One huge benefit of cultivated meat will eventually be the ability to custom design meat. Evolution has optimized muscle tissue for the animal's survival, not for the taste preferences of people who kill the animal and eat it. (That might actually be selected against.) All sorts of factors figure into taste -- muscle fiber orientation, length, marbling of fat, etc. That's why people have preferences for different cuts of meat. But I presume that all of that could be custom designed and probably augmented. Why not use some alternative fat instead of cow fat in beef? Marble it differently, depending on how you cook it. Or no fat at all? Have largely parallel muscle fiber orientation, with 12% crossing fibers. Maybe 23%. Maybe 75%, just to have a crazy steak. Go for it -- the possibilities are endless. Once all these design options become feasible, I could imagine master chefs custom designing meat. Sure, many people now think they would try it (because it is novel) but not regularly eat it (because it is weird and maybe a little icky), but if it cheaper, customizable, tastes better, and endorsed by celebrities, it will presumably catch on. Although it is an unfortunate metaphor here, if you build a better mousetrap . . . .
BTW, "cultivated meat" or "cultured meat" something similar is probably a better term than "lab-grown meat" since it eventually will be grown in some sort of production facility, not a lab.
"No, the worst thing would be if factory farms stuck around and spread. If their hellish, cancerous rot spread throughout the galaxy—so that their cries would ring out on a quadrillion worlds, for a trillion years. The worst thing would be if we did this entirely unnecessarily, for no benefit. At that point, even an all merciful God could not resist obliterating creation.
At that point, we wouldn’t just have built hell, but filled the universe with it—bringing screams to a thousand silent worlds. We would have brought those dark satanic mills through the void of space, so that no reachable world was free from vulnerable creatures crying out in pain. At that point, there would be some deep sense in which the fight for good was lost, where evil ultimately triumphed, on a cosmic scale."
This reminds me of a quote from a CS Lewis piece, "Religion and Rocketry". I don't have it with me, so I'm quoting from memory, but he's talking about the hypothetical of humanity becoming an empire that exploits aliens, and says that this would make "the night sky an object that no good man could look at without feelings of pity and burning shame."
I put something like 1% on this scenario playing out in a meaningful way, almost all of which is based on deep uncertainty about how weird the future could be rather than there being an systematic reason to expect this. In a post-TAI future, the opportunity cost of terraforming worlds for meat creatures would just be stupidly high in real terms.
And at 1%, it falls way behind other longtermist interventions in terms of priority, plus the grounding in deep uncertainty makes it harder to predict where the promising levers are. I agree that the eradication of factory farming in rich countries would be close to sufficient to avoid these weird worlds, but it achieving that seems intractable on most timelines to TAI.
If the future is deeply weird, why would the perpetuation factory farming be possible via terraforming rather than a dozen other weird and actually cost efficient ways of farming animals that we can’t even imagine?
It would be very strange if we were able and willing to re-engineer factory farming around the need for earth-like conditions, but were unable/unwilling to engineer around the need for conscious, suffering minds to be involved.
We already know how to factory farm animals, and there are multi-billion dollar companies who would likely be happy to submit proposals to experiment with the most efficient factory farming methods in space. Biodomes are cheaper and much more feasible than terraforming a whole planet. We also know how biodomes can fail on earth (biosphere2). All attempts to make large space habitats work for humans would also make those habitats work for other non-humans.
We don’t know how to mass manufacture cultivated meat, let alone how to do that off planet. There is no institutional capital or 100-ish years of accumulated knowledge behind cultivated meat.
So, doesn’t seem that crazy that AI-powered R&D will be cheaper for the thing we know a lot about vs. the thing that is still a moonshot *on earth.*
this POV is not really internalizing the technology level for even one step of interstellar colonization, much less "the entirety of the future":
-growing whole animals from scratch isn't the most efficient way to produce a given type of food
-humans eating food and digesting it with legacy bioguts aren't the most efficient way to do minds
so:
"a century of accumulated 20th century knowledge about farming" is just totally irrelevant, like a forager talking about how centuries of accumulated wisdom regarding finding wild plants probably means the people of the future will always find wild plants too. what could be better than that?
I agree, but surely there are futures where the singularity never happens or is sufficiently delayed? If yes, there could be hinge-y moments that lengthen how long factory farming survives. I would rather that we think carefully to ensure a future with less decades/centuries of factory farming, instead of hand wavy reasoning.
that's true but irrelevant to "factory farming spreading to quadrillions of worlds over trillions of years" (sic), which was the scenario described in the OP. if you agree the OP is nonsense then fair enough
I would be shocked if physically farming animals as we know it continued into the stars. It seems like it would surely be more efficient to take the brains out of the animals and engineer them to be colossal mounds of flesh, or do any other method to reduce the resource use.
Also lol at the hyperbole that intergalactic factory farming would make the problem of evil too hard to beat.
Small pedantic correction: "With lab-grown meat...Have we invested billions of dollar trying to produce it?"
Assuming you're defining "we" as the whole world, many billions of dollars have been spent on alternative meat R&D. My understanding is that least $3 billion has been spent by just one key organization.
Hey, how do you want frontier model companies to proceed to prevent this sort of outcome? It does seem uniquely dystopian and disasterous. We should not play out our timeline like a horror movie.
I don't think I agree with the premise that colonizing other planets by default leads to factory farming on other planets. Animal farming is just a much less efficient way of producing calories than plant farming. The first colonies on a new planet will feed themselves entirely on plants, not for moral reasons, but because their resources will be extremely limited and you can feed more people more efficiently that way. Once the first generation on a new planet grows up vegetarian, that will be the culture of that world which will be the default from that point forward.
The thing is that evolution is even more brutal and horrific than factory farming, and we have a chance of ending that horror, whereas if we obliterate creation now we just set things up for millions of years of evolution again
The push to ban it is obviously a move on the part of the meat industry to head off potential competition. That would be easier to oppose if we hadn’t normalized the idea that using state power for competitive advantage was acceptable.
My concern is that if people like BB get their way, it could become mandatory. Even if the product is inferior.
This is why instead of colonizing the stars with humans who need to be fed, we need to just convert all the matter of the universe into hedonium. No matter how you look at it, populating the universe with biologically embodied humans rather than optimized conscious substrate is suboptimal.
Insightful piece! I'd add that there are already lots of research projects working on bringing factory farming to space.
The Lunar Hatch project is working on bringing fish factory farming to space and this article says Chinese researchers are too: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/28/sea-bass-in-space-lunar-hatch-fish-farms-moon-aquaculture
The European Space Agency is working on bringing insect factory farming to space: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Insects_on_the_space_menu
One huge benefit of cultivated meat will eventually be the ability to custom design meat. Evolution has optimized muscle tissue for the animal's survival, not for the taste preferences of people who kill the animal and eat it. (That might actually be selected against.) All sorts of factors figure into taste -- muscle fiber orientation, length, marbling of fat, etc. That's why people have preferences for different cuts of meat. But I presume that all of that could be custom designed and probably augmented. Why not use some alternative fat instead of cow fat in beef? Marble it differently, depending on how you cook it. Or no fat at all? Have largely parallel muscle fiber orientation, with 12% crossing fibers. Maybe 23%. Maybe 75%, just to have a crazy steak. Go for it -- the possibilities are endless. Once all these design options become feasible, I could imagine master chefs custom designing meat. Sure, many people now think they would try it (because it is novel) but not regularly eat it (because it is weird and maybe a little icky), but if it cheaper, customizable, tastes better, and endorsed by celebrities, it will presumably catch on. Although it is an unfortunate metaphor here, if you build a better mousetrap . . . .
BTW, "cultivated meat" or "cultured meat" something similar is probably a better term than "lab-grown meat" since it eventually will be grown in some sort of production facility, not a lab.
I tried for a brief moment on Twitter years ago to get the term to be ‘culture meat’. You know, so it sounds fancy. Maybe one day.
"No, the worst thing would be if factory farms stuck around and spread. If their hellish, cancerous rot spread throughout the galaxy—so that their cries would ring out on a quadrillion worlds, for a trillion years. The worst thing would be if we did this entirely unnecessarily, for no benefit. At that point, even an all merciful God could not resist obliterating creation.
At that point, we wouldn’t just have built hell, but filled the universe with it—bringing screams to a thousand silent worlds. We would have brought those dark satanic mills through the void of space, so that no reachable world was free from vulnerable creatures crying out in pain. At that point, there would be some deep sense in which the fight for good was lost, where evil ultimately triumphed, on a cosmic scale."
This reminds me of a quote from a CS Lewis piece, "Religion and Rocketry". I don't have it with me, so I'm quoting from memory, but he's talking about the hypothetical of humanity becoming an empire that exploits aliens, and says that this would make "the night sky an object that no good man could look at without feelings of pity and burning shame."
I put something like 1% on this scenario playing out in a meaningful way, almost all of which is based on deep uncertainty about how weird the future could be rather than there being an systematic reason to expect this. In a post-TAI future, the opportunity cost of terraforming worlds for meat creatures would just be stupidly high in real terms.
And at 1%, it falls way behind other longtermist interventions in terms of priority, plus the grounding in deep uncertainty makes it harder to predict where the promising levers are. I agree that the eradication of factory farming in rich countries would be close to sufficient to avoid these weird worlds, but it achieving that seems intractable on most timelines to TAI.
If the future is deeply weird, why would the perpetuation factory farming be possible via terraforming rather than a dozen other weird and actually cost efficient ways of farming animals that we can’t even imagine?
It would be very strange if we were able and willing to re-engineer factory farming around the need for earth-like conditions, but were unable/unwilling to engineer around the need for conscious, suffering minds to be involved.
Doesn’t seem that strange to me tbh.
We already know how to factory farm animals, and there are multi-billion dollar companies who would likely be happy to submit proposals to experiment with the most efficient factory farming methods in space. Biodomes are cheaper and much more feasible than terraforming a whole planet. We also know how biodomes can fail on earth (biosphere2). All attempts to make large space habitats work for humans would also make those habitats work for other non-humans.
We don’t know how to mass manufacture cultivated meat, let alone how to do that off planet. There is no institutional capital or 100-ish years of accumulated knowledge behind cultivated meat.
So, doesn’t seem that crazy that AI-powered R&D will be cheaper for the thing we know a lot about vs. the thing that is still a moonshot *on earth.*
?
this POV is not really internalizing the technology level for even one step of interstellar colonization, much less "the entirety of the future":
-growing whole animals from scratch isn't the most efficient way to produce a given type of food
-humans eating food and digesting it with legacy bioguts aren't the most efficient way to do minds
so:
"a century of accumulated 20th century knowledge about farming" is just totally irrelevant, like a forager talking about how centuries of accumulated wisdom regarding finding wild plants probably means the people of the future will always find wild plants too. what could be better than that?
I agree, but surely there are futures where the singularity never happens or is sufficiently delayed? If yes, there could be hinge-y moments that lengthen how long factory farming survives. I would rather that we think carefully to ensure a future with less decades/centuries of factory farming, instead of hand wavy reasoning.
that's true but irrelevant to "factory farming spreading to quadrillions of worlds over trillions of years" (sic), which was the scenario described in the OP. if you agree the OP is nonsense then fair enough
I would be shocked if physically farming animals as we know it continued into the stars. It seems like it would surely be more efficient to take the brains out of the animals and engineer them to be colossal mounds of flesh, or do any other method to reduce the resource use.
Also lol at the hyperbole that intergalactic factory farming would make the problem of evil too hard to beat.
this might be worth a rebuttal:
https://map.simonsarris.com/p/veganism-and-moral-intuitions?
Small pedantic correction: "With lab-grown meat...Have we invested billions of dollar trying to produce it?"
Assuming you're defining "we" as the whole world, many billions of dollars have been spent on alternative meat R&D. My understanding is that least $3 billion has been spent by just one key organization.
Hey, how do you want frontier model companies to proceed to prevent this sort of outcome? It does seem uniquely dystopian and disasterous. We should not play out our timeline like a horror movie.
I don't think I agree with the premise that colonizing other planets by default leads to factory farming on other planets. Animal farming is just a much less efficient way of producing calories than plant farming. The first colonies on a new planet will feed themselves entirely on plants, not for moral reasons, but because their resources will be extremely limited and you can feed more people more efficiently that way. Once the first generation on a new planet grows up vegetarian, that will be the culture of that world which will be the default from that point forward.
I'm in complete agreement with you about lab grown meat, but doesn't the combination of
> At that point, even an all merciful God could not resist obliterating creation.
and
> My guess is that it’s about a coinflip whether factory farming spreads to the stars—whether hell goes intergalactic.
mean that a fanatical utilitarian should support obliterating creation *right now*?
I was being poetic not making precise theological claims.
The thing is that evolution is even more brutal and horrific than factory farming, and we have a chance of ending that horror, whereas if we obliterate creation now we just set things up for millions of years of evolution again
The push to ban it is obviously a move on the part of the meat industry to head off potential competition. That would be easier to oppose if we hadn’t normalized the idea that using state power for competitive advantage was acceptable.
My concern is that if people like BB get their way, it could become mandatory. Even if the product is inferior.
This is why instead of colonizing the stars with humans who need to be fed, we need to just convert all the matter of the universe into hedonium. No matter how you look at it, populating the universe with biologically embodied humans rather than optimized conscious substrate is suboptimal.
I dropped everything again to quickly comment and up the odds of u seeing this question.
Cuz I'm really curious how eschatology factors in to the long-termist calculations of a theist like you?
In plain English:
Most fellow theists believe that God already predestined the big picture and there's little that individuals can do to change God's mind.
So instead they largely concern themselves with the salvation of themselves and the beings around them.
So if u get a chance could u plz lmk why you diverge from most thiests on this issue?