Huge Vegetables From Outer Space May End World Food Crisis
Wed, May 14, 2008
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Now there’s a headline you don’t see every day and yet, while it’s probably calling back memories of “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” for an entire generation of corrupted American youth, it’s entirely true. The Chinese have begun growing their own version of genetically modified crops–with “modified” meaning “strapped to the top of a long march rocket and blasted into space.
The downside to this approach is that the Chinese don’t actually know what happens to the seeds in space that make them grow to gargantuan sizes on earth. It could be radiation, it could be magnetic fields, it could be the lack of gravity–or it could be something else that we don’t yet know about and have a way to measure. Not that the effects of any of those three things are totally known, either. China doesn’t see this as a risk: their top scientists claim that the seeds can only lose genes in space, and are therefore safer than GM foods with added genetic material. However, the argument seems to have far too much in common with the assertion that “the earth is always warming or cooling, so how do you know where it’s supposed to be?”
Regardless of how, exactly, it works, China is having great success with the program, and has placed 22 provinces under the program in an attempt to ease food costs on the world’s most populous nation. The foods are producing incredible results, with two foot cucumbers, two pound tomatoes, pumpkins that are 10 times their normal size and melons tipping the scales at 160 pounds all regularly produced by the space seeds. Will they join the growing ranks of Chinese exports to the world? And if they do, will they be any safer than the lead-painted toys that were discovered last year? As food prices spiral out of control…anything is possible.
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May 14th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Pihranas put in early-earth environment pods grew to giantism. It may hvae something to do with vibrational interference between the electrical system of a lifeform and the planet or a supplying field.
Life forms also try to make a complete biological ecology circuit. Vegetables are trying to grow to enrich the soil and spread their kind in the space environment. Bacteria become more deadly trying to thrive on humans or other life forms, editing / ‘evolving/devolving’ them more intensely.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Junk science again. And poor reporting that reiterates the dumbest misconception of failing physics students and idiots the world over. To even suggest that lack of gravity caused a change in the seeds betrays the author’s lassitude. Gravity pervades every nook and cranny in the universe. Newton knew this hundreds of years ago. He determined the inverse square law that describes the gravitational pull between any two objects. Every atom in the universe exerts a pull on every other atom, but from a distance the pull’s force approaches negligible values. Nevertheless, an object as large as Earth, or the sun, exerts a phenomenal pull on objects revolving around it. That’s why the moon remains in its orbit. The seeds experienced free-fall, just as astronauts drifting around the cabin of the space shuttle do, or as folks on a falling elevator car would. They are weightless as they fall but gravity still has its impact, obviously, since they are falling toward some celestial body.
May 10th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Is it confirmed that these seeds have different genes? Does the gigantism trait pass on to offspring?
Perhaps they are “safer” than gm plants but there is still the problem of rejecting wild lineages or the diversity of saving seeds. There will be farms that produce only giants and the diverse gene pool will shrink.