u/Electric_Octopus_

Most vertical farming ideas focus on warehouses, rooftops, or purpose built indoor facilities, right?

But I’ve been looking into a stranger possibility... repurposing abandoned mines, tunnels, bunkers, and other subterranean voids into controlled environment farms...

So the basic argument from my understanding is that underground spaces already have some of the things indoor agriculture spends a fortune trying to create:

• stable temperatures
• insulation from surface heat and cold
• protection from storms, drought, wildfire, and pests
• large enclosed volumes
• possible access to old industrial power, water, and transport infrastructure
• physical security
• proximity to former industrial towns that may need new economic uses

Then if you pair that with hydroponics, aeroponics, LED lighting, robotics, climate control, and renewable power, and you basically can turn dead industrial infrastructure into food infrastructure.

The potential upside is obvious - less water, less land, more local production, fewer climate disruptions, and potentially year-round growing in places where surface agriculture is becoming less reliable....

if I understand this correctly, so you cool ordinary air to around −196°C and it turns into liquid.

Store it in insulated tanks.

When electricity is needed, warm it back up, let it expand, and use that expansion to spin a turbine.

that sounds like sci-fi, but the strange part is how unsci-fi it apparently is. The components already exist across the LNG, industrial gas, and turbine industries...

And the pitch seems to not be “better than lithium-ion at everything.” cause It isn’t. Lithium wins short-duration storage by a bunch...

But for longer gaps like overnight, multi-day wind droughts, renewable curtailment events, lithium seems to get brutally expensive because adding duration means adding more battery cells...

Liquid air mostly adds tanks, right?

Could the future of renewable energy storage be less about exotic batteries and more about industrial plumbing at very cold temperatures?

Where does this idea break: efficiency, cost, maintenance, siting, grid economics, or something else?

Not a trade alert here, more of a portfolio-construction question...

Ive been looking at neutral iron condors and realized I was treating ticker count as diversification when what really matters is correlation...

If a condor book is concentrated in SPY/QQQ/mega-cap tech and the individual trades can all start near flat delta and still turn into a big short-put book during a selloff.

The test case that changed my view was a small three-condor book that started around -0.15 portfolio delta and swung to about -1.95 after a synchronized move in SPY, QQQ, and AAPL... That feels like the real hidden risk...

For those of you who trade condors systematically:

- what correlation threshold makes you treat positions as one cluster?

- do you decrease size when VIX gets above a certain level?

- what’s your preferred way to hedge book-level downside without destroying edge?

What increasingly strikes me is that the strongest near-term aging interventions may not be one grand therapy.

They may be layered: targeted senolysis, immune surveillance enhancement, tissue repair, and maybe partial reprogramming later on, right?

That is less dramatic than “immortality,” but arguably more plausible.

If that’s the path, then the real milestone isn’t “curing aging” in one shot; it’s building therapies that keep pushing back multiple aging drivers faster than damage accumulates.

Curious whether that feels like a realistic transhumanist path or just a slower version of the same old promises.

I’ve been researching MES — basically engineered microbes using electricity + CO₂ to produce chemicals, fuels, and materials — and the cost curve is getting interesting.

The big question: if MES can hit cost parity with traditional chemistry at mid-sized industrial scale, does this become a real manufacturing disruption instead of just another climate-tech science project?

Curious what people here think: is this viable industrial biotech, or another overhyped lab-to-market story?

The PipeLine