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Comment by laser | Hacker News Reader

Relatedly, anyone know of anybody working on genetically modifying trees to create human-habitats on earth? It’s a fun and crazy concept, but perhaps it’s still far too technically difficult to approach with current tools.

Imagine planting many acres of genetically-modified trees and coming back in forty years to the primary structures of thousands of beautiful forest homes :P

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As far as I understand it, the mechanisms that trees and other plants use to make themselves plant-shapes wouldn’t generalize to other useful things like houses; e.g., the algorithm is something akin to an L-system [0], and there’s only so much one can do with that.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

Well you could program a die off of cells, so internals of a tree could possibly be hollowed out with rooms.

What if you use multiple trees together? A system of L-systems surely allows for more complexity?

EDIT: Might even lead to interesting "composite materials" if you can get different wood types to (semi)fuse together naturally.

A step back from that, you can grow trees into furniture and bridges. So I suppose you could grow trees into the shape of houses, or house frames.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tree+grown+into+a+chair&t=fpas&ia=...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=living+tree+bridge&t=fpas&ia=about

The baobab tree[1] is already pretty close - it grows to large circumferences and has hollow trunks.

1. https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Baobab-Tree-Home/

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