Saving Half the World

In the movie Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos infamously snaps his fingers and (spoiler alert!) half of the life in the universe dies. Thanks a lot, Thanos!

There’s one of those lame, boring processes that I want to tell you about today, but instead of starting in on the process itself, I’m just going to say that it’s like the inverse of what Thanos did, but only for human beings.

The Haber-Bosch Process even has a boring name—maybe Reverse Infinity Snap was taken already—but this incredibly important process gives life to perhaps half of the people alive today.

For centuries, farmers have observed that rotating crops produced much better results than monocropping (growing the same crop in the same place for many years in a row). By the 19th century, the principle that crop growth is limited by the availability of the nutrient in shortest supply was well understood, and this nutrient most often turned out to be nitrogen.

Meanwhile, by the late 19th century, it became evident that a growi…