We know how plants make oxygen, why can’t we automate that process and not worry about losing plants?
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We can and NASA have recently created oxygen on Mars.
I’d imagine it costs more than a plant does. In addition, plants pick up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which isn’t necessarily replicated with every oxygen producing technique.
Might be more complex effects we rely on plants for, I’ll let smarter posters fill in the gaps.
Why would you need to automate a process that nature already does on its own, unattended and on 100% solar power?
we can force plants to grow faster in high CO2 greenhouses with artificial grow lights 24/7, but then you need to power the lights, concrentrate co2, which need electricity, and no matter how large your greenhouse it will never be close to the size of all the forests on earth
We can, people have already done it. It’s just that plants are a *hell* of a lot better at it than machines are (or likely can ever be), so we may as well just keep the plants around, or replace them. It’ll be a lot cheaper and a lot nicer to look at.
Because doing was would be extremely expensive, probably not worth it (produce more greenhouse gases than we could get rid of once the process has been made useful), and living in a glass, steel and concrete hellscape is not really an appealing reality for most of us.
we can but its expensive as shit.
even if you would be able to do it youd basically have chlorophyll floating around in a synthetic cell, youll also have to add enzymes to maintain the chlorophyll and chloroplasts, and to create more enzymes youll have to add a ribosome and other little organelles.
you created a plant cell, just use a plant cell
a) We’re not exactly running out of oxygen.
b) If we’re trying to remove carbon dioxide, the scale of it is probably about 50,000,000,000 tons a year. If you like more zeros, this is 50,000,000,000,000 kilograms or 110,000,000,000,000 pounds of CO2 a year just to get some progress.
The chemistry is not super difficult but the raw materials and energy is pretty expensive.
It is trivial to do. Run DC electricity to two electrodes in water and you split it into hydrogen and oxygen. There are many different DIY designs in this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85OX6yEwE0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85OX6yEwE0)
The huge problem is that we need a lot of electricity.
Even if we could make all oxygen plants provide another very important function. They produce plant matter that animals including humans eat.
If no more oxygen was produced and there was a magic food source for all living to exit like they do today there is enough oxygen to last 5000 years. For just all humans we talk about half a million years. We also need something that gets rid of all carbon dioxide that would be produced but not used up by plants. In an enclosed space you die of CO2 poisoning not lack of oxygen, the same would be true for eath.
Replicating nature is a terrible plan because nature is not the best at anything, its just good enough and arrived at the end result through a series of random mutations
We can generate oxygen from CO2 easier. NASA has a module on Perseverance for doing this. It takes 300W and generates about 4 liters of oxygen per hour. Your average house plant only makes about 100 mL per hour so a MOXIE is wayyyy better than even a shrub
But we’re not worried about trees for oxygen production, most of that comes from algae in the ocean anyway. We’re worried about trees for biodiversity and erosion. There are lots of things in jungles and deep forests we don’t understand including some plants with medicinal properties we haven’t had a chance to study yet. Losing large amounts of forests would destroy all the other plants and animals that live in there and would expose the area to significant erosion and likely dry it out.
Plants do wayyyy more for us than create oxygen, that’s probably their least important attribute. Their ability to hold large quantities of dirt in place and slowly release moisture back to the air keeps their environments a bit more stable which makes them a bit better for us to live in.
In addition to the other comments about it being expensive as hell, plants do other things. Most of the plants that we want to save are pretty negligible as far as oxygen production is concerned. Most of the oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean, not trees on the ground.
We care about the trees because of the habitats they give to animals, the structure they provide to the ground, and all of the unknown consequences that would happen if they went extinct.
Because science is not a magic and you point at things to solve them like they do in science fiction. Sometimes our technology would allow us to do something if we powered it, but why bother? The sun already powers the world’s oxygenation for us 24/7 at no cost to us except maybe planting more trees and not deforest anymore.
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