Even if you do get this to produce appreciable amounts of light, this seems like a really good way to have these plants spread outside of their designated areas and fuck up wildlife even more than our artificial lighting does already.
Given that these plants would need to devote a significant amount of resources to store the energy in order to produce light, I would expect they would be outcompeted by regular plants that aren’t wasting their energy in the wild. Selection pressures generally favor efficient use of energy.
Your reasoning makes sense but we can’t really be sure until we let their seeds loose in the wild and see how they do. Bioluminescent animals and algae do exist. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be some unforeseen selective benefit that would allow these mutated glowing plants to thrive
Anything could happen obviously, but it’s not really fundamentally different from something evolving naturally either. If there is some benefit to this, we might see a new kind of ecosystem developing around these plants. That’s always a risk with biology.
Good point.
Damn tankies again stealing solarpunk aesthetics! (/s)
Sounds like it might look cool but even if they were able to actually make enough light for a public space I doubt it would actually be more energy efficient to feed water and maintain extensive gardens down every street than to install some LED bulbs.
Even if it wasn’t more energy efficient, you’d also get fresh air from the plants as a bonus, and an ecosystem developing around them. Plants also help manage heat in cities which is another bonus. Having more nature in the city may have a positive effect on mental health. Finally, you’d be massively saving on materials that go into making stuff like LED bulbs that could now be used elsewhere. If you could make the plants glow bright enough, imagine how many billions of LEDs you’d be saving in a country the size of China.
Imagine all the fertilizer and labor spent on the plants. I agree that more green space would benefit any city but I don’t think a monoculture of plants engineered for maximum bioluminescence would make a healthy base for it. Public lighting and public greening are two separate problems and trying to solve both at once means not doing as good a job at either.
Using fertilizer and labor sounds better than mining and refining stuff like rare earths to me. You could probably even process waste from sewage into fertilizer creating a somewhat closed system this way. On the balance, this seems like a far preferable trade off all around if you’re going to need to produce light somehow. There’s also no reason why this would need to be a monoculture, and they actually talk about engineering a variety of plants in the article.
I don’t really see how you can make the assertion that these are two separate problems that can’t be elegantly solved in this way. We’ll only know whether that’s the case once it’s actually tried.
I think we’re picturing a very different level of brightness achievable per plant. Replacing one street light would require a very large amount of glowing vegetation. Just the maintenance would be prohibitive. A city would need more gardeners than all other civil servants combined. And nevermind whether the fertilizer is produced from sewage or petrochemicals the runoff would be an enormous pollutant in its own right. Also it would be least effective in winter when the need for artificial light is greatest.
I mean you wouldn’t necessarily need the same level of light, nor would you have to replace all the street lights with this. There’s no reason these two things can’t coexist. And sure, it wouldn’t work in winter, but that’s only a problem for specific regions. Large parts of China don’t have cold winters.
Yes, I think it would mostly be a really cool aesthetic gimmick, not serve a critical function. But probably no harm done in planting plants and LEDs can still be used, if needed. Also I’m not a biologist, but even if those plants inevitably spread to the wild, I assume that the impact on ecosystems from some glowing plants would be minimal. Maybe they could distract insects? But artificial lights already do that and are much brighter. I don’t think they would be bright enough to affect most night time animals (owls, rodents, predators hunting rodents, etc.) if they spread to forests, or at least I hope they won’t have a harder time hiding. Okay, maybe someone should look into the possible effects on a case by case basis depending on species and region.
I’ve seen one of those glowing petunias in real life, it’s laughable that glowing plants could illuminate anything like a park or a street.
Don’t get me wrong, it was cool af, but it’s not the future of lighting
It’s not laughable, it is good to have one more option.
As I answered in an other comment : You don’t always need a bright light, lots of cities even cut lights few hours at night (0-5 am) to preserve both energy and dark sky for biodiversity.
Some glowing petunias would be an option to show a path
for fuck sakes, no.
These have a dim glow similar to mushrooms, no one is going to light a city with that.
You don’t always need a bright light, lots of cities even cut lights few hours at night (0-5 am) to preserve both energy and dark sky for biodiversity.
Some cities are already using glowing plants, but more for events, there is a start-up that provides this solution since few years
I don’t think there’s any fundamental reason why you couldn’t get plants to produce a stronger glow though.
I think the energy metabolism of any organism would limit the amount of light you can get. I don’t believe any organism (except maybe bacteria with lots of nutrients provided) has that much energy to spare and handle without dying pretty fast.
there’s actually some research on the subject that I linked in the other reply in this thread
Of course there is, you can’t get more energy out than you put in.
Obviously, but that doesn’t mean plants can’t be designed to accumulate energy during the day though photosynthesis and release it at night in form of bioluminescence. There’s actually a whole separate line of research regarding that:
