On salmon and future

There's a webcomic I read regularly called Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler. I was a Sci-Fi fan from my childhood, having read most of the classics (Asimov, Clarke, Niven...), so when in 2005 I stumbled upon this comic – purely by accident, just because it's name sounded funny – I was immersed in it, reading several years' worth of archives non-stop (Ok, I did sleep for some hours... but not very long) and was a loyal reader ever since.

So today I went for my regular dose of Schlock goodness... and Howard had posted some news. Apparently he made not one, but two predictions of the future which are becoming reality right now. One about hologram pop bands is somewhat expected – after all, you can always trust the Japanese to come up with some crazy stuff. But the other one...The other one was about genetically-engineered salmon. And this one is, in my opinion, much more important. Talking about sustainable development and lowering environmental impact is good until you consider the sheer mass of humanity on Earth. And every one of those human beings needs food, clothing, transportation and many other things. But traditional crops and power sources can go only that far, and I'm afraid we are nearing the limits of what we can get from them. To go any further we need to find some other means of providing food for all these people and power to their homes. And we just can't do it without GMO - be it GM food crops or bacteria to produce biofuel more efficiently.

You can ask: What it has to do with the GM salmon? Why, I see it as a way to save the salmon in Russian rivers, for example. Now it is clear that there's no way to stop poachers using traditional means. They outnumber and outgun fishing inspectors, they have powerful speedboats, they have bribed officials... The only way to stop them is to make their business unprofitable. GM fish grown at the farms will do just that. But to make that happen people around the world will have to stop quivering from terror at the mere mention of GM food or animals. Sadly, it's not the case now. Just last month there was a great big scare in UK when some milk from the cloned cow and meat from the cloned bull was sold. See these articles from BBC, for example: 1, 2, 3 and 4. To be precise, the milk wasn't even from the clone - it was from the offspring of the cloned cow. But the people were scared all the same, as if cloning somehow may produce some "evil twin" of the animal cloned.

As I see it, cloning allows farmers to improve their livestock. Ultimately it means that the same number of cows will produce more milk and meat. Which, in turn, will allow for feeding more people without increasing carbon footprint. And the cloned animal is not even genetically engineered, it's basically a "carbon copy". So I'm afraid to think what people and governments start shouting when they start selling that GM salmon ("OMG! It's GMO! It must be dangerous because it was made by those mad-scientist weirdo types and we don't understand anything about it! Ban it, jail the scientists now!"). So I guess China will get ahead of the West in this field pretty soon – when you have 1,5 billion people you just have to feed them, and they are not scared of GM food here...