something we really need in large enough concentration, but as a rule of thumb, it is better to mine stuff closer to the places with the industry which needs them.
One of the nice things about space is that you can move the industry. Hence why asteroids are considered good mining choices: they let you move to the next asteroid without much complication.
Victor_D wrote:4) Mars is by far the most "habitable" planet besides Earth. It has everything we need to build a self-sustaining civilization which, if need be, could be completely independent on Earth.
Mars doesn't have an atmosphere that we can breath, nor a biosphere that we can live off of. Since we'll have to construct all of that anyways, it's generally agreed that the orbital-colony ideas are better choices.
Victor_D wrote:5) Saturn may be the "Persian Gulf of the Solar System" as Zubrin put it, if we start mining He-3 from its atmosphere and colonize Titan.
Well, it certainly couldn't be that much less practical than Mars. If nothing else, I believe that Titan has a smaller gravity well.
Victor_D wrote:6) Mercury is undervalued. We probably just found water at its poles, which means colonization is possible. I think it will be a nice place for manufacturing anti-matter some time in the future.
The trick is: why would we want to land? The only possibility that I know of is the combination of solar power and minerals, and for that we can just use reflectors to focus sunlight onto collectors at whatever asteroid we're mining.
Victor_D wrote:7) Venus is pretty much useless I am afraid. It's not even worth the effort of trying to terraform it.
Actually, the density of the Venusian atmosphere could make it useful. I don't recall the constituency, but it obviously has volatiles, many of which could be important for space habitats.
Victor_D wrote:8) Large space habitats are in my opinion not a good proposition, because they lack an economic rationale. It makes sense to have zero-g factories, spacedocks, defence installations, things like that, but they likely won't require huge manpower to function. So what would all these people in space habitats do? Unless they were all geniuses selling their inventions, I don't see an economic raison d'etre for them.
They offer basically the same advantages of most of the planets, but traveling between stations is easier than returning to orbit or traveling between distant surface colonies. Meanwhile, everything that we know you can do on a planetary surface we believe we can do on a station as well. You also get easy access to both vacuum and zero-gee, and can physically move your colony if you have a reason (e.g. economics). Space habitats are basically a better option than planetary colonies, Zubrin is just fascinated with the romance.
Victor_D wrote:So, in the short term, I see our expansion in space like this: Earth->LEO/GEO->Moon/Near Earth Asteroids->Mars->Main Belt Asteroids->Outer Solar System->Mercury->?

:)
My list is Earth->Leo/Geo/Lagrange->Moon/Near Earth Asteroid/Main Belt Asteroids->Mars->Others

remember, many Near Earth Asteroids actually follow very elliptical orbits around the sun, so they aren't as easy as they seem. Meanwhile, I don't think the Moon has all that much to suggest itself as a preliminary colony site.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

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Trantor wrote:
Smithy wrote: the last thing it want's is for it's market advantage to be lost as soon as it goes to market. And then they need to make a profit as to continue their business.
So should we people suffer for the shareholder´s value?
Now you are assuming all seed companies are publicly traded companies. A huge amount of crop research would not be done without seed companies, let alone GM. The small company I work for in Hampshire, we work closely with a research company in Yorkshire that's family owned. If you just gave away their crop development and new breed varieties they would be broke.

Nor do people suffer in my experience. As I mentioned before, the last thing we want to do with sedum, and opium is harvest the seeds. Leaving seeds to the seed companies is effective specialisation. You don't like who your currently buying from, buy from someone else.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Victor_D »

Absalom wrote:One of the nice things about space is that you can move the industry. Hence why asteroids are considered good mining choices: they let you move to the next asteroid without much complication.
Doesn't matter if you need to move bulk mass to the industry which needs all these resources. Plus, asteroids have their own challenges (near zero-g, often a serious lack of volatiles and other chemicals needed for metal extractions, etc.).
Victor_D wrote:Mars doesn't have an atmosphere that we can breath, nor a biosphere that we can live off of. Since we'll have to construct all of that anyways, it's generally agreed that the orbital-colony ideas are better choices.
Generally agreed by whom? Not many in the space community would agree with this, certainly I haven't met many such people. Mars is a planet, a planet has resources (it's actually a huge pile of them). Empty space offers no resources except for solar energy. An orbital settlement colony would essentially has to import *everything* from Earth or some other planet. What would it export - how would it justify its existence *economically*?

The fact is that on Mars, you can find everything to build a sustainable independent colony, including all the biogenic elements. You need to build something? Get out, mine stuff, process it, use it. It's probably the case that since Mars has had an active geology for quite some time, it has also developed localized concentrations of resources. Asteroids are usually undifferentiated piles of rubble. There are metallic ones, but they usually lack volatiles that are needed to efficiently extract the metals (because I doubt you want to be sending unprocessed rock back to your planet for processing, that would be terribly useless).
Victor_D wrote:Well, it certainly couldn't be that much less practical than Mars. If nothing else, I believe that Titan has a smaller gravity well.
More importantly, it has an atmosphere and readily available supplies of all kinds of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds.
The trick is: why would we want to land? The only possibility that I know of is the combination of solar power and minerals, and for that we can just use reflectors to focus sunlight onto collectors at whatever asteroid we're mining.
Inverse square law. Mercury gets far more sunlight, and I assume we can make photovoltaic panels out of its rocks. With water on the poles, a small human colony can exist to tend the machines.
Victor_D wrote:Actually, the density of the Venusian atmosphere could make it useful. I don't recall the constituency, but it obviously has volatiles, many of which could be important for space habitats.
You mean the space habitats which make no sense? ;) Venus' atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, co2, with clouds of sulphuric acid. It's very hydrogen-poor, unfortunately. It's not that the volatiles are of no value, but Venus' steep gravity well makes it rather impractical to get them there. Earth is a much better source, much closer to where we want them.
Victor_D wrote:They offer basically the same advantages of most of the planets,
No they don't, they're just enclosed bubbles of air in an ocean of nothingness. It's like comparing an island made of solid rock, say, Britain, with an artificial platform, say, Sealand. Even with near 100% effective closed-loop life support, they'll always be dependent on resources from the outside. Again, what economic rationale can you offer for building them?
but traveling between stations is easier than returning to orbit or traveling between distant surface colonies.
So? Martian colonists wouldn't want to travel back and forth; they signed up for colonizing Mars.
Meanwhile, everything that we know you can do on a planetary surface we believe we can do on a station as well. You also get easy access to both vacuum and zero-gee, and can physically move your colony if you have a reason (e.g. economics). Space habitats are basically a better option than planetary colonies, Zubrin is just fascinated with the romance.
What you're citing is a case for orbital manufacturing, if we find something that can only be economically manufactured in zero-g (say, special crystals, unique alloys, exotic chemicals/drugs, etc.). But that will hardly require manpower in the millions. An orbital/lagrange point factory wouldn't be a settlement/colony.

Planets like Earth and Mars are places where humans can actually live, work, and develop an independent sustainable culture. Which is kind of the point of colonizing space.
Meanwhile, I don't think the Moon has all that much to suggest itself as a preliminary colony site.
It has water and some metals we might use to tend for our cis-lunar space infrastructure.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by discord »

why people would want to live in space.

#1 medical reasons, lowered strain on heart for instance, could let people live longer.
#2 scenic, the view gotta be awesome.
#3 it's SPACE man! that is another awesome in itself.

probably a few more, can't think of them right now, tired as hell, but get a one way ticket down to 20k US and there will be people that would wanna go up.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Victor_D »

I do not rule out space hotels, even pretty big ones with O'Neill cylinders and what not. It's just I can't see them as permanent colonies. Manufacturing, tourism, research, defence, these are all viable uses for orbital installations; colonization will always be focused on planets/large moons, because that's human habitat. It's the same reason we are not building huge floating cities in the middle of the ocean to "colonize" it (and mind you, floating cities would still have access to many ocean-based resources, unlike space habitats which float in a vacuum.

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Re: Size of 'empires'

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Smithy wrote:A huge amount of crop research would not be done without seed companies, let alone GM. The small company I work for in Hampshire, we work closely with a research company in Yorkshire that's family owned. If you just gave away their crop development and new breed varieties they would be broke.
It's true that even people working on seed companies have to eat.

But It's not solution, that big company like Mosanto can pump seeds to market with low prices until they get monopoly and then lift the prices on sky, making only one type of seeds available. And the one is highly dependable of their own poisons to survive against diseases and weeds. With their army of lawyers they can also seize any harvest, which has traces of their copymarked dna. Throwing seeds on the unguarded fields and mixing the flours from different farmers on only mill at area of state either purposely or accidentally are common rumors, but GM plants are found hundreds of miles away from their legal location.
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Re: Size of 'empires'

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discord wrote:why people would want to live in space.

#1 medical reasons, lowered strain on heart for instance, could let people live longer.
#2 scenic, the view gotta be awesome.
#3 it's SPACE man! that is another awesome in itself.

probably a few more, can't think of them right now, tired as hell, but get a one way ticket down to 20k US and there will be people that would wanna go up.
Actually
#1 you start losing your bones
#2 it's get soon boring
#3 we too are in SPACE but with less emptyness
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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Trantor »

Smithy wrote:Leaving seeds to the seed companies is effective specialisation. You don't like who your currently buying from, buy from someone else.
Why buying at all?
My grandfather was a farmer, he never "bought" seeds.
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Re: Size of 'empires'

Post by Smithy »

You are all concerned about Genetic use restriction technology, which has never been realised.

Anyway the amount of seed retention is dependent on the laws of the Land so to speak. I think here in the UK we can retain a certain percentage of the seeds legally. It's very rarely done though I might add.
Trantor wrote:Why buying at all?
My grandfather was a farmer, he never "bought" seeds.
Scale, and specialisation, we don't want to invest in the equipment to harvest, store and manage seeds, we want to concentrate our time and capital on production.

Anyhow in my own personal experience:

With sedum, we don't poses the equipment to viable extract and store the seeds, we would also destroy our product to extract the seeds, nor does sedum ripen at the same time. Sedum is used to create living roofing mats if your wondering what the hell it is.

When I worked with opium, we harvested the whole plant and pulp the head and stem and then use chemicals to extract the opiates for use in morphine excreta. Opium poppies are in their highest "milk" before ripening and the poppy heads explode to seed, thus we harvest the crop before it is viable for seed retention. That be said, again we didn't have the equipment to harvest, process and store poppy seeds (also I think it's illegal for us to retain the seeds, I didn't check the exact legal stuff, I was quite young when working for the Janaways anyway). When we weren't growing opium we were growing wheat. And again we didn't possess the silo capacity/ or radiators to store and maintain seeds. Let alone the expertise/experience in seed storage. We concentrate on growing good crops, and efficient and effective harvesting.

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