Like every other living organisms, we humans require energy to function as well. We need food, water and oxygen to survive. In the stone age, we used to hunt and forage for food to sustain ourselves.
Today, we have tons of options and it's not even about sustaining yourself anymore. It's about pleasing your tastebuds! Anyways, this puts a lot of burden on the environment. We have to cultivate unimaginable amounts of plants and animals to satisfy our hunger.
But what if there was a better way? What if we didn't have to rely on any other organisms at all? Does that sound familiar? That's because this is already happening. With plants.
You might have learned in school about photosynthesis. It's a process by which plants convert water, minerals, carbon dioxide and sunlight into energy. They store that energy in the form of sugar and that's what we depend on for food. But what if we could replicate this process and do it ourselves?
Biohacking Our Way to Self-Sustenance?
We are increasingly getting more advanced with our biohacking capabilities. It is not too far-fetched to think that in the future we might gain the ability to genetically modify ourselves to be able to do photosynthesis.
In theory, that would mean that we could survive based off of water, carbon dioxide, minerals and sunlight. No need to harvest plants or animals at all! The burden that we put on the environment would be gone and we would, in fact, start having a positive impact on it by giving out oxygen. What a thought!
If we achieve this and decide to go this route, we would all be green in colour. That's the price we'd have to pay! We'd also need to be more efficient with photosynthesis than plants which only convert 5%-10% of the sunlight falling on them. That would be necessary to get the 2000-3000 required calories per day for an average human.
So, do you think we should even think about doing this? Maybe someday this could be done but in a way that doesn't change us into green beings or make adjustments where we don't want to. Who knows how any technology unfolds and becomes mainstream! It is something cool to think about though.