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Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

We mechanically pollinate plants all the time, it’s not the end of our ability to feed ourselves. I think people are ignorant to and are overestimating how difficult it is to make pollen blow in the air or transfer using mechanical means.

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Please spend a few minutes researching pollination before just assuming that "technology" can solve a process that is handled by nature after billions of years of specialization by thousands of types of insects on thousands of different types of plants, trillions of times every year. Just hand waving some "mechanical means" is stuff that gets civilizations killed.

But but we're hackers! Surely we could tinker and hack our way to solving this, maybe with AI or crypto, or, now stay with me here, both!

I was going to make a joke about bees on the blockchain, but it looks like it's actually a real idea...

https://urbanbeelab.org/projects/the-future-of-food-saving-t...

It’s definitely a problem and we need to develop technical solutions as workarounds since there is an inability to get political traction to do the most optimal thing.

How about we apply the effort and resources that a "technical solution" would require (which in this case would be massive because again, you are trying to replicate a highly complex natural phenomenon of which many components are barely or not at all understood) to get "political traction on the most optimal thing"?

There have been stories documenting how the decline of bee populations has necessitated the introduction of hand-pollination. [0] Hand-pollination seems both tedious and difficult to scale. Mechanical pollination might be viable in some environments but basically it amounts to extensively paying for something that historically has been free.

[0] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/life-without-bees-h...

It costs money to rent or maintain bees used in agriculture, but it's probably still cheaper.

... how much are you willing to stake on that assumption?

What other options are working? Geopolitics isn’t changing anytime soon.

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