- cross-posted to:
- science@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- science@mander.xyz
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Damn tankies again stealing solarpunk aesthetics! (/s)
Even if you do get this to produce appreciable amounts of light, this seems like a really good way to have these plants spread outside of their designated areas and fuck up wildlife even more than our artificial lighting does already.
Given that these plants would need to devote a significant amount of resources to store the energy in order to produce light, I would expect they would be outcompeted by regular plants that aren’t wasting their energy in the wild. Selection pressures generally favor efficient use of energy.
Your reasoning makes sense but we can’t really be sure until we let their seeds loose in the wild and see how they do. Bioluminescent animals and algae do exist. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be some unforeseen selective benefit that would allow these mutated glowing plants to thrive
Anything could happen obviously, but it’s not really fundamentally different from something evolving naturally either. If there is some benefit to this, we might see a new kind of ecosystem developing around these plants. That’s always a risk with biology.
Good point.
for fuck sakes, no.
These have a dim glow similar to mushrooms, no one is going to light a city with that.
I don’t think there’s any fundamental reason why you couldn’t get plants to produce a stronger glow though.
I think the energy metabolism of any organism would limit the amount of light you can get. I don’t believe any organism (except maybe bacteria with lots of nutrients provided) has that much energy to spare and handle without dying pretty fast.
there’s actually some research on the subject that I linked in the other reply in this thread
Of course there is, you can’t get more energy out than you put in.
Obviously, but that doesn’t mean plants can’t be designed to accumulate energy during the day though photosynthesis and release it at night in form of bioluminescence. There’s actually a whole separate line of research regarding that:
You don’t always need a bright light, lots of cities even cut lights few hours at night (0-5 am) to preserve both energy and dark sky for biodiversity.
Some cities are already using glowing plants, but more for events, there is a start-up that provides this solution since few years
I’ve seen one of those glowing petunias in real life, it’s laughable that glowing plants could illuminate anything like a park or a street.
Don’t get me wrong, it was cool af, but it’s not the future of lighting
It’s not laughable, it is good to have one more option.
As I answered in an other comment : You don’t always need a bright light, lots of cities even cut lights few hours at night (0-5 am) to preserve both energy and dark sky for biodiversity.
Some glowing petunias would be an option to show a path
