Hacker News Reader

This over-hyped crap again? Humbug!

Call me when someone solves the REAL problem, which is the energy budget needed to make the amount of light people actually want.

That'll probably involve some way to shunt externally-generated electrical power into the tree.

View on HN

They way I see it, it's not going to completely replace street lighting. It's going to supplement available light, thus reducing our energy consumption among other benefits like producing oxygen. I'm especially excited about the possibility of genetically modifying trees that produce edible stuff to have bio luminescence, that'd be pretty cool.

Seriously. I saw a video from a major oil company (Exxon IIRC) sponsoring a demo day. "We want to power the cities of the future" it said. Those cities were dozens of skyscrapers filled with electricity -- people watching giant televisions, using giant iPads, every thing in their home, work and street just glowing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com