At this point we came across an article about using Algae as 3D printer filament. There are plenty of TED talks on the matter that bring up interesting points about the research, progress and sustainability of this bacteria. People have been working since the 1950’s to harvest this into food. Algae can grow up to an exponential rate of double the volume every day. And most impressively, algae is the only plant that has almost every nutrition the human body needs in an almost perfect ratio. So algae proves to be a viable, sustainable and ecological means to solving many of our current sociopolitical global issues, and has growing hype around it, et has not become mainstream yet. Can only speculate Big Oil may have something to do with that.
Jonathan Trent explains his experimentation with growing algae in the most productive manor including this slide in his talk. This circulates algae algae through tubes with a turbine to create movements which increases the speed of cell division. They also pump CO2 into the system to keep feeding the algae and extract the oxygen through the spiral in the centre of the image. Raw dense algae collects at the bottom of this tube and can be pumped out and refined into produce.
To convert this into a currency people could use to began by using cryptocurrency mining as a metaphor, as it would work in a similar way. Users would invest and subscribe to a system and allow they machine to passively work in the background. But rather than earning blockchain money to spend or exchange, it would be algae they could sell for credit or traditional currency.
We began by speculating that the return for growing this algae would be discount on unsustainable products that will spike in value in the future such as petrol and other old based products. This would mean doing good behaviour in the form of growing sustainable materials in return for the privilege to perform unsustainable actions. Similar to taxing the environmentally friendly.
We also began exploring the broader narratives surrounding this type of community, such as oil and meat empires targeting algae cultivators to poison their crop, inspires by the mass genetic extinction in the Channel 4 Series Utopia.
