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Comment by strictfp | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that the plant was robust in space. It could just as well have stopped growing at all. Makes you wonder if there are any low gravity growth places on earth. If not, where has the plant learned this skill?

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With plants, the "default" is to grow a shoot in a straight line. When an adjustment needs to be made, the shoot's two sides grow at different rates, resulting in a bend. If there is no stimulus that makes the plant want to "turn", it will just combine growing in the same direction (probably with some random small variations thrown in).

By analogy to cars, if you disable the steering wheel, the car can still move, but it won't have a particular destination.

I'm not sure if you're joking, but you should know that I had a good laugh at this comment. :) In case you are indeed wondering, gravity has no effect on cell growth, or indeed on any of the cell's vital functions. More than anything, cellular processes rely on chemical diffusion, which at that scale is more strongly affected by temperature than by gravity.

Also, gravity is almost constant everywhere on the earth's surface.

Wow. Complete cognitive dissonance between us :) I was reasoning about the plant as a biological device which has adapted to life according to Darwin's theory of evolution. Since gravity, as you point out, is quite constant on earth, one could expect that a plant has come to rely on it for its existence. Unless trained otherwise. So I was contemplating that the ability to survive without gravity would have had to be a skill learned off the surface of the planet. And if it has never experienced such an environment before in its evolutionary development, one could consider it extreme luck that it kept on living without the previously nearly constant gravity parameter. If the plant manages to survive in spite of fundamental environmental changes without previous training, it must have a very robust design. It's like a computer program which would keep on running if you removed main memory. Not impossible, but very unlikely that it wouldn't be dependent on main memory by now. If it still works, must it not be designed in a very robust manner?

Are plants this robust? One could be lead to believe that this is indeed a useful property in a evolutionary sense. But it must surely also have high costs. So it is nonetheless a very interesting question in my opinion.

Addendum: Regarding cells not being dependent on gravity for growth: In the article is was mentioned that plant in fact are dependent on gravity for their survival, in fact very much so. Without gravity the plant would not be able to physically locate its root system correctly or get its leaves above ground. It was, however, also mentioned that the plant survive in space just fine.

Plants did evolve in what is effectively low gravity 'environments' namely under water, which is why hydroponics can still work. We don't actually know much about how large plants like trees grow in space so while some plants are fine that does not mean they all are.

There's no reason to leap from the presence of an environmental factor to reliance on that factor for survival.

For instance, air is thick with nitrogen, something that most organisms need but are unable to extract from that air.

Do you have anything for your claim (like maybe NASA planting something on the space). Because, after reading this article, I'm having a hard-time figuring out the chance that the plant will actually find its way to the top.

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