Scientists find link between photosynthesis and 'fifth state of matter' | Hacker News Reader

Scientists find link between photosynthesis and 'fifth state of matter'

phys.org

109 points8bitsrule21 comments

Actual paper which has a nicer summary: https://journals.aps.org/prxenergy/abstract/10.1103/PRXEnerg...

The ARI of the paper's 1400-char abstract is 25+ (disciplinary professor level)

The ARI of the article's first 1387 chars is 13+. (college freshman)

I'll admit I'm not up to speed on the 'Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex' OR 'accounting for intrachromophore electron correlation'.

and the 'Popular Summary' below the abstract?

I’ll admit that I didn’t see it until you pointed it out. I scrolled down a little bit, saw the citation info and author affiliation, and assumed there wasn’t anything else.

Will we ever be able to extract CO2 from the atmosphere by mimicking the process that goes on in trees? And perhaps speeding it up or increasing the density? Is that even feasible? Disclaimer I know very little about botany/biology/chemistry.. so if the question may be off.

We can, but you have to supply energy to do it; and since we still burn carbon for energy, it's not worth extracting CO2 since if you've got the spare energy for that, it's far more efficient to simply burn less coal.

Having a thing that makes nice big carbon structures from atmospheric carbon would be nifty, though. People use wood for all sorts of things; being able to plop a "seed" some place and come back in a couple seasons and have a structure made from sunlight, ambient minerals, and co2 from the air -- would be super cool.

I still can't quite convince my kids or other people I mention it to -- hey -- this tree? Almost all of it comes from air and sunlight. I'm lucky to live near some really big, really old trees; they're quite obviously magical.

Yes, It really does boggle the mind when you realize that these large trees were mostly manufactured from air. Just a few trace elements sucked out of the ground added in.

So power it with wind or nuclear?

If you have x MWh of wind or nuclear, then using that for CO2 conversion to C is worthless and harmful, since the obvious alternative is to send the same MWh to consumers, replacing x MWh produced by current coal electricity plants, as that would reduce the CO2 emissions at least 2-3 times more than what you could capture with that energy. As long as there's at least a single "CO2 conversion machine" and at least a single coal plant, shutting down an equal quantity of both is a good deal for both environment and economy.

I mean, in practice there's a single pool of energy for each region and even those are connected in various ways (e.g. shipping of fuels), so "power A with X and B with Y" is just fiction, all energy consumption is powered with all energy generation, and the marginal consumption is (currently) fueled by fossil fuels, which vary how much is burnt based on how much consumption is not filled by nuclear/solar/wind.

It might make sense when you need the energy storage density. For example for jet fuel.

Quite a lot of people are researching this. For a Starting point, have a look at the 'harnessing plants' initiative at the Salk Institute:

https://www.salk.edu/harnessing-plants-initiative/

You already can, plant trees or other plants or use algae farms etc. Then sequester the carbon into something that will not decay quickly and release it back.

The problem is always scale, so any artificial mechanism that would mimic this would have to many orders of magnitude more efficient than using existing biological solutions to be viable as biological solutions are simpler and cheaper to do at any scale.

If the Netflix show Unstable is a reliable source, a hyperdense "biomass" or recaptured carbon cement is the future. ;) it's quite enjoyable - very silly.

I’m wondering if it’s possible that the UAPs with no means of propulsion that pilots see and record could be doing some energy transfer using this or a similar principle.

"When a photon from the sun strikes a leaf, it sparks a change in a specially designed molecule. The energy knocks loose an electron. The electron, and the "hole" where it once was, can now travel around the leaf, carrying the energy of the sun to another area ///"

You can theoretically use an electron cannon as a source of thrust, but that thrust would be very, very small. Even very real and large electric ion thrusters that power interplanetary spacecraft have thrust within a few N. And this is very far from the range of energies that photosynthesis molecules provides.

I appreciate the sincere reply and the explanation. I don’t know physics. Just coming at it from the pov of a writer of speculative science fiction.

Clearly, speculative science fiction is not a safe topic for HN. Downvote noted.

It'll be super ironic if some aliens somewhere read that and think something like "shit, we've been found out". ;)

lol

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