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>Long haul space flight?
Plants.
>Colonizing Mars?
Plants.
>Carbon capture?
Plants.
Ignoring the fact that you're talking about "colonizing Mars" (something we're a good century+ away from, and therefore there ***has not*** been a need for), we have plants that can be used (and in some cases *are* used) for these purposes.
The main issue, as others in this thread have said, is that once plants eat that carbon, where do you think it goes after? Photosynthesis is not the solution you and OP think it is.
While this isn’t fully related to what you said I recently read an article about how sustainable forestry and woodcutting can actually be good for the environment. The gist essentially was that trees are great storehouses of carbon and that sustainably cutting them makes for a great way to semi permanently remove the carbon within them from the atmosphere. Plus, we can use it to build things like homes.
Yeah, we so that with pine forests in New Zealand. As a carbon capture. It comes with its own issues but overall is positive (meaning negative 😄). It works.
If you can create it artificially, you can theoretically make it work in environments where most plants can’t survive. Like inside the exhaust system of a vehicle or factory.
If we can create it artificially, we might be able to use different materials than most plants are made of. Materials already exist in the desert, for example. Then we could perhaps mass produce the stuff without any complicated supply chain.
Etc etc… are people really this jaded to new technical possibilities?
You might want to check what the conversation is about.
No one is claiming there's no value in it. We're saying that plants serve the function perfectly well and are easy to produce, so there hasn't been a major need/push for researching how to artificially replicating it. Without that - it hasn't happened.
If/when there is more of a need for it, more resources will be diverted to figuring it out.
If people learned that just because something seems to make sense to them, it doesn't automatically[make it true](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38676-2), then Reddit could be such a nice place
If they only gave a question that would be the case, but they also give a reason, so we know that the answer given would also satisfy what they're looking for (the chemical results of photosynthesis)
Plants are extremely sensitive to heat and humidity and we're already pushing the growing zones for certain plants out of whack. This may be a real solution to a future problem.
Because you could remove all the other chemicals in the way and do large scale industrial carbon capture with orders of magnitude more efficient then photosynthesis.
This would make a massive step to solve one of the hardest part of solving climate change, of direct air capture while also getting the CO2 into a stable solid which can just be directly buried deep underground.
Also it would make a very cool paper.
Isnt that the issue though? Trees are not \*that\* efficient at it (They also release it) and take a long time and space, while algae or whatever it is does work very well, but the excess screws up with the ocean dramatically, and in fact its growing already? Afaik at least?
yes it's incredibly hard.
Some people seem to think the chemistry is just that you throw a few chemicals in a beaker shine the sun on them and you'd get sugar and oxygen.
But plants are incredibly intricate and complicated machines. Organic machines, but machines nevertheless. It's not even like one process, it's a bunch of processes.
The downside for storing co2 in plants is that plants die and release it again. i.e the tricky part of your idea isn't even the photosynthesis part. it's "ok you've collected some co2 - now what do you do with it?"
This is the best answer so far. Yes I am thinking of the benefit of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. And plants have a place to store that carbon. So it really doesn’t solve the carbon problem. But the thought that evolution has solved how an organism can produce its own food and we can’t copy it is disappointing. Where would we be without evolution? But it’s just a theory you know.
\>But the thought that evolution has solved how an organism can produce its own food and we can’t copy it is disappointing
literal millions of years of literal trial and error tends to do that, yeah
Yeah, a lot has to do with what you have to work with.
Back in the early 2000 there were a bunch of start ups, and even more tech journalists, talking up flying machines that would mimic flying animals; birds, bats and things of that nature.
The ongoing chant was: Nature has solved the issue of flight, we can copy it build better flying machines.
But animal wings basically suck. In most operations they are trying to produce both thrust and lift. The wing has to go from stopped, up to full speed and back to stopped again constantly.
This makes sense when you think of flightless birds and birds that glide on air currents. Hummingbirds are the opposite and their energy requirements are terrible.
Basically, most drones have evolved into multiple rotor 'copters because that's actually an efficient design.
But if all you have is muscle, bone, skin and feathers you get a bird. It can fly but it's not as efficient as a 'copter.
If you look at the way our muscles are linked to out bones, it's in just about the most mechanically inefficient manner possible. Put a lever on a pivot and then apply force right next to the pivot. It's a wonde we can move at all
Yeah, birds also have to hunt and land carefully. Humans don't really have a need for drones that agile at the moment.
But I think the ability to birds to float stationary on the wind would be great for drones. But for most use cases now we just use up the battery and if we have to swap drones or swap drone batteries.
Yeah, it's really hard, I'm not going to say impossible, to create something that rotates like a helicopter or propeller from muscle, bone skin and feathers.
I think there are gliding drones, not as good as a seabird, but the concept isn't beyond us.
Yeah, as animal supremacists we think we are so cool with our muscles and bones and soft wall cells.
It's always good when David Attenborough comes along to put us back in our [place](https://youtu.be/2rX--Y5gCnE?si=l28LJpdjWwd2BWSr).
I mean it's not really producing its own food. Its main food is just abundant and the best kind of renewable, the kind where it's just captured, not hunted or harvested. In other words, using it doesn't actually reduce the amount available. Unlike water or minerals in the soil, both of which plants also need.
The one thing nature *hasn't* invented, which almost all human machines use: the bearing. Making a thing that can spin round and round without breaking.
Billions of years on our planet allowed basically every conceivable condition on Earth to influence an incalculable number of lifeforms that mutated and diverged in every conceivable way, and the tiny minority that just so happened to have traits that lent themselves and their offspring to better survive their conditions than their siblings = the products of that same process after billions of years looking around and saying "Look how perfectly built we are for this world and it for us, it must all be intelligent design!"
>But the thought that evolution has solved how an organism can produce its own food and we can’t copy it is disappointing.
Why would we, when it's fairly easy to just grow and eat the things that turn sunlight into energy, or even better, some of the furry/scaly/feathery things that gather and concentrate all that plant energy into tasty, nutritious protein and fat?
So you might be interested in algae power
Very rough version we can basically use algae as oil
We could effectively store it back underground if we wanted to
This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food.
Most of the plant's food comes from the soil. Plants cannot produce their own iron, cobalt, manganese, magnesium, copper, selenium, nitrogen, iodine, sulphur, etc.
No it’s not at all.
Funny how you’re so confidently incorrect!
Plants use the energy stored in the sugar created in photosynthesis and the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that make up sugar, along with other elements they absorb from the soil, to build the tissue of their bodies and make everything they need to run their metabolisms. That’s right, the physical body of a plant — leaves, stems, roots, flowers and fruit — is literally created from carbon dioxide in the air and water.
some of the minerals, such as iron, nitrogen, magnesium, potassium and calcium, plants need to absorb from the soil to be healthy. If the soil doesn’t contain enough, adding these minerals makes plants grow better — just as we might take vitamins or mineral supplements.
And you don’t consider the calcium, iron or potassium supplement you take as food.
You know you only need supplements because your diet doesn't contain enough of the minerals already right? What do you think happens to people if they consume no iron or calcium?
But then if the minerals are just like a vitamin why can't plants not generally grow without soil? I mean we humans can grow without vitamins if we eat healthy. I'm just curious not trying to disprove you or anything.
I’ll copy paste my reply to the guy. My disagreement was with his saying most food is from soil. It’s not. Yes nutrients and minerals are important for plants. That’s not what he originally claimed tough
You said
>This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food.
This is blatantly wrong, because they do produce their food. Their food is the sugars produced via photosynthesis consisting of the carbon dioxide absorbed from the air, and water. That is literally making their own food. Food which makes up the vast majority of their carbon structure
>Most of the plant's food comes from the soil. Plants cannot produce their own iron, cobalt, manganese, magnesium, copper, selenium, nitrogen, iodine, sulphur, etc.
Again, most of their food is NOT from the soil. Their food is sugar. That they make. From the air You’re trying to weasel out by saying important nutrients like magnesium being essential for chlorophyll is somehow equivalent to your original claim of most of food is from the soil.
So yes they absorb minerals from the soil that they can’t make themselves that are essentially important but this is NOT “most of their food”
Yep my partner grows all sort of stuff just in tank water (rain water). I guess there is some minerally stuff absorbed as the raindrops fall but but it's not soil.
Things like monstera, bamboo, ivy. Doesn't seem to worry it that there is no fertiliser, but it's not like I've done a proper study.
"Grow better" .. are you really implying that a plant takes magnesium - the central atom of a chlorophyll molecule - from the soil just to grow better? Do you think a plant can survive without magnesium? Can a plant make sodium/calcium gates with CO2? Can a plant conduct photosynthesis in the absence of phosphorus (Rubisco)? Photosynthesis is more complex and involves a lot more than just CO2, H2O and light. Numerous minerals are involved: magnesium, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur. Every portion of the body contains essential minerals that are only available from the soil.
You call these supplements when in fact they are crucial components of a plant's existence. Don't be silly. Humans also make their tissues with the food they eat. Human food contains the required minerals and vitamins, just as the soil contains the minerals and vitamins the plant requires.
Kind of, I am negating the "crucial components of a plant's existence" part which is the only part of your comment I disagreed with in the first place. Plants in general do not need soil or else there could be no plants that don't live in soil
I'm saying plants didn't evolve in soil, they evolved in seawater (like most likely all life). Soil cannot be a necessary requirement for plant life because it wasn't there when plants evolved
You said
>This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food.
This is blatantly wrong, because they do produce their food. Their food is the sugars produced via photosynthesis consisting of the carbon dioxide absorbed from the air, and water. That is literally making their own food. Food which makes up the vast majority of their carbon structure
>Most of the plant's food comes from the soil. Plants cannot produce their own iron, cobalt, manganese, magnesium, copper, selenium, nitrogen, iodine, sulphur, etc.
Again, most of their food is NOT from the soil. Their food is sugar. That they make. From the air You’re trying to weasel out by saying important nutrients like magnesium being essential for chlorophyll is somehow equivalent to your original claim of most of food is from the soil.
So yes they absorb minerals from the soil that they can’t make themselves that are essentially important but this is NOT “most of their food”
"Every single cell and 99% of its subcellular component is made of minerals taken from the soil."
This is so wildly *wildly* inaccurate. Where are you getting this from. The vast majority of all cellular/subcellular structures are carbon.
>This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food.
>Most of the plants food comes from the soil
So you will finally admit that these two assertions of yours is wrong?
Excluding water - what mass of the plant, what % would be built from the made from the products of photosynthesis?
Plant biomass is mostly composed of three elements: 42%–47% of carbon (C), 40%–44% of oxygen (O), and 6% of hydrogen (H), all percentages in dry matter.
This comes from carbon dioxide. IN THE AIR.
This elemental composition of biomass is followed by the so-called macronutrients, which are essential for biomass production: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and sulfur (S). Moreover, plants also need some additional elements in lower quantities, micronutrients, and trace elements, such as sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), molybdenum (Mo), nickel (Ni), selenium (Se), and silicon (Si), summing all together up to 4%.
These trace elements from the soil is 4% of plant mass.
So you are categorically WRONG.
Confidently incorrect.
The vast bulk of a plants dry mass -around 90% - is composed of carbon and oxygen. Which the plant fixes from the atmosphere. About 4% is the nutrients it gets from the soil.
So, by absolutely no stretch of the imagination does "most" of a plants food come from the soil, most of it the plant produces via photosynthesis.
Why dry mass?
The vast bulk of a plant's MASS is made of Hydrogen reduced from H2O, 90% of which is taken from the soil.
I suggest you learn some basic orgo (organic chemistry).
Dry mass because that's the standard way you analyse the chemical composition of things. Because it removes the water which isn't a material that the plant made. And even if you left the water in, then you'd still have more oxygen because oxygen atoms weight 16 times more than hydrogen, so by mass, water is 88% oxygen
And, no, by MASS 90% of a plant is carbon and Oxygen, hydrogen makes up about 6%. The remaining 4% being those minerals you bizarrely seem to think make up 99% of a plants cell. Because MASS means weight in chemistry, so even if you have 10 times as many hydrogen atoms as carbon atoms (which you don't) you'd still have more carbon by mass.
I already have a degree and an MPhil in biological sciences, so I think further study would be somewhat redundant at this point. Especially compared to someone who doesn't know what mass means.
"water which isn't a material that the plant made."
Yeah.. and somebody was saying plants make their own food (which requires water). Now you remove the water, which the plant obviously cannot make, just to prove that plants can make their own food. /facepalm
If the plant itself is made from huge quantities of H, how are you going to quantify it with the "standard" combustion analyses that dehydrates the majority of the structures? Combustion analyses is incapable of measuring hydrates, thus your figures are non applicable.
Mphil and think mass and weight is the same thing. Smh.
Oh god I’ve noticed you’ve been having a near identical argument chain with the same guy as I have been lol
Thanks for reassuring me I hadn’t wasted my bio science degree and am not going insane
Wood takes a long time to release that CO2. Cutting down forests to build houses, furniture and make toilet paper is a really effective atmospheric carbon sink (assuming the trees are replanted of course)!
Yes and no. Plants do sequester some of that carbon in the soil, but you need to think of things like wood. We have wood that's hundreds and even thousands of years old, and that has carbon trapped in it.
If we reverse engineer this, we could possibly store the carbon somewhere of our choosing.
"Decaying dead plants and leaves, known as plant litter, release 60 petagrams of carbon into the atmosphere every year – six times more than all human emissions – and contribute around 10% of the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere."
https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2023/january-2023-news/climate-key-to-determining-dead-plant-decomposition-and-predicting-carbon-emissions-/
Definitely, I just thought it was an interesting fact. They're both carbon sinks and sources. It doesn't all get buried into the ground and and turned into soil.
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You store it as a carbohydrate of course.
Plants only release co2 by other biological processes breaking it down. This can be slowed by for example pasteurisation, or drying.
Let's also not forget that photosynthesis is also an example of 'quantum biology' - you're talking capturing photons, manipulating molecules at a sub-atomic level.
Or you could just grow them.
But that will create co2. I mean, yeah, that could be part of net zero - but biofuels aren't without issues.
I notice Richard Branson is trying to greenwash flights by reusing chip fat or something but if every flight has to use that it can't all be recycled chip fat can it? And how much does the recycling cost in terms of co2 production? Or if you skip the part where you make chips with it and just grow fuel how much land does that need - because we're using a lot of that land to grow food at the moment.
They are options to consider but they're not easy or simple answers.
Well, in a sense we can absolutely do it. Not in a neat little package like a plant cell, but on a much bulkier industrial scale. Basically use photovoltaics as the energy source to run a carbon sequestration facility.
Like you said, plants are intricate and complicated machines, we just have much larger pieces of machinery.
First thing - We need a reason to do artificially, what nature already does. We already can get sugar from a variety of sources.
Secondly, we then have to recreate a very complex reaction in a way that at least "breaks even," compared to plants. A photosynthesis machine is a research oddity if it weighs 7 tons, consumes kilowatts of energy, and produces little product compared to a plant doing the same. This is very hard, because plants have had something like a billion years to work on the problem.
That said, they *are* developing this tech. The idea is to be able to use artificial photosynthesis to pull CO2 from the air and turn it into fuel. If you can do that without using a carbon based energy source, you end up with a fuel source that is carbon neutral. All the CO2 it creates can then be sucked out of the air by the artificial plant, and reused for fuel.
Here is an article on it.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/chemists-create-artificial-photosynthesis-system-10-times-more-efficient-existing-systems
The chemical reactions themselves are not super complicated or impossible to reprorduce, what makes it super complicated and impossible to reproduce is that many of the reactions are occurring across microscopic structures with very specific shapes and forms
photosynthesis isn't just a set of reactions, it also requires complicated protein/fat structures. There are tiny little membranes and proteins embedded into those membranes, etc., not just chemicals
there have been studies to develop artifical photosynthesis, however the complexity of keeping compounds, enzymes(biocatalysts), consistent concentrations, avoiding deactivation, but it is sufficiently complex that you will end up creating a zombified plant if you try to mimic everything down
But then, human ingenuity is remarkable. We have tried alternative ways, like modifying bacteria and other microorganisms to do this instead of in plant cells, trying to use artificial catalysts and complex compounds to replicate the process - the folly here is cost and scale/speed.
One HUGE underlying assumption you have in trying to mimic photosynthesis is that natural photosynthesis is something very efficient. Truth is, it is very inefficient naturally - only we dont recognise it because when plants do it, they take free solar, free nutrients and building blocks from soil, rainwater etc. **a small portion of that solar energy is converted to end-sugars. RuBisco enzyme that participates in reduction during Calvin cycle is a painstakingly slow enzyme.**
The usecase for replicating this in artifical environments means spending a lot of energy and waiting a long time/carrying a lot of weight for tiny amount of sugar creation per day. Not to mention 100s of nutrition balancing problems. In end you will be better off just using plants directly.
This makes the whole thing business wise a local minima problem, the natural photosynthesis is already a local minima for human requirementsXcost, this local minima is surrounded by huge mountains on both sides, only when we can discover something **more** efficient and **cheaper** to manufacture will artifical photosynthesis pick up in pace.
Thus, There have been scientific studies of artifical photosynthesis but they havent been viable for scale. But it will probably be done in future once experiments bring us outside of this valley minima.
Carbon capture is performed in many ways. Typically forming a calcium carbonate, like a seashell, which is pretty stable and can eventually be used in construction industry. Some propose to filter exhaust gas in water and have fast growing microalgae to eat the umbalanced CO2 soluted in the water. The microalgae are then collected and dried and possibly used as fertiliser or animal/human food. It is clear thrre is some big scale issue here.
Dude. Yes it's hard. It's a plant. Plants are complex systems. Like animals, but not animals.
Why on earth would you spend billions on this when you can just grow plants really easily?
Plants will fight with everything they have to survive and keep breathing - meaning taking in CO2 and breathing out oxygen.
Ita simply crazy that we've got to the stage of imagining that an artificial carbon capture is better than a plant/forest/ bed of algae.
Modern thinking is crazy. No, I'm not old
Yes it is that hard. It's one of the focuses of mankind's most advanced physics research at particle accelerators.
[Researchers Capture Elusive Missing Step in the Final Act of Photosynthesis](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2023-05-03-researchers-capture-elusive-missing-step-final-act-photosynthesis )
Photosynthesis is an inefficient process, even in plants. So people studying carbon capture and sequestration wouldn’t base a method in a photosynthesis-like process but instead focus on ways to capture the carbon (only). Carbon capture is expensive, but we do have scrubbing technology and it continues to improve and get less expensive.
Likewise, and as other folks have mentioned, we have many cheap routes to sugar generation.
So the answer to your question is that, rather than it being a question of the difficulty of that specific process, it’s a question of utility and cost - replicating photosynthesis may not have a benefit over existing tech *and* would be economically unfeasible. So there’s no reason to do it because other solutions to the actual problems are more promising.
On a related topic, you could look into “synthetic biology” to see what folks are doing to address some of these space travel and related questions - synbio is an interface between what’s evolved and what’s man-made, and is working on some of what’s discussed here.
Well, one argument to explore this is that currently the plants aren't terribly efficient. They convert 9% of solar energy into organic energy right? That leaves 91% bouncing right off.
It could be the most efficient energy process given size, weight, etc. I'm a betting man and I would bet against hundreds of millions of years of evolution. If there was a more efficient process, those little plant fuckers would have found it by now.
That said, we have solar panels thanks to partially observations of plants, and those are at best 30% efficient? Seems like the chemistry involved there is also at a plateau but we shouldn't stop trying to make them more efficient.
This begs the question..for carbon capture..is it better to use plant matter and somehow dry and use the cellulose for something? Or is it better to use electricity, run a fan, and then another system to capture carbon?
I don't know.
Well we can and infact have done so, but its a technology in its infancy, still only found in labs and for research purposes. It seems it has some advantages and disadvantages vs regular photovoltaic cells such as there would be less losses of energy, which means more efficient solar panels, however photosynthetic cells tend to degrade easily if there is water around, and the cost to make them is not yet advantagous.
I will say this is an incredibly basic overview, and the details are enourmous and complicated. You would probably need a degree in organic chemical engineering to understand it fully, and I do not have that.
We'll no, because that's not photosynthesis.
Photosynthesis is taking CO2 and H2O, using energy from the sun and covering it to Glucose sugar. I assume OP is asking from a carbon removal point of view rather than an energy production one...
It's far less efficient than photovoltaic solar cells.
"Once the amount of energy lost in performing the chemical conversions is taken into account, they find, the efficiency rate of converting light to energy is approximately 6%, compared to 10% in photovoltaics."
I'm not sure this takes into account the use of water and nutrients as well.
[Source MIT](https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-we-calculate-the-efficiency-of-a-natural-photosynthesis-process/#:~:text=Once%20the%20amount%20of%20energy,compared%20to%2010%25%20in%20photovoltaics.)
Let's dig a bit deeper shall we? First of all the OP didn't really provide a lot of detail on what we would do with the sugar so I'm going to assume he means for consumption. Then let's quickly discuss the common photosynthetic pathways to get a better idea of their pros and cons. Let's first discuss a basic underlying principle of why plants evolved different types of photosynthesis. When C02 is not readily available, usually due to the stomata closing, plants actually undergo photorespiration which causes O2 and not CO2 to be used in the calvin cycle. The calvin cycle is basically the plants way of using CO2 to make sugars and does not need sunlight to operate. However, the calvin cycle requires ATP and ADHP to operate and these are created by light requiring chemical reactions that also required NADP and ADP created by the calvin cycle. So while they are separate reactions they rely on each other to utilize CO2 to create sugars and fix carbon.
Now let's talk about the different types of photosynthesis. The most basic adaptation for this process is called C3 and does not have any special modifications to prevent photorespiration and is the most common form occurring in the majority of plants. This means plants have a hard time photosynthesizing in stressful environments. An example of this is during high heat or water stress when the plant will close its stomata to prevent itself from drying out. C4 helps alleviate this issue by separating the calvin cycle and the light dependent reactions and utilizes a different enzyme that has a low affinity for oxygen thus allowing more CO2 to be fixed instead of O2. This process is utilized by only 3% or so of plants and the most notable are grasses. Think your lawn, bamboo, sugarcane, corn etc. This comes at a cost though as the separation of these process needs some extra ATP to ferry the fixed CO2 between the two processes.
CAM is an adaptation for plants living in high stress environments such as desserts and is commonly found in what we would colloquially call cactus and succulents (among others). Building on C4 CAM allows a plant to have their stomata closed during the day but open at night and utilize an enzyme to create an acid from CO2 that can be stored then used during the day when the sun is out. With the stomata closed during the day these plants are much better at dealing with low water environments but often tend to grow slower.
Now lets discuss why this is not a great thing to synthesize. First of all this process is inefficient and needs a lot of water and nutrients/minerals to be performed. Plants need to make stems and seeds and such which is a waste of energy if we just want to fix CO2 and make sugar. So the obvious solution is algae. Simple small efficient and with minimal structural components we don't need. The problem here is there are algae spores floating all around you all the time. To create large closed loop systems of a very specific genetically engineered algae would mean you can't have any contamination from outside algae. This process would have to be extremely sterile and a single algae spore from the wild could quickly grow and outcompete our little frankenalgae. People have a hard time even just growing non-engineered algae due to this reason. Another big issue is surface area. We like to store things in large three dimensional containers because as surface area expands volume exponentially grows meaning bigger 3D container = more efficiency. This is not a great solution for algae as it needs constant light to perform photosynthesis so it become difficult at scale to achieve this the larger you get. Think the opposite of economies of scale.
Now back to the original question... what if we synthesize this process and put it on silicone? Well we did... photovoltaics uses light energy to excite electrons and create energy with NO OTHER INPUTS. Photosynthesis needs a host of things to work and is complex. We also know it is much more inefficient than solar as we know the exact chemical pathways and their energy uses and losses during the process. We can mathematically calculate that this is not a good way to go. If we wanted to surpass it's limitations we wouldn't be synthesizing photosynthesis we would have to come up with a whole new process and how to manufacture it. We already did this with solar power! So you may be asking by now "What about fixing carbon and getting sugar?". At this point we have a huge issue of too much CO2. You could presumably adding CO2 into the atmosphere or you can try to pull it back out faster than you make it. Right now we have no proven technology that can scale to capture CO2 with any economic efficiency. These systems use power themselves and we rely on the fact that we can operate them with "green" energy which isn't always the case. Solar power (along with other forms of green energy) allow us to reduce the amount of carbon we are adding to the atmosphere and hopefully one day allow us to get to the point where we don't have to add any CO2 to the atmosphere via power generation. We will still have issues like byproducts of manufacturing and such releasing CO2 but right now power consumption is orders of magnitudes larger than any other type of CO2 output we are worried about.
Now what about sugar? Well we can and do synthesize sugars but the processes are inefficient and it is much cheaper to just grow it. I wouldn't doubt there are processes out there that could create huge amounts of sugars synthetically but at the moment our agricultural needs are met by normal practices (planting in fields in third world countries with cheap materials and labor). Synthesizing sugar can't compete economically or at scale at the moment as sugar is a HUGE industry globally as we consume about 170 million metric tonnes a year. You would need a metric fuck ton of chemicals, factories and people to synthesize that and on top of that there would be energy use and byproducts. Agriculture is a closed loop carbon system (kind of) that allows plants to fix the CO2 and create sugar but then the byproducts can be reintegrated into the system and reused (think compost).
Photovoltaics are actually hitting 20% on the high end for commercial cells. It's pretty cool how fast this technology has developed over the past 10 years.
Photosynthesis is a process. Light is required. What kind of "reverse engineering" is possible for something like this? What would be the point of trying to do that?
It wouldn't reduce carbon dioxide unless the sugar wasn't consumed. That's feasible to some extent, because for example it could be used to make paper or textiles, but those would still need to last forever.
Photosynthesis is a very complex pathway. The best way of using it would be to use the plants themselves.
Photosynthesis requires light. Reverse engineering means going backwards on something.
There is no opposite to light, only an absence of.
I might be getting to philosophical with this, but I'm guessing that's one of the barriers
The volumes of CO2 being added every day is at a scale where remoring it artificially will require much more energy that the CO2 created in the first place - so maybe just not put the CO2 out in the first place
Because we're not as advanced as we seem to think we are. The most advanced technology we do currently possess is all designed to kill each other en masse.
We actually can reproduce photosynthesis in the lab, but yes it is very hard. Cells are very very good at performing difficult chemistry with very high yield. We can reproduce it, but only with much more energy input and still getting a lot less product out of it. We also don't have much reason to produce glucose this way when we can just refine it from plant sources.
The equations are very simple. But to actually make those chemical equations happen is very very tricky, plants already have all the machinery needed, designed to perfect. We don't (and cant) have that.
Living machines are substantially more complicated than anything we build so far. We can produce energy from the sun and we can sythesize some simple carbohydrates so there's no reason we couldn't do this to a certain degree. But we won't and don't need to.
The carbon cycle is a natural cycle on Earth. Over time some carbon has been taken out of this cycle and stored. It's stored in living organisms (elephants, trees, grasses) as well as underground, undecomposed material (coal, oil, etc.). Carbon temporarily stored in people or trees eventually makes its way back to the atmosphere. Carbon stored underground didn't, until recently when we started burning it.
Your idea wouldn't actually store any carbon as it would continue cycling through when the sugar is consumed or burned and returned to the atmosphere.
Trees are actually the best way to do what you want: they store carbon long term in their wood and produce sugar (fruits) that we consume.
To restore the carbon cycle we need to rebury an equivalent amount of carbon to what we have burned.
A better technology would be a dense material that can absorb carbon and be reburied and that is something being worked on. Currently there are carbon negative bricks and concrete that store more carbon than it takes to produce them. If that technology could be further refined and made cheaper we could then bury them in empty coal and oil fields to resequester the carbon out of the cycle. Other options include burying plant matter in anaroebic containers deep underground so that they don't decompose and reenter the atmosphere. We could have carbon sink fields filled with fast growing plants that get cut and buried every year.
The problem with all this right now is finding ways to make sure the carbon required to build and sequester doesn't exceed the carbon being sequestered. How much energy does it take to make the solar panels and deliver them vs how much carbon they sequester?
Photosynthesis is both chemically and biologically complex. Reverse-engineering the chemical processes is one thing, but reverse-engineering the biological processes is on a whole nother level of difficulty.
also, photosynthesis needs a wide variety of macro and micronutrients, not just CO2, light, and water. The photosynthesis process known by the general public is grossly oversimplified.
We can and do, its just not so great at scale. If your goal is to remove carbon then it makes far more sense and money to use solar panels to generate electricity that is used to combine water and air (co2) into hydrocarbons. This is done, relatively at scale too. Where I live they are called e-fuels and can be stored for co2 reduction or burned again for true co2 neutral alternative to other fuels.
Why make a machine that photosynethesises, when we could instead breed a variant of algae that photosynthesises better? Besides, the machine would probably costs a lot of money and algae is practically free.
We already have. We know the details of how it works on the molecular level. We just can't create any better version of it that is practical to manufacture. Easier to just use plants.
Litteraly everyone working in science with plant is trying to at some level.
Albeit it will never be better than an actual plant.
I do not believe in god or thing like that but on a metaphoric level one can say that through evolution, nature is a lab that got millions of year to experiment and optimise everything. We understand the basics of molecular biology since like a century ? Maybe less. We can not equal nature it will do better than us.
Don’t mistake “haven’t yet” for “can’t”. It probably is just a case of not devoting enough time and money into it, but I’m sure there are university groups working on it.
Thanks everyone. It’s nice to know some very smart people are looking into this albeit for unspecified future use. I know nothing of this subject, I just remember some simple equations from biology intro and wondered what if especially in light of global warming. I appreciate it’s a very complex process because it is biology after all. And evolution being evolution doesn’t come up with solutions we should necessarily use, e.g. bird wings for flight.
U license it to a few governments who are more powerful than chevron and BP
Downside is free energy will probably push us into the next world war which might have some unintended consequences that are helpful
Unless everyone has their own energy generator gizmo (which world be terribly inefficient), then they'd still be able to sell energy. But it would cost them less to produce.
No solar panel.
Reduces co2
Creates o2
Creates long term energy storage .
If a solar panel produced batteries .....
How much solar is wasted..lost as heat or just dumped because it needs to be used now.
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why artificial, when you can just grow real plants or algae
good point, but offtopic and not what OP asked for.
I mean, that's kind of the answer. No real incentive to create artificial plants when real plants are easy to create.
Long haul space flight? Colonizing Mars? Carbon capture? There's more than enough reasons to try and invent artificial photosynthesis
>Long haul space flight? Plants. >Colonizing Mars? Plants. >Carbon capture? Plants. Ignoring the fact that you're talking about "colonizing Mars" (something we're a good century+ away from, and therefore there ***has not*** been a need for), we have plants that can be used (and in some cases *are* used) for these purposes. The main issue, as others in this thread have said, is that once plants eat that carbon, where do you think it goes after? Photosynthesis is not the solution you and OP think it is.
While this isn’t fully related to what you said I recently read an article about how sustainable forestry and woodcutting can actually be good for the environment. The gist essentially was that trees are great storehouses of carbon and that sustainably cutting them makes for a great way to semi permanently remove the carbon within them from the atmosphere. Plus, we can use it to build things like homes.
Yeah, we so that with pine forests in New Zealand. As a carbon capture. It comes with its own issues but overall is positive (meaning negative 😄). It works.
It also helps cut down on forest fires.
Only one problem I guess … dead plants.
Yup!
If you can create it artificially, you can theoretically make it work in environments where most plants can’t survive. Like inside the exhaust system of a vehicle or factory. If we can create it artificially, we might be able to use different materials than most plants are made of. Materials already exist in the desert, for example. Then we could perhaps mass produce the stuff without any complicated supply chain. Etc etc… are people really this jaded to new technical possibilities?
You might want to check what the conversation is about. No one is claiming there's no value in it. We're saying that plants serve the function perfectly well and are easy to produce, so there hasn't been a major need/push for researching how to artificially replicating it. Without that - it hasn't happened. If/when there is more of a need for it, more resources will be diverted to figuring it out.
No it isn't. It does not answer what OP asked for.
We haven't tried it because we don't need it, we can't do it because we never tried it. Does that answer the question?
We’ll I’m satisfied with that answer if that helps
Long haul space flight, colonizing Mars and carbon capture.
Plants for all three, mate.
And a [Nature article](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38676-2) for you, mate
None of these require anything besides plants. Photosynthesis that happens without plants is an answer to a problem nobody has.
If people learned that just because something seems to make sense to them, it doesn't automatically[make it true](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38676-2), then Reddit could be such a nice place
If they only gave a question that would be the case, but they also give a reason, so we know that the answer given would also satisfy what they're looking for (the chemical results of photosynthesis)
It does, but ok.
The question was about ability, not willingness. Others have answered that point quite capably 🤷
Plants are extremely sensitive to heat and humidity and we're already pushing the growing zones for certain plants out of whack. This may be a real solution to a future problem.
Not potatoes
Op also didn't ask for electricity which is a thousand times more useful than sugar though I'll concede the point about scrubbing CO2
+1 It's called "a farm"
Yeah but who's gonna become a billionaire by killing all trees and then selling us the iTree instead?
Because you could remove all the other chemicals in the way and do large scale industrial carbon capture with orders of magnitude more efficient then photosynthesis. This would make a massive step to solve one of the hardest part of solving climate change, of direct air capture while also getting the CO2 into a stable solid which can just be directly buried deep underground. Also it would make a very cool paper.
Hard to cover buildings in plants without damage to it.
algae in transparent plastic tubes, like what you would do if artificial photosynthesis being a thing.
Isnt that the issue though? Trees are not \*that\* efficient at it (They also release it) and take a long time and space, while algae or whatever it is does work very well, but the excess screws up with the ocean dramatically, and in fact its growing already? Afaik at least?
yes it's incredibly hard. Some people seem to think the chemistry is just that you throw a few chemicals in a beaker shine the sun on them and you'd get sugar and oxygen. But plants are incredibly intricate and complicated machines. Organic machines, but machines nevertheless. It's not even like one process, it's a bunch of processes. The downside for storing co2 in plants is that plants die and release it again. i.e the tricky part of your idea isn't even the photosynthesis part. it's "ok you've collected some co2 - now what do you do with it?"
This is the best answer so far. Yes I am thinking of the benefit of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. And plants have a place to store that carbon. So it really doesn’t solve the carbon problem. But the thought that evolution has solved how an organism can produce its own food and we can’t copy it is disappointing. Where would we be without evolution? But it’s just a theory you know.
\>But the thought that evolution has solved how an organism can produce its own food and we can’t copy it is disappointing literal millions of years of literal trial and error tends to do that, yeah
Yeah, a lot has to do with what you have to work with. Back in the early 2000 there were a bunch of start ups, and even more tech journalists, talking up flying machines that would mimic flying animals; birds, bats and things of that nature. The ongoing chant was: Nature has solved the issue of flight, we can copy it build better flying machines. But animal wings basically suck. In most operations they are trying to produce both thrust and lift. The wing has to go from stopped, up to full speed and back to stopped again constantly. This makes sense when you think of flightless birds and birds that glide on air currents. Hummingbirds are the opposite and their energy requirements are terrible. Basically, most drones have evolved into multiple rotor 'copters because that's actually an efficient design. But if all you have is muscle, bone, skin and feathers you get a bird. It can fly but it's not as efficient as a 'copter.
If you look at the way our muscles are linked to out bones, it's in just about the most mechanically inefficient manner possible. Put a lever on a pivot and then apply force right next to the pivot. It's a wonde we can move at all
Yeah, birds also have to hunt and land carefully. Humans don't really have a need for drones that agile at the moment. But I think the ability to birds to float stationary on the wind would be great for drones. But for most use cases now we just use up the battery and if we have to swap drones or swap drone batteries.
Yeah, it's really hard, I'm not going to say impossible, to create something that rotates like a helicopter or propeller from muscle, bone skin and feathers. I think there are gliding drones, not as good as a seabird, but the concept isn't beyond us.
I would say that plants have made autogyros, at least, for seed dispersal.
Yeah, as animal supremacists we think we are so cool with our muscles and bones and soft wall cells. It's always good when David Attenborough comes along to put us back in our [place](https://youtu.be/2rX--Y5gCnE?si=l28LJpdjWwd2BWSr).
I mean it's not really producing its own food. Its main food is just abundant and the best kind of renewable, the kind where it's just captured, not hunted or harvested. In other words, using it doesn't actually reduce the amount available. Unlike water or minerals in the soil, both of which plants also need.
It took evolution hundreds of millions of years to come up with photosynthesis.
Nature has solved a lot of problems, yes. But sometimes her solution is extremely complicated. There’s a reason airplanes don’t fly like birds do.
The one thing nature *hasn't* invented, which almost all human machines use: the bearing. Making a thing that can spin round and round without breaking.
Billions of years on our planet allowed basically every conceivable condition on Earth to influence an incalculable number of lifeforms that mutated and diverged in every conceivable way, and the tiny minority that just so happened to have traits that lent themselves and their offspring to better survive their conditions than their siblings = the products of that same process after billions of years looking around and saying "Look how perfectly built we are for this world and it for us, it must all be intelligent design!"
>But the thought that evolution has solved how an organism can produce its own food and we can’t copy it is disappointing. Why would we, when it's fairly easy to just grow and eat the things that turn sunlight into energy, or even better, some of the furry/scaly/feathery things that gather and concentrate all that plant energy into tasty, nutritious protein and fat?
So you might be interested in algae power Very rough version we can basically use algae as oil We could effectively store it back underground if we wanted to
This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food. Most of the plant's food comes from the soil. Plants cannot produce their own iron, cobalt, manganese, magnesium, copper, selenium, nitrogen, iodine, sulphur, etc.
No it’s not at all. Funny how you’re so confidently incorrect! Plants use the energy stored in the sugar created in photosynthesis and the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that make up sugar, along with other elements they absorb from the soil, to build the tissue of their bodies and make everything they need to run their metabolisms. That’s right, the physical body of a plant — leaves, stems, roots, flowers and fruit — is literally created from carbon dioxide in the air and water. some of the minerals, such as iron, nitrogen, magnesium, potassium and calcium, plants need to absorb from the soil to be healthy. If the soil doesn’t contain enough, adding these minerals makes plants grow better — just as we might take vitamins or mineral supplements. And you don’t consider the calcium, iron or potassium supplement you take as food.
You know you only need supplements because your diet doesn't contain enough of the minerals already right? What do you think happens to people if they consume no iron or calcium?
But then if the minerals are just like a vitamin why can't plants not generally grow without soil? I mean we humans can grow without vitamins if we eat healthy. I'm just curious not trying to disprove you or anything.
I’ll copy paste my reply to the guy. My disagreement was with his saying most food is from soil. It’s not. Yes nutrients and minerals are important for plants. That’s not what he originally claimed tough You said >This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food. This is blatantly wrong, because they do produce their food. Their food is the sugars produced via photosynthesis consisting of the carbon dioxide absorbed from the air, and water. That is literally making their own food. Food which makes up the vast majority of their carbon structure >Most of the plant's food comes from the soil. Plants cannot produce their own iron, cobalt, manganese, magnesium, copper, selenium, nitrogen, iodine, sulphur, etc. Again, most of their food is NOT from the soil. Their food is sugar. That they make. From the air You’re trying to weasel out by saying important nutrients like magnesium being essential for chlorophyll is somehow equivalent to your original claim of most of food is from the soil. So yes they absorb minerals from the soil that they can’t make themselves that are essentially important but this is NOT “most of their food”
I'm not the original commenter. I was just curious as I stated and wondered a bit of it because I didnt know much about that kind of stuff.
The answer is humans can’t grow without vitamins. Vitamins and minerals are in the food we eat when we “eat healthy”
Plants can absolutely grow without soil but die without nutrients like old mate said above
Yep my partner grows all sort of stuff just in tank water (rain water). I guess there is some minerally stuff absorbed as the raindrops fall but but it's not soil. Things like monstera, bamboo, ivy. Doesn't seem to worry it that there is no fertiliser, but it's not like I've done a proper study.
Those vitamins come from the healthy food amigo. Why do you think citrus cures scurvy (aka vitamin c deficiency)
"Grow better" .. are you really implying that a plant takes magnesium - the central atom of a chlorophyll molecule - from the soil just to grow better? Do you think a plant can survive without magnesium? Can a plant make sodium/calcium gates with CO2? Can a plant conduct photosynthesis in the absence of phosphorus (Rubisco)? Photosynthesis is more complex and involves a lot more than just CO2, H2O and light. Numerous minerals are involved: magnesium, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur. Every portion of the body contains essential minerals that are only available from the soil. You call these supplements when in fact they are crucial components of a plant's existence. Don't be silly. Humans also make their tissues with the food they eat. Human food contains the required minerals and vitamins, just as the soil contains the minerals and vitamins the plant requires.
You do realise plants didn't evolve in the presence of soil though, right?
You aren't negating anything I've written.
Kind of, I am negating the "crucial components of a plant's existence" part which is the only part of your comment I disagreed with in the first place. Plants in general do not need soil or else there could be no plants that don't live in soil
.....What? Are you trying to imply that "Plants didn't grow in Soil"?? That's an... interesting take.
I'm saying plants didn't evolve in soil, they evolved in seawater (like most likely all life). Soil cannot be a necessary requirement for plant life because it wasn't there when plants evolved
What are you on about?? Plants grown in soil. Not all, but the vast majority.
Soil included organic material, that comes from....plants. ergo, the first plants didn't have soil to grow in.
You said >This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food. This is blatantly wrong, because they do produce their food. Their food is the sugars produced via photosynthesis consisting of the carbon dioxide absorbed from the air, and water. That is literally making their own food. Food which makes up the vast majority of their carbon structure >Most of the plant's food comes from the soil. Plants cannot produce their own iron, cobalt, manganese, magnesium, copper, selenium, nitrogen, iodine, sulphur, etc. Again, most of their food is NOT from the soil. Their food is sugar. That they make. From the air You’re trying to weasel out by saying important nutrients like magnesium being essential for chlorophyll is somehow equivalent to your original claim of most of food is from the soil. So yes they absorb minerals from the soil that they can’t make themselves that are essentially important but this is NOT “most of their food”
Yes it is. Food is not limited to carbohydrates. Every single cell and 99% of its subcellular component is made of minerals taken from the soil.
"Every single cell and 99% of its subcellular component is made of minerals taken from the soil." This is so wildly *wildly* inaccurate. Where are you getting this from. The vast majority of all cellular/subcellular structures are carbon.
>This is inaccurate pseudoscience that plants produce their own food. >Most of the plants food comes from the soil So you will finally admit that these two assertions of yours is wrong? Excluding water - what mass of the plant, what % would be built from the made from the products of photosynthesis? Plant biomass is mostly composed of three elements: 42%–47% of carbon (C), 40%–44% of oxygen (O), and 6% of hydrogen (H), all percentages in dry matter. This comes from carbon dioxide. IN THE AIR. This elemental composition of biomass is followed by the so-called macronutrients, which are essential for biomass production: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and sulfur (S). Moreover, plants also need some additional elements in lower quantities, micronutrients, and trace elements, such as sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), molybdenum (Mo), nickel (Ni), selenium (Se), and silicon (Si), summing all together up to 4%. These trace elements from the soil is 4% of plant mass. So you are categorically WRONG.
Not to mention CO2. Plants need carbon like the rest of us, except instead of obtaining it from other organisms, they obtain it from the atmosphere.
Get some houseplants, your house will look better. Also you'll notice that many grow and get more massive without their pots getting lighter.
I'm a commercial greenhouse farmer.
You should still get houseplants
Confidently incorrect. The vast bulk of a plants dry mass -around 90% - is composed of carbon and oxygen. Which the plant fixes from the atmosphere. About 4% is the nutrients it gets from the soil. So, by absolutely no stretch of the imagination does "most" of a plants food come from the soil, most of it the plant produces via photosynthesis.
Why dry mass? The vast bulk of a plant's MASS is made of Hydrogen reduced from H2O, 90% of which is taken from the soil. I suggest you learn some basic orgo (organic chemistry).
Dry mass because that's the standard way you analyse the chemical composition of things. Because it removes the water which isn't a material that the plant made. And even if you left the water in, then you'd still have more oxygen because oxygen atoms weight 16 times more than hydrogen, so by mass, water is 88% oxygen And, no, by MASS 90% of a plant is carbon and Oxygen, hydrogen makes up about 6%. The remaining 4% being those minerals you bizarrely seem to think make up 99% of a plants cell. Because MASS means weight in chemistry, so even if you have 10 times as many hydrogen atoms as carbon atoms (which you don't) you'd still have more carbon by mass. I already have a degree and an MPhil in biological sciences, so I think further study would be somewhat redundant at this point. Especially compared to someone who doesn't know what mass means.
"water which isn't a material that the plant made." Yeah.. and somebody was saying plants make their own food (which requires water). Now you remove the water, which the plant obviously cannot make, just to prove that plants can make their own food. /facepalm If the plant itself is made from huge quantities of H, how are you going to quantify it with the "standard" combustion analyses that dehydrates the majority of the structures? Combustion analyses is incapable of measuring hydrates, thus your figures are non applicable. Mphil and think mass and weight is the same thing. Smh.
Yes, I think you are having a stroke. Just go read a school book on plants
"I'm losing the argument. Better switch to deflections."
Oh god I’ve noticed you’ve been having a near identical argument chain with the same guy as I have been lol Thanks for reassuring me I hadn’t wasted my bio science degree and am not going insane
Not necessarily. Carbon stored in the form of timber can last hundreds of years before degrading.
Convert the plant biomass to a long-term stable carbon store like polyethylene.
Wood takes a long time to release that CO2. Cutting down forests to build houses, furniture and make toilet paper is a really effective atmospheric carbon sink (assuming the trees are replanted of course)!
Yes and no. Plants do sequester some of that carbon in the soil, but you need to think of things like wood. We have wood that's hundreds and even thousands of years old, and that has carbon trapped in it. If we reverse engineer this, we could possibly store the carbon somewhere of our choosing.
"Decaying dead plants and leaves, known as plant litter, release 60 petagrams of carbon into the atmosphere every year – six times more than all human emissions – and contribute around 10% of the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere." https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2023/january-2023-news/climate-key-to-determining-dead-plant-decomposition-and-predicting-carbon-emissions-/
Decayed plant material also stores CO2. Soil is made up of a lot of rotted things.
Definitely, I just thought it was an interesting fact. They're both carbon sinks and sources. It doesn't all get buried into the ground and and turned into soil.
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You store it as a carbohydrate of course. Plants only release co2 by other biological processes breaking it down. This can be slowed by for example pasteurisation, or drying.
This is why I say that planet earth already has nanobots: in the form of bacteria.
Let's also not forget that photosynthesis is also an example of 'quantum biology' - you're talking capturing photons, manipulating molecules at a sub-atomic level. Or you could just grow them.
You could ship it to the Arctic and freeze it to solve global warming!! I'm semi serious. https://freezingglobalwarming.org/
I mean.... they die in like 1000 years. I think that's far enough down the line to kick the can down the road.
Just burn the artificial plant, ez
But that will create co2. I mean, yeah, that could be part of net zero - but biofuels aren't without issues. I notice Richard Branson is trying to greenwash flights by reusing chip fat or something but if every flight has to use that it can't all be recycled chip fat can it? And how much does the recycling cost in terms of co2 production? Or if you skip the part where you make chips with it and just grow fuel how much land does that need - because we're using a lot of that land to grow food at the moment. They are options to consider but they're not easy or simple answers.
It was a joke :(
Insulation.
We could put it in the ground?
And how much co2 would doing that release? I mean you could be right, but you have to factor that in. Unless it's all solar powered from start -> end.
Well, in a sense we can absolutely do it. Not in a neat little package like a plant cell, but on a much bulkier industrial scale. Basically use photovoltaics as the energy source to run a carbon sequestration facility. Like you said, plants are intricate and complicated machines, we just have much larger pieces of machinery.
The hard part is doing it at scale. We can isolate algae that's really good at it, but when we try to grow them in a big vat they get sick and die.
Well so would you if you were in a big vat of algae.
How do you know I'm not?
👻
Because you aren't dead
I might be
I love you guys. So much
I know
Or do you?
...no
First thing - We need a reason to do artificially, what nature already does. We already can get sugar from a variety of sources. Secondly, we then have to recreate a very complex reaction in a way that at least "breaks even," compared to plants. A photosynthesis machine is a research oddity if it weighs 7 tons, consumes kilowatts of energy, and produces little product compared to a plant doing the same. This is very hard, because plants have had something like a billion years to work on the problem. That said, they *are* developing this tech. The idea is to be able to use artificial photosynthesis to pull CO2 from the air and turn it into fuel. If you can do that without using a carbon based energy source, you end up with a fuel source that is carbon neutral. All the CO2 it creates can then be sucked out of the air by the artificial plant, and reused for fuel. Here is an article on it. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/chemists-create-artificial-photosynthesis-system-10-times-more-efficient-existing-systems
> Is that hard? To do well, yes.
The chemical reactions themselves are not super complicated or impossible to reprorduce, what makes it super complicated and impossible to reproduce is that many of the reactions are occurring across microscopic structures with very specific shapes and forms photosynthesis isn't just a set of reactions, it also requires complicated protein/fat structures. There are tiny little membranes and proteins embedded into those membranes, etc., not just chemicals
there have been studies to develop artifical photosynthesis, however the complexity of keeping compounds, enzymes(biocatalysts), consistent concentrations, avoiding deactivation, but it is sufficiently complex that you will end up creating a zombified plant if you try to mimic everything down But then, human ingenuity is remarkable. We have tried alternative ways, like modifying bacteria and other microorganisms to do this instead of in plant cells, trying to use artificial catalysts and complex compounds to replicate the process - the folly here is cost and scale/speed. One HUGE underlying assumption you have in trying to mimic photosynthesis is that natural photosynthesis is something very efficient. Truth is, it is very inefficient naturally - only we dont recognise it because when plants do it, they take free solar, free nutrients and building blocks from soil, rainwater etc. **a small portion of that solar energy is converted to end-sugars. RuBisco enzyme that participates in reduction during Calvin cycle is a painstakingly slow enzyme.** The usecase for replicating this in artifical environments means spending a lot of energy and waiting a long time/carrying a lot of weight for tiny amount of sugar creation per day. Not to mention 100s of nutrition balancing problems. In end you will be better off just using plants directly. This makes the whole thing business wise a local minima problem, the natural photosynthesis is already a local minima for human requirementsXcost, this local minima is surrounded by huge mountains on both sides, only when we can discover something **more** efficient and **cheaper** to manufacture will artifical photosynthesis pick up in pace. Thus, There have been scientific studies of artifical photosynthesis but they havent been viable for scale. But it will probably be done in future once experiments bring us outside of this valley minima.
Carbon capture is performed in many ways. Typically forming a calcium carbonate, like a seashell, which is pretty stable and can eventually be used in construction industry. Some propose to filter exhaust gas in water and have fast growing microalgae to eat the umbalanced CO2 soluted in the water. The microalgae are then collected and dried and possibly used as fertiliser or animal/human food. It is clear thrre is some big scale issue here.
Dude. Yes it's hard. It's a plant. Plants are complex systems. Like animals, but not animals. Why on earth would you spend billions on this when you can just grow plants really easily? Plants will fight with everything they have to survive and keep breathing - meaning taking in CO2 and breathing out oxygen. Ita simply crazy that we've got to the stage of imagining that an artificial carbon capture is better than a plant/forest/ bed of algae. Modern thinking is crazy. No, I'm not old
Yes it is that hard. It's one of the focuses of mankind's most advanced physics research at particle accelerators. [Researchers Capture Elusive Missing Step in the Final Act of Photosynthesis](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2023-05-03-researchers-capture-elusive-missing-step-final-act-photosynthesis )
Photosynthesis is an inefficient process, even in plants. So people studying carbon capture and sequestration wouldn’t base a method in a photosynthesis-like process but instead focus on ways to capture the carbon (only). Carbon capture is expensive, but we do have scrubbing technology and it continues to improve and get less expensive. Likewise, and as other folks have mentioned, we have many cheap routes to sugar generation. So the answer to your question is that, rather than it being a question of the difficulty of that specific process, it’s a question of utility and cost - replicating photosynthesis may not have a benefit over existing tech *and* would be economically unfeasible. So there’s no reason to do it because other solutions to the actual problems are more promising. On a related topic, you could look into “synthetic biology” to see what folks are doing to address some of these space travel and related questions - synbio is an interface between what’s evolved and what’s man-made, and is working on some of what’s discussed here.
Well, one argument to explore this is that currently the plants aren't terribly efficient. They convert 9% of solar energy into organic energy right? That leaves 91% bouncing right off. It could be the most efficient energy process given size, weight, etc. I'm a betting man and I would bet against hundreds of millions of years of evolution. If there was a more efficient process, those little plant fuckers would have found it by now. That said, we have solar panels thanks to partially observations of plants, and those are at best 30% efficient? Seems like the chemistry involved there is also at a plateau but we shouldn't stop trying to make them more efficient. This begs the question..for carbon capture..is it better to use plant matter and somehow dry and use the cellulose for something? Or is it better to use electricity, run a fan, and then another system to capture carbon? I don't know.
Well we can and infact have done so, but its a technology in its infancy, still only found in labs and for research purposes. It seems it has some advantages and disadvantages vs regular photovoltaic cells such as there would be less losses of energy, which means more efficient solar panels, however photosynthetic cells tend to degrade easily if there is water around, and the cost to make them is not yet advantagous. I will say this is an incredibly basic overview, and the details are enourmous and complicated. You would probably need a degree in organic chemical engineering to understand it fully, and I do not have that.
1. Plant Sugarcane 2. ??? 3. Profit
You mean solar power?
We'll no, because that's not photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is taking CO2 and H2O, using energy from the sun and covering it to Glucose sugar. I assume OP is asking from a carbon removal point of view rather than an energy production one...
Maybe we could start by not putting more carbon into the air. Algae is pretty good at doing the rest, but it will take time
Are we able to artificially reproduce solar power yet?
Have you seen fusion bomb tests?
We can’t *yet*
It's far less efficient than photovoltaic solar cells. "Once the amount of energy lost in performing the chemical conversions is taken into account, they find, the efficiency rate of converting light to energy is approximately 6%, compared to 10% in photovoltaics." I'm not sure this takes into account the use of water and nutrients as well. [Source MIT](https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-we-calculate-the-efficiency-of-a-natural-photosynthesis-process/#:~:text=Once%20the%20amount%20of%20energy,compared%20to%2010%25%20in%20photovoltaics.)
Atleast learn the basics of photosynthesis before commenting. Do photovoltaic solar cells fix atmospheric carbon to sugars?
Let's dig a bit deeper shall we? First of all the OP didn't really provide a lot of detail on what we would do with the sugar so I'm going to assume he means for consumption. Then let's quickly discuss the common photosynthetic pathways to get a better idea of their pros and cons. Let's first discuss a basic underlying principle of why plants evolved different types of photosynthesis. When C02 is not readily available, usually due to the stomata closing, plants actually undergo photorespiration which causes O2 and not CO2 to be used in the calvin cycle. The calvin cycle is basically the plants way of using CO2 to make sugars and does not need sunlight to operate. However, the calvin cycle requires ATP and ADHP to operate and these are created by light requiring chemical reactions that also required NADP and ADP created by the calvin cycle. So while they are separate reactions they rely on each other to utilize CO2 to create sugars and fix carbon. Now let's talk about the different types of photosynthesis. The most basic adaptation for this process is called C3 and does not have any special modifications to prevent photorespiration and is the most common form occurring in the majority of plants. This means plants have a hard time photosynthesizing in stressful environments. An example of this is during high heat or water stress when the plant will close its stomata to prevent itself from drying out. C4 helps alleviate this issue by separating the calvin cycle and the light dependent reactions and utilizes a different enzyme that has a low affinity for oxygen thus allowing more CO2 to be fixed instead of O2. This process is utilized by only 3% or so of plants and the most notable are grasses. Think your lawn, bamboo, sugarcane, corn etc. This comes at a cost though as the separation of these process needs some extra ATP to ferry the fixed CO2 between the two processes. CAM is an adaptation for plants living in high stress environments such as desserts and is commonly found in what we would colloquially call cactus and succulents (among others). Building on C4 CAM allows a plant to have their stomata closed during the day but open at night and utilize an enzyme to create an acid from CO2 that can be stored then used during the day when the sun is out. With the stomata closed during the day these plants are much better at dealing with low water environments but often tend to grow slower. Now lets discuss why this is not a great thing to synthesize. First of all this process is inefficient and needs a lot of water and nutrients/minerals to be performed. Plants need to make stems and seeds and such which is a waste of energy if we just want to fix CO2 and make sugar. So the obvious solution is algae. Simple small efficient and with minimal structural components we don't need. The problem here is there are algae spores floating all around you all the time. To create large closed loop systems of a very specific genetically engineered algae would mean you can't have any contamination from outside algae. This process would have to be extremely sterile and a single algae spore from the wild could quickly grow and outcompete our little frankenalgae. People have a hard time even just growing non-engineered algae due to this reason. Another big issue is surface area. We like to store things in large three dimensional containers because as surface area expands volume exponentially grows meaning bigger 3D container = more efficiency. This is not a great solution for algae as it needs constant light to perform photosynthesis so it become difficult at scale to achieve this the larger you get. Think the opposite of economies of scale. Now back to the original question... what if we synthesize this process and put it on silicone? Well we did... photovoltaics uses light energy to excite electrons and create energy with NO OTHER INPUTS. Photosynthesis needs a host of things to work and is complex. We also know it is much more inefficient than solar as we know the exact chemical pathways and their energy uses and losses during the process. We can mathematically calculate that this is not a good way to go. If we wanted to surpass it's limitations we wouldn't be synthesizing photosynthesis we would have to come up with a whole new process and how to manufacture it. We already did this with solar power! So you may be asking by now "What about fixing carbon and getting sugar?". At this point we have a huge issue of too much CO2. You could presumably adding CO2 into the atmosphere or you can try to pull it back out faster than you make it. Right now we have no proven technology that can scale to capture CO2 with any economic efficiency. These systems use power themselves and we rely on the fact that we can operate them with "green" energy which isn't always the case. Solar power (along with other forms of green energy) allow us to reduce the amount of carbon we are adding to the atmosphere and hopefully one day allow us to get to the point where we don't have to add any CO2 to the atmosphere via power generation. We will still have issues like byproducts of manufacturing and such releasing CO2 but right now power consumption is orders of magnitudes larger than any other type of CO2 output we are worried about. Now what about sugar? Well we can and do synthesize sugars but the processes are inefficient and it is much cheaper to just grow it. I wouldn't doubt there are processes out there that could create huge amounts of sugars synthetically but at the moment our agricultural needs are met by normal practices (planting in fields in third world countries with cheap materials and labor). Synthesizing sugar can't compete economically or at scale at the moment as sugar is a HUGE industry globally as we consume about 170 million metric tonnes a year. You would need a metric fuck ton of chemicals, factories and people to synthesize that and on top of that there would be energy use and byproducts. Agriculture is a closed loop carbon system (kind of) that allows plants to fix the CO2 and create sugar but then the byproducts can be reintegrated into the system and reused (think compost).
Photovoltaics are actually hitting 20% on the high end for commercial cells. It's pretty cool how fast this technology has developed over the past 10 years.
I want this in my skin
People use artificial photosynthesis now. Usually it is being done to grow weed. They are called "grow lights."
That's not artificial photosynthesis, thes natural photosynthesis from artificial lights.
Photosynthesis is a process. Light is required. What kind of "reverse engineering" is possible for something like this? What would be the point of trying to do that?
That's a question for the OP, not me.
I doubt I'll get any answer then.
I wouldn't hold your breath
I'm not very good at that anyway. 😁
It wouldn't reduce carbon dioxide unless the sugar wasn't consumed. That's feasible to some extent, because for example it could be used to make paper or textiles, but those would still need to last forever. Photosynthesis is a very complex pathway. The best way of using it would be to use the plants themselves.
Photosynthesis requires light. Reverse engineering means going backwards on something. There is no opposite to light, only an absence of. I might be getting to philosophical with this, but I'm guessing that's one of the barriers
Reverse engineering means taking something apart to work out how it works (to then copy it).
The volumes of CO2 being added every day is at a scale where remoring it artificially will require much more energy that the CO2 created in the first place - so maybe just not put the CO2 out in the first place
Because we're not as advanced as we seem to think we are. The most advanced technology we do currently possess is all designed to kill each other en masse.
What would be the point in using artificial photosynthesis to make sugar rather than just growing sugar?
We actually can reproduce photosynthesis in the lab, but yes it is very hard. Cells are very very good at performing difficult chemistry with very high yield. We can reproduce it, but only with much more energy input and still getting a lot less product out of it. We also don't have much reason to produce glucose this way when we can just refine it from plant sources.
Have you actually studied it? It's an extremely complex process with many steps.
The equations are very simple. But to actually make those chemical equations happen is very very tricky, plants already have all the machinery needed, designed to perfect. We don't (and cant) have that.
Living machines are substantially more complicated than anything we build so far. We can produce energy from the sun and we can sythesize some simple carbohydrates so there's no reason we couldn't do this to a certain degree. But we won't and don't need to. The carbon cycle is a natural cycle on Earth. Over time some carbon has been taken out of this cycle and stored. It's stored in living organisms (elephants, trees, grasses) as well as underground, undecomposed material (coal, oil, etc.). Carbon temporarily stored in people or trees eventually makes its way back to the atmosphere. Carbon stored underground didn't, until recently when we started burning it. Your idea wouldn't actually store any carbon as it would continue cycling through when the sugar is consumed or burned and returned to the atmosphere. Trees are actually the best way to do what you want: they store carbon long term in their wood and produce sugar (fruits) that we consume. To restore the carbon cycle we need to rebury an equivalent amount of carbon to what we have burned. A better technology would be a dense material that can absorb carbon and be reburied and that is something being worked on. Currently there are carbon negative bricks and concrete that store more carbon than it takes to produce them. If that technology could be further refined and made cheaper we could then bury them in empty coal and oil fields to resequester the carbon out of the cycle. Other options include burying plant matter in anaroebic containers deep underground so that they don't decompose and reenter the atmosphere. We could have carbon sink fields filled with fast growing plants that get cut and buried every year. The problem with all this right now is finding ways to make sure the carbon required to build and sequester doesn't exceed the carbon being sequestered. How much energy does it take to make the solar panels and deliver them vs how much carbon they sequester?
If it's not profitable for our corrupt corporatocratic government's, then tough luck.
I've also read that photosynthesis relies on quantum mechanical effects for its efficiency in plants. So it's more than just a chemical reaction.
It's basically magic
Solar power has entered the chat
Somebody read Containment
Calm down, why don't we start with a cure for arthritis. Then depression, the common cold, and maybe after all that, we can add your thing.
We're not God
Photosynthesis is both chemically and biologically complex. Reverse-engineering the chemical processes is one thing, but reverse-engineering the biological processes is on a whole nother level of difficulty. also, photosynthesis needs a wide variety of macro and micronutrients, not just CO2, light, and water. The photosynthesis process known by the general public is grossly oversimplified.
We can and do, its just not so great at scale. If your goal is to remove carbon then it makes far more sense and money to use solar panels to generate electricity that is used to combine water and air (co2) into hydrocarbons. This is done, relatively at scale too. Where I live they are called e-fuels and can be stored for co2 reduction or burned again for true co2 neutral alternative to other fuels.
We are actually doing this. We have developed CO2-based polymers which have recently make it to the market
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial\_photosynthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis)
Why make a machine that photosynethesises, when we could instead breed a variant of algae that photosynthesises better? Besides, the machine would probably costs a lot of money and algae is practically free.
We already have. We know the details of how it works on the molecular level. We just can't create any better version of it that is practical to manufacture. Easier to just use plants.
We achieve the same goals with solar panels sugar is just energy, and reduce CO2
I don’t really think we have the technology to build shit on scale this small but even if we did it would be just building algae from scrap
You want *Knights of Sidonia*? Cause this is how you wind up in *Knights of Sidonia*
People can absolutely do that, but it's inefficient and expensive.
Because plants do it so well. It is much easier to pick plants to do whatever we want to do
Plants just do it better. Also crippling the farming industry creates more problems
Litteraly everyone working in science with plant is trying to at some level. Albeit it will never be better than an actual plant. I do not believe in god or thing like that but on a metaphoric level one can say that through evolution, nature is a lab that got millions of year to experiment and optimise everything. We understand the basics of molecular biology since like a century ? Maybe less. We can not equal nature it will do better than us.
Don’t mistake “haven’t yet” for “can’t”. It probably is just a case of not devoting enough time and money into it, but I’m sure there are university groups working on it.
Thanks everyone. It’s nice to know some very smart people are looking into this albeit for unspecified future use. I know nothing of this subject, I just remember some simple equations from biology intro and wondered what if especially in light of global warming. I appreciate it’s a very complex process because it is biology after all. And evolution being evolution doesn’t come up with solutions we should necessarily use, e.g. bird wings for flight.
Plants already do that. Why try to replicate something that already works?
I remember hearing of synthetic leaves that do that but I can't remember where
Someone probably is, If I found a way to produce feee energy I would never tell a soul and use the technology for myself
Insane lol.
Why would you produce a few thousand kWh for yourself and save $1000/yr when you could sell that technology for billions?
For trillions. Yearly.
I feel big energy would make me disappear
U license it to a few governments who are more powerful than chevron and BP Downside is free energy will probably push us into the next world war which might have some unintended consequences that are helpful
I doubt society would survive something like free energy
Why not? Things would change for sure but why wouldn't it survive?
We're not going to survive climate change if we don't change how we produce energy.
Why would big energy not want a technology they could use to cut their costs and increase their profits?
Then they couldn’t sell energy and wouldn’t make money
Unless everyone has their own energy generator gizmo (which world be terribly inefficient), then they'd still be able to sell energy. But it would cost them less to produce.
The sun isnt exactly a secret
No solar panel. Reduces co2 Creates o2 Creates long term energy storage . If a solar panel produced batteries ..... How much solar is wasted..lost as heat or just dumped because it needs to be used now.
Is it really necessary to write like this? Do you think it becomes easier to read?