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Comment by kris-s | Hacker News Reader

The youtube link in the article has a nice animation of how mantas filter: https://youtu.be/2nRN1ZJPs98

This approach to problem solving is one of my favorite. Instead of thinking hard about a problem: observe nature and leverage a few billion years of evolutionary problem solving that's already been done.

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I share your opinion of it as well! There is a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetics

The animation in the middle of that video was very informative, thank you.

That strategy can be very successful, but sometimes what you discover is that nature often depends on things like regenerating materials, and other things we can’t come close to replicating. We can understand how a dragonfly flies, but we can’t replicate it efficiently. Nature is also often unconcerned with long service lives, again looking at the dragonfly. What we want from our machine tends to be durability and reparibility, not to mention affordability.

Nature can only get us so far with the current state of the art of materials science.

Seems to me that one of the more interesting directions that genetic engineering could take is manufacturing of exotic materials. The safety issues would be much easier to manage as well if the GM organisms are kept in vats in a lab instead of planted in farm fields, etc.

It already has, spider goat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-16554357/t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel

Spider goat! That’s really amazing, and the promise of spider silk and related materials to everything from body armor to surgery can’t be overstated.

Also...

Spider goat, spider goat, doing whatever a spider goat does. Is it a spider? No it’s a goat. Spider goat. Spider goat.

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