69
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
69 points (82.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43852 readers
701 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
From air to your plate: tech startups making food from atmospheric CO₂
Nature already did this. It's called plants.
How would that work? Surely one periodic table chemical couldn't singlehandedly convert itself into all the nutrients the body needs.
You're right, you can't. You need some additional stuff. Plants takes both CO2 from the air but they also need for instance nitrogen from the ground. Now, of course 80% of air is nitrogen but it's bound up in an extremely stable state that plants can't really use. It takes too much energy to break the bond. If we could find some way to extract nitrogen cheaply from air though, it would be a real game changer.
Why not just eat the plants?
Well plants do other stuff than only produce food, so I guess the idea is that it might be possible to produce food more efficiently than a plant does, which isn't that far-fetched.
So it's not "don't eat plants" as much as "look, we made this bacteria that can produce a vegetable-soup with slightly more calories per energy input than a carrot".