By artificially creating plantations or, in other words, afforestation. That’s probably the way forward.
If there’s a way to assess how many trees were cut, per capita, and if we replace at least that much, in about 15 to 30 years, we can hit equilibrium? Not sure if my approach is correct (accounting for the time a plant takes to grow into a full size tree).
If annual afforestation exceeds annual per capita consumption, we may actually reverse the trend? But then again, it would probably take a decade or two?
They’re working on it. But the way it happens in plants is that an entire organism revolves around the process and keeps up with the needs until it can’t anymore and dies. And a lot of that is done on a microscopic scale with a pretty small energy excess which the plant uses to grow. From an engineering standpoint it’s more valid to take lessons from plants then to try to reinvent them. They can teach us a lot about optimal use of light energy.
I’m interested in why the OP thinks we need artificial plants to this rather than just regular plants. What would artificial plants provide that regular plants would not?
Are there any instances where our technological mimicry of biological systems ends up being superior?
Can you imagine the tech it would take to create a seed that you could just toss out your front door into the dirt and a week later there would be a plant there sucking in C02, capturing that sunlight, and spitting out 02?
It’s about theoretical versus actual versus production. Take for instance batteries. Yes we have batteries with layers as thin as one micron. Yes we can make them actually. Can you mass produce it, and make it cheaper than the alternatives? Probably not. Tesla had same philosophy.. it’s easy to make a model car, not easy to mass produce them.
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