Random idea: what if peopl animal advocates try to establish a norm that you don’t eat meat in space? It currently only requires persuading a small amount of people to take a quite low cost action, food in space is already weird, and the norm has a chance of persisting as space faring scales up. Could eventually be established as law, and hopefully expanded to veganism and no insect farming if that becomes less stigmatized.
I don’t have a clear idea here! Something like: most astronauts don’t eat meat --> stuff like insect farming in space never takes off --> instead, an animal friendly protein production zero G technique develops into technological maturity --> hard to compete with later
Or
Most astronauts don’t eat meat --> as more and more people live off Earth, they adopt the norm --> counterfactually much less animal consumption in the future.
That makes sense, thanks for responding. I can see where you’re coming from.
I think early spacefaring will probably be a quite competitive space, since there seems to be a lot of diverse commercial and government interest right now. Because of that, it seems like it may be difficult to create any sort of durable norms around something like food sourcing unless there’s a clear winner on efficiency, which I presume would be arrived at independently of whether it involves animals. This might be weak argument if you expect early spacefaring to be dominated by an individual entity like NASA and if you expect government contracts for things like food in space to not be very competitive.
Maybe something that would make this more concrete is looking at whether there are examples of the lock-in of practices like this in the past, and whether we have reason to believe that additional dynamics would make early spacefaring harder to draw historical comparison to. What do you think?
oh okay I think the misunderstanding was that by “in space” you mean something like “everywhere/on planets that aren’t earth” and not just “in space stations/on spacecraft”
Random idea: what if peopl animal advocates try to establish a norm that you don’t eat meat in space? It currently only requires persuading a small amount of people to take a quite low cost action, food in space is already weird, and the norm has a chance of persisting as space faring scales up. Could eventually be established as law, and hopefully expanded to veganism and no insect farming if that becomes less stigmatized.
Could you talk more about how you think the norm might persist?
I don’t have a clear idea here! Something like: most astronauts don’t eat meat --> stuff like insect farming in space never takes off --> instead, an animal friendly protein production zero G technique develops into technological maturity --> hard to compete with later
Or
Most astronauts don’t eat meat --> as more and more people live off Earth, they adopt the norm --> counterfactually much less animal consumption in the future.
That makes sense, thanks for responding. I can see where you’re coming from.
I think early spacefaring will probably be a quite competitive space, since there seems to be a lot of diverse commercial and government interest right now. Because of that, it seems like it may be difficult to create any sort of durable norms around something like food sourcing unless there’s a clear winner on efficiency, which I presume would be arrived at independently of whether it involves animals. This might be weak argument if you expect early spacefaring to be dominated by an individual entity like NASA and if you expect government contracts for things like food in space to not be very competitive.
Maybe something that would make this more concrete is looking at whether there are examples of the lock-in of practices like this in the past, and whether we have reason to believe that additional dynamics would make early spacefaring harder to draw historical comparison to. What do you think?
I’m probably missing something but why would this be worth doing ?
Because eventually a lot of people might live off Earth, and having a norm against meat eating could reduce animal consumption by a lot.
oh okay I think the misunderstanding was that by “in space” you mean something like “everywhere/on planets that aren’t earth” and not just “in space stations/on spacecraft”