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Comment by philipps | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it’s encouraging to see engineers and scientists focus their efforts on important societal issues. However, we need to find more thoughtful ways to use this technology. A good place to start is trying to deeply understand a context and need, before coming up with a solution. We just ran a workshop in Jordan with engineers who want to develop education technology for refugee learners. On the first day we took our teams to NGOs who are working with refugees and interviewed the learners. As a result most team scrapped their initial ideas. I wish learning to analyse a challenge through the lense of the user was a more integral part of engineering education.

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What makes you think that these companies didn't go through that process?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16264127

Also, the usual rule of thumb: "drones". Flying means constantly expending energy to fight against gravity. Unless the particular problem solved requires flying (to e.g. reach otherwise unreachable spots), solutions involving flying machines are almost always bad. And I don't see anything in reforestation that requires flying.

This is doubly important if you're trying to make the world a better place, instead of just making a quick buck. If all you care about is money, you can make it so that someone else pays the energy costs. But if you truly care about doing something good, then you have to factor them in (they almost always involve non-renewable sources and pollution) and ask yourself, if your plan is even a net improvement for the world.

I can see two alternatives to flying, sending a person, or a remote-control/autonomous ground based machine. The first one is not as productive, the second one is much more complex, and so more expensive.

If cost and fuel are major concerns then sending a person is by far the cheapest option. Not the most productive but in the areas that need reforestation (i.e. where they burn or clear cut, Asia / Amazon) the labour is not that expensive. Though there are a lot of other factors involved.

These kinds of projects remind me of Juicero, where it combines a few things western (middle/upper class?) people care about with technology and expects a great result but end up a middling disappointment.

A ground based drone is orders of magnitude simpler than a multirotor. There is nothing magical about multirotors except being the latest fad for tech geeks.

A ground based drone — eg a modified bulldozer — can carry far more plants as cargo, meaning planting a field of a thousand sapling might require one trip where a flying drone will require a thousand trips.

The only catch is access: for a remote region with no trails of any kind it might be difficult for a large vehicle to navigate through the forest. In this case clearing a path for the planting machine might be a lower cost to the environment than the energy required to fly a thousand sorties with flying planters. A ground based drone will also be able to plant more robust saplings, since payload weight is far less of a concern.

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