Bioluminescent trees as an alternative to electric lighting(blog.suny.edu) |
Bioluminescent trees as an alternative to electric lighting(blog.suny.edu) |
Let's say that we want to have a glowing forest. The glowing trees will absorb sunlight from a certain area and emit it over the same area with a certain efficiency.
Photosynthesis has an efficiency of between 0.1% and 1%. I don't know what the efficiency of glowing is, so let's assume it's 10%. So your plants will illuminate the area with about 0.01%-0.1% of the intensity of the light which they absorb.
Full daylight is about 100,000 lux, so your forest will be illuminated to somewhere around 10-100 lux, which is somewhere between "twilight" and "a poorly lit room".
It gets even worse if you want your plants to illuminate a larger area than they themselves cover: if you have a plant illuminating (say) 10x more area than it covers (a tree in the middle of an open field, or next to a road), you're down to 1-10 lux, optimistically.
Basically 1kg ATP is 21.8 kilocalories
Call me when someone solves the REAL problem, which is the energy budget needed to make the amount of light people actually want.
That'll probably involve some way to shunt externally-generated electrical power into the tree.
Also, how much light do they give off? All of the images on the post are computer generated. I'd like to see a photo of this actually working.
Consider evergreen grasses that could probably be made to glow, too. Such grass could nicely light up park lanes at night. Slightly glowing evergreen bushes growing along a walkway could help one walk at night.
Also, consider how helpful such a natural illumination would be during a power outage, especially when it happens due to a natural disaster. The light might be faint, but it will help people orient themselves, help rescue helicopters recognize the terrain, etc.
I do wonder about unintended consequences. Invasive glowing trees might wreak havoc on ecosystems, especially on tree dwelling nocturnal creatures. At least they'd be easy to spot :)
They say that within a couple generations, the glowing feature quickly disappears due to natural selection.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2013/jun/0...
Here is their research for bioluminescent trees - http://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Tools/Lighting
If like the other comments note, the impact is lost within a few generations, it's of less risk. However, if that's not true and it starts to spread, we could be looking at a serious problem.
Personally, I don't know of how much benefit this is given the low consumption of LEDs. The trees will need energy from somewhere, so their requirements for soil/nutrients will likely be a lot greater than the current tree population, resulting in need to fertilize/upkeep. This could end up being a lot more expensive than LED light poles using electricity.
Environmental impact from the need for more nutrients/fertilizer could be significant as well.
Lots of questions.
They don't need energy, they just generate it autonomously. Why didn't we think of this earlier? The logic is flawless!
I would instead take advantages of photoautrophic organisms that already are bioluminescent like Dinoflagellate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinoflagellate
They can have a startling effect in large numbers and feed themselves with daylight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence#mediaviewer/Fi...
Some video of their effect
...perhaps not.
This 'designer/architect' seems more like a self-promoter.
There's an entire class of 'designers' who see themselves as gifted idea people, but in fact they lack the scientific literacy to realise why some ideas aren't good engineering.
Real designers do clever stuff that works in reality, not just as a concept in an illustration.
While I'm all for high quality bioengineering as a future trend, I suspect it's quite a bit harder to replace current technology with it than this 'designer' thinks.
And sites like Gizmodo don't bring any critical thinking and just repeat the claims verbatim.
http://gizmodo.com/a-stick-on-speaker-that-uses-your-windows...
The problem is that generating ATP requires sun or sugar in plants (depending on the specific metabolic process involved), and that the total amount of sugar produced during the day as part of photosynthesis is tiny relative to the amount of ATP necessary to fuel the light at night.
Consider that humans burn 100-150 kilos of ATP daily (according to Wikipedia). This is only possible because we are recycling ATP continuously, fueling the recycling process with sugar and oxygen that we consume at rates several orders of magnitude higher than what a 20 year old tree could produce in the same period.
I can't find numbers for peak sugar production in plants, but considering how many maple trees it takes to make a single small container of maple syrup, I think this is a reasonable statement to make for now. I will stand corrected if someone has good numbers. :)
> 116 organizations have called for a moratorium on any release of synthetic organisms. The UN convention on Biological Diversity has urged countries to exercise precaution in any release of synthetic organisms to the environment.
Well if I click on the link I find a very interesting sentence:
> With synthetic biology, instead of swapping existing genes from one species to another (as in “ traditional” genetic engineering), scientists can write entirely new genetic code on a computer, "print" it out and then insert it into living organisms — or even try to create life from scratch.
Swapping a couple genes from one species to another sounds exactly like what they typically do to make a species glow.
And yet after that sentence they seem to change their definition of synthetic biology to include both those categories.
It tastes like doublespeak to me. "Companies are doing not just X but Y! Ban Y! (also we defined Y to include X)"
Source: I work in a molecular biology lab.
Anyone who's had to muck with a giant piece of spaghetti code realizes how dicey it is to start changing things you don't really understand.
Projects like this and maybe tens of thousands of others in the future could interact to create strange changes in the wild that no one would be able to completely explain.
Maybe I'm just too much of a Luddite, or just an idiot (OK, I'm a complete fucking idiot), but projects like this and the thousands that are sure to follow give me an impending sense of doom.
