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Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by moffkalast on Saturday February 04, 2023 @08:45AM (#34654431)
That's all well and good, but natural selection has the tendency to only find a good enough solution that happens to work in a niche, not an optimal one for all cases. There may very well be a technique that doesn't work as well in small individual plant-sized systems but can become far more efficient when scaled up. I suppose it is somewhat unlikely though.
Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by JoshuaRogers on Saturday February 04, 2023 @09:24AM (#34654702)
As I was reading your comment, I couldn’t help but laugh as it reminded me of the quote “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by dopidopHN on Saturday February 04, 2023 @11:04AM (#34655417)
Scaled up at the continental level, like say, the Amazonian basin?
Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by moffkalast on Saturday February 04, 2023 @12:05PM (#34655979)
Scaled beyond a single tree-sized entity I mean. Sure you can put a lot of trees together to do more, but each tree has to do its own small scale sourcing of water, sun, air, etc.

You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.

Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by dopidopHN on Saturday February 04, 2023 @04:41PM (#34658662)
I see, thanks for expanding on your point.

Just a detail: forest are not tree next to each other’s. The relationship between organisms change the energy efficiency and life outcome of most of the participants.

Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by sidpatil on Sunday February 05, 2023 @12:32PM (#34666748)
> Scaled beyond a single tree-sized entity I mean. Sure you can put a lot of trees together to do more, but each tree has to do its own small scale sourcing of water, sun, air, etc.

Vertical versus horizontal scaling.

> You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.

Microservices versus monoliths.

Re:MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide ... by Schroedingersat on Monday February 06, 2023 @03:38AM (#34674855)
Why use a sand blaster when you could polish something by hitting it with one huge rock?

Why have thousands of individual car fuelling stations when everyone could drive to one giant one in the middle of the country?

Why have a steam turbine in your nuclear plant with many small blades?

If your thousand spoons work pretty much untended and cost half a million each, then an excavator that requires a crew of a thousand which costs ten billion is just as stupid as all of the above.