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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

No doubt we'll see this transplanted into GM crops for reduced fertilizer need.

Since we spend a couple percent of our total energy consumption just on turning nitrogen into fertilizer, anything that reduces our dependence would be awesome for the climate.

I don't think so. Biological nitrogen fixation is far too inefficient for this to make sense. Deceased in yield would be too big tfor this to make sense

To give some numbers, just the fixation takes 5.4 more energy, and photosynthesis is 6 times less efficient than solar panels. Moving to biological fixation would also increase water and pesticide usage

Maybe we'll make some progress in human genetic engineering and get it in us too. We'd be able to eliminate the need for B3 vitamins!

I’ll let other people try that out, then in 20 years we’ll do the classic “well sh/t, messing with this actually* also messes that up. Whoops!”

Well I guess we need to figure out how to regression test humans then!

It'll be lots of fun when AGI starts doing unit tests on us.

It'll be too busy arguing with itself over whether its an integration test or not

In fact back to the original comment we’re finding out that shoving chemicals and GM crops in to complex ecosystems messes a lot of stuff up too.

IVG + gene editing, we're already there!

Or worse, multiple faster than algaes and sucking up all the Nitrogen from thr air.

A photosynthetic organism that fixed more nitrogen than it needed would (1) be at a terrible competitive disadvantage (nitrogen fixation requires a great deal of energy), and (2) would be a source of fixed nitrogen when it died, boosting the growth of other plants that could leech off its efforts.

Do you realise 70% of the atmosphere is nitrogen? We will not run out of it.

make that 78%

Removing the nitrogen bottleneck would let them capture carbon faster. Given our predicament I'd say we should take all the help we get.

Remove too much carbon however and the plants die.

We don't want a Great Decarbonification Event.

Decaying plants emit carbon. The extra nitrogen would just be changing is the length of the give-your-carbon-back-to-the-atmosphere queue. It's negative feedback: stable.

Nitrogen is inert. Even if you could run out of N2 (unlikely), it would have no effect.

That's wrong, the fact that is inert doesn't mean it's useless

If you remove all nitrogen from atmosphere, there WILL be consequences

The sibling comment about lift is one of the few things I can think of. Birds would have a tough time. The freezing point of water would also be lowered significantly.

Eliminating a gas while keeping all other partial pressures constant only affects physical processes. Biochemistry on the other hand only relies on partial pressures, and the number of organisms which interact with atmospheric nitrogen are literally so few that you could count them on one hand.

This is all pretty far afield though. There's no way biological processes are even going to have a dent in the ocean of N2 surrounding us.

Current planes will not be able to fly since they will lose 70% of lift. They will grow gigantic wings.

There'd be less drag on rockets too. That could be a plus for when we need to escape the death spiral we create

Except burning your lungs in the not-so-long run, as they are not evolved to deal with a pure oxygen atmosphere.

Lungs do absolutely fine in 3 psi pure oxygen.

Lungs are damaged by high PPO2, not high FO2.

Eh, that's really hard to do and fertilizer is cheap you just zap some air with electricity and You're chilling. Plus legumes have the better version figured out imo - symbiotic bacteria instead of having to support a whole new organelle.

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