Humans have imitated nature since prehistoric times. Aircraft, submarines and even cars are designed in the image of wild animals.
Huh? This is so misleading that I have trouble reading beyond it. These things are designed and tested for functionality in environments that _also_ have animals (wild or not), and many of the same forces that designs cater to, also shape the evolution of said animals. For a lot of aspects, studying the solutions that have evolved over millions of generations is a great illumination and often a jumpstart to designs that work well. But they’re not “designed in the image of”, they’re “designed with some of the functionality of”.
Directly speaking, there are zero animals that can safely and cheaply carry people in the air, under water, or on roads. We had to invent new things for these purposes. What new things are you imagining that require artificial photosynthesis that aren’t already performed well by natural photosynthesis?
Today, we can synthesize chlorophyll, and it’s reasonable to think we could easily fabricate a leaf to use it to photosynthesize O2 and carbohydrates from CO2. We’re a lot further from packaging the technology into a self-replicating tiny starter unit (“seed”). But it doesn’t matter, as we can _directly_ use plants for this purpose.
It will be interesting to see whether, as we do discover new uses for photosynthesis (and other biological transformations of chemicals), we start from the ground up with purely fabricated solutions, or whether we find it better to engineer plants and animals that do the job.
Huh? This is so misleading that I have trouble reading beyond it. These things are designed and tested for functionality in environments that _also_ have animals (wild or not), and many of the same forces that designs cater to, also shape the evolution of said animals. For a lot of aspects, studying the solutions that have evolved over millions of generations is a great illumination and often a jumpstart to designs that work well. But they’re not “designed in the image of”, they’re “designed with some of the functionality of”.
Directly speaking, there are zero animals that can safely and cheaply carry people in the air, under water, or on roads. We had to invent new things for these purposes. What new things are you imagining that require artificial photosynthesis that aren’t already performed well by natural photosynthesis?
Today, we can synthesize chlorophyll, and it’s reasonable to think we could easily fabricate a leaf to use it to photosynthesize O2 and carbohydrates from CO2. We’re a lot further from packaging the technology into a self-replicating tiny starter unit (“seed”). But it doesn’t matter, as we can _directly_ use plants for this purpose.
It will be interesting to see whether, as we do discover new uses for photosynthesis (and other biological transformations of chemicals), we start from the ground up with purely fabricated solutions, or whether we find it better to engineer plants and animals that do the job.