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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

In full sun a plant can absorb far more light than it can handle. Apparently one of the little tricks of chloroplasts is how they shunt that power away without sustaining damage. Could we just do something with that power?

It’s a bit like turning the rotor blades when the wind is too high to keep the thing from ripping itself apart.

But imagine if you could make a turbine that generated tons more electricity in a gale force wind. Think what you could do with that much concentrated power.

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I've not been able to kill the idea of a plant that uses excess energy to create hydrogen which it uses to float its seeds far and yonder. Didn't know that there's already a lot of excess energy that could be used for such a project, though I suspect the knowledge of genegeneering needed to make it happen is a ways off still.

The biological hardware for producing hydrogen already exists; green plants make use of an oxygen-evolving complex to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen then goes on to pump ATP synthase.

However, storing hydrogen is probably infeasible for biology. It's difficult to store hydrogen, even using metal containers without it leaking out, because the molecules are so small.

Also, explosive.

Usually it would be far simpler and cheaper to just use the wind to spread seeds through a variety of methods. Nature tends to "try" to conserve energy (no conscious effort involved but the ones that do so usually win out at a certain point), hence the rarity of high energy mechanisms things like bombdardier beetles or even offensive horns - predatory usage needed to sustain it would be too expensive for misses but defensive usage can be budgetted for better since saving their life is worth a heavy investment compared to death which voids its energy benefit to propagation. Even suicidal maters want their energy to contribute to their offspring.

Granted there are also opportunity costs to everything - rabbits dominated Australia comically despite the widespread deadliness by investing in reproduction and evasion instead of dangerous defense mechanisms.

That's such a neat idea. I wonder why floating plants don't already exist. I'm also surprised that I've not seen it in Scifi.

Not hydrogen storage for seed dispersal, but Larry Niven's Known Space series featured Stage Trees. These were plants genetically engineered to be solid fuel rockets. They grew to be quite large, multistage launchers. When they ignited, they dispersed their seeds to other planets.

How would an evolutionary pathway to floating look like?

Like tumbleweeds as air plants[∆], floating around like helium-filled beach balls, living off the humidity and occasional puddle or storm.

One problem with floating plants is that dirt and water are heavy.

[∆]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillandsia

One could argue that Avatar has those.

to add to this, I just listened to a podcast called StarTalk [0] where Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed James Cameron [1]. James Cameron stated the idea for some of the plants actually come from personally scuba diving and seeing some plants react the way they did in the movie (specifically when you touch them move or close up)

James Cameron stated he has been a passionate scuba diver and it was a slight nod to others who may have had similar experiences.

[0] https://www.startalkradio.net/show/ [1] https://www.startalkradio.net/show/the-spirit-of-exploration...

Water lily seeds float away with help from some gas. Wikipedia tells it's just trapped air, but ...

In both cases it's a straightforward cost-benefit tradeoff: sure, you can build a turbine that works in gales. But they're rare. So in practice the turbine design is tuned against a statistical model of expected wind speeds to deliver the best $/kWh ratio over its design life.

> Think what you could do with that much concentrated power.

That sounds more like a headache (now you have to uprate the whole power-handling systems) than a benefit.

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