Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidmurdoch | Hacker News Reader

If it does actually require regular maintenance of a proprietary microbiom then, eh, it doesn't clean the air like 30 regular plants; it's more like a subscription service for clean air that comes with a plant.

Still cool though.

View on HN

Yeah that bit feels weird. It's designed to require less water than normal, I assume because many forget to water their plant. It makes sense, given the cost. You can't very well have people accidentally killing an expensive plant. But they somehow expect people who can't remember to water to provide the same plant with a sprinkle of bacteria once a month?

I am also worried about proprietary plants, I don't know, maybe you can make cuttings? But yeah, still really cool.

I’m pretty sure that’s just the typical watering requirements of pothos. It’s an extremely neglect-tolerant houseplant.

But it's NASA. They are not thinking about forgetful plant owner on earth that needs help. NASA wants to scrub air in spaaaaace, or on other planets located in spaaaace.

We just want to use it on earth so we can show how cool we are that we have something from NASA while your "other" friends have Dyson gear.

CAaaS+P is the business model of the future.

Plant as a service :(

This is not the solarpunk future of my dreams. I self-host my plants. My plants are on-prem bare-dirt.

As they should be.

What happens when you need to go out of town for an extended period? If it was just another ${X}aaS, you could temporarily suspend those plant instances and avoid the charges. Their work would be unused during that period anyway, so why pay for it? On-prem would still continue to accrue those charges. Also, what happens if you have your large extended family over for the holidays? Your on-prem plants would be unable to handle the load and start returning 504 type errors. With ${X}aaS you could just spin up a few more instances or even upgrade to larger instance types. Once the family holiday nightmare is over, you just spin them down again.

> Their work would be unused during that period anyway, so why pay for it?

should people in Silesia or Dheli pay triple price of London, because air pollution is bigger problem there, so cleaning air has more value?

Sure, why shouldn't they be subjected to spot pricing too?

Should is a weird word here, they will. It's a market question not a morality question.

And IP-unemcumbered.

Unless you use Monsanto seeds

Plant subscription boxes are a thing, so we're not _that_ far off.

In some ways that's nothing new under the sun.

One of my student jobs in the 1970's was with a company that provided and serviced the decorative plants in restaurants and hotels.

We would go there every week and take them outside to be watered, drained, and given the only sunshine they were going to see for a while.

Anything that was looking sick we replaced with spares and rehabilitated.

Hi David, Lio here from Neoplants, thank you for your comment! The plant itself is also bioengineered to purify the air, but for people who will want to maximize the performance of Neo P1 we will indeed recommend adding back the power drops (microbiome) on a regular basis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com