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Notable that 'natural' photosynthesis only has a 1% efficiency at producing biomass. The best plants get 2%.
That's really low compared to standard solar panels at 20% efficiency, or expensive lab solar panels at 47% (output: electricity).
Basically, we have already beaten nature. Aiming to copy nature at this game is probably fruitless.
That is ‘synthesis’ as in chemical synthesis. Sugars are good for energy storage so the right comparison is with e-fuel production. They also can be made into structural materials.
Casey Handmer, if he doesn’t die from the Kool-aid, is going to go down the path Eric Drexler went down and that anybody who thinks seriously about space colonization goes down. You can have a revolution in space travel and then you need a revolution in manufacturing… or if you have the revolution in manufacturing you don’t really need much better space travel.
He’s coming to the conclusion that Starship can’t really send enough solar panels to Mars to support a human colony so now he’s looking for a nuclear miracle. The other approach is to send a solar panel factory, but if you run numbers on it you will decide you need a solar panel factory factory that bootstraps itself and when you consider the spare parts problem conclude you need molecular assemblers or something that works as well as a molecular assembler.
You see, plants are based on molecular assemblers and are already solar panel factory factories packed into a seed.
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So you need a thin-film factory-factory to put the plants in.
If we’re talking strictly about producing energy, yes, but this isn’t a method for more efficient or desirable solar energy production. This is an attempt to recreate the biomanufacturing processes of plants, so that we can use solar energy and rain to synthesise desirable organic compounds in situ. If we can do that, then it’s very exciting that we’ve blown plant efficiency out of the water before, because it means we should be able to do it in this domain too.
Unfortunately we have beaten nature only at a single stage of what is needed.
There are 2 more steps needed to be able to do what a plant does.
The second step after capturing solar energy is to use that energy with a good efficiency to capture from the air carbon dioxide and nitrogen (perhaps also water vapor) by converting them into some simple organic substances, perhaps a simple amino-acid like glycine and some other simple HCO molecule, e.g. glycerol.
With such simple organic substances, one could feed a culture of genetically-modified fungi or other fungus-like organisms, which could produce high-quality proteins and fatty substances (there already exist genetically-modified fungus strains, e.g. of Trichoderma, which can produce whey protein or egg-white protein, i.e. much higher-quality proteins than those that can be extracted from plants).
While the first 2 stages of capturing solar energy into simple organic substances are things at which we should be able to beat nature, at the synthesis of complex organic substances like those that are necessary as food, but also for various industrial applications, there is no known method that could beat the biological enzymatic syntheses, so for such things the solution are genetically-modified bacterial or fungal organisms, not machines.
Except nature’s framework comes with ability to manufacture and self maintain with infrastructure requirements that literally fall from the sky(rain). Given most of the cost of solar panels is installation and maintenance there are still places for photosynthesis.
Exactly- and also the timeline. 1% over millennia is going to quickly beat the solar panel’s lifetime output.
It depends, the efficiency isn't the only parameter. Plants are beloved and self sustained, there are plants that have been alive for thousands of years. Even when the plants die, they can be useful and are naturally recycled. Also, they are able to grow to enormous sizes with the materials available on site, and although it can create challenges plants are desired in most environments.
Our advanced high efficiency devices are cool but the ultimate solar devices can be something with many characteristics of the plants.
> Basically, we have already beaten nature
I don't understand the logic. Can you build life building blocks with solar panels? I don't think so. So your metric is irrelevant.
Sure, but if you can synthesize carbon chains directly then you can make pure compounds. Probably things more valuable than sugar. So you would compare energy of growing plants/microbes + downstream processing or chemical inputs and processing energy (which will never be pure) to whatever this can make - not much right now it seems.
> Basically, we have already beaten nature.
Yeah, except solar panels don't exactly recycle themselves.
Plants, however, do.
So "beaten" is not the word I'd use.
We have also beaten plants on some experimental schemes for air-carbon capture. But organic synthesis is still incredibly inefficient.
We are probably on the low 0.1%s of total efficiency of converting solar power into organic molecules. And it's still very capital intensive.
>Basically, we have already beaten nature.
This isn't true until synthetic fuels are cheaper than biofuels.
> Basically, we have already beaten nature. Aiming to copy nature at this game is probably fruitless.
As long as nature only consists of electricity. If it involves matter we might not be quite at 20% efficiency (output: physical work).
We only beat nature if forget to count the gigantic amount of CapEx you need when building a solar farm. (And we should even add the capital needed for the Solar panel factory too, when comparing with photosynthesis).
Photosynthesis a energy -> sugar processes and sugar is easy to store. So a better comparison includes a battery round-trip. I think we still win, but not by a x10 margin.
>Basically, we have already beaten nature.
Are you really sure?
"The synthetic potential of the present transformation is highlighted by a short synthesis of terfenadine, a pharmaceutically important anti-histamine compound."
It was all fun and games until the Viagra weed got loose.
Got pulled from the market for being dangerous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terfenadine
but they prescribed it to me about as soon as it came out. I've tried all the allegedly non-drowsy antihistamines and the only one that doesn't have CNS effects for me is
If Allegra is working for you, and not killing you, stick with it.
In my personal experience, cetirizine (Zyrtec) is also extremely effective and completely non-drowsy.
Part of the forbidden eleven.
Crafted by Rajat
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