[HN Gopher] Artificial photosynthesis directed toward organic sy...
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Artificial photosynthesis directed toward organic synthesis
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-03-13 18:36 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "The synthetic potential of the present transformation is
| highlighted by a short synthesis of terfenadine, a
| pharmaceutically important anti-histamine compound."
|
| It was all fun and games until the Viagra weed got loose.
| greesil wrote:
| Part of the forbidden eleven.
|
| https://anathem.dlma.com/data/Eleven.html
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Got pulled from the market for being dangerous
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terfenadine
|
| but they prescribed it to me about as soon as it came out. I've
| tried all the allegedly non-drowsy antihistamines and the only
| one that doesn't have CNS effects for me is
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexofenadine
| jfengel wrote:
| If Allegra is working for you, and not killing you, stick
| with it.
|
| In my personal experience, cetirizine (Zyrtec) is also
| extremely effective and completely non-drowsy.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Notable that 'natural' photosynthesis only has a 1% efficiency at
| producing biomass. The best plants get 2%.
|
| That's really low compared to standard solar panels at 20%
| efficiency, or expensive lab solar panels at 47% (output:
| electricity).
|
| Basically, we have already beaten nature. Aiming to copy nature
| at this game is probably fruitless.
| ptsneves wrote:
| Except nature's framework comes with ability to manufacture and
| self maintain with infrastructure requirements that literally
| fall from the sky(rain). Given most of the cost of solar panels
| is installation and maintenance there are still places for
| photosynthesis.
| james_marks wrote:
| Exactly- and also the timeline. 1% over millennia is going to
| quickly beat the solar panel's lifetime output.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Basically, we have already beaten nature
|
| I don't understand the logic. Can you build life building
| blocks with solar panels? I don't think so. So your metric is
| irrelevant.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It depends, the efficiency isn't the only parameter. Plants are
| beloved and self sustained, there are plants that have been
| alive for thousands of years. Even when the plants die, they
| can be useful and are naturally recycled. Also, they are able
| to grow to enormous sizes with the materials available on site,
| and although it can create challenges plants are desired in
| most environments.
|
| Our advanced high efficiency devices are cool but the ultimate
| solar devices can be something with many characteristics of the
| plants.
| cyrillite wrote:
| If we're talking strictly about producing energy, yes, but this
| isn't a method for more efficient or desirable solar energy
| production. This is an attempt to recreate the biomanufacturing
| processes of plants, so that we can use solar energy and rain
| to synthesise desirable organic compounds in situ. If we can do
| that, then it's very exciting that we've blown plant efficiency
| out of the water before, because it means we should be able to
| do it in this domain too.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Photosynthesis a energy -> sugar processes and sugar is easy to
| store. So a better comparison includes a battery round-trip. I
| think we still win, but not by a x10 margin.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That is 'synthesis' as in chemical synthesis. Sugars are good
| for energy storage so the right comparison is with e-fuel
| production. They also can be made into structural materials.
|
| Casey Handmer, if he doesn't die from the Kool-aid, is going to
| go down the path Eric Drexler went down and that anybody who
| thinks seriously about space colonization goes down. You can
| have a revolution in space travel and then you need a
| revolution in manufacturing... or if you have the revolution in
| manufacturing you don't really need much better space travel.
|
| He's coming to the conclusion that Starship can't really send
| enough solar panels to Mars to support a human colony so now
| he's looking for a nuclear miracle. The other approach is to
| send a solar panel factory, but if you run numbers on it you
| will decide you need a solar panel factory factory that
| bootstraps itself and when you consider the spare parts problem
| conclude you need molecular assemblers or something that works
| as well as a molecular assembler.
|
| You see, plants are based on molecular assemblers and are
| already solar panel factory factories packed into a seed.
| sitkack wrote:
| So you need a thin-film factory-factory to put the plants in.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Basically, we have already beaten nature.
|
| This isn't true until synthetic fuels are cheaper than
| biofuels.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Basically, we have already beaten nature.
|
| Yeah, except solar panels don't exactly recycle themselves.
|
| Plants, however, do.
|
| So "beaten" is not the word I'd use.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| We only beat nature if forget to count the gigantic amount of
| CapEx you need when building a solar farm. (And we should even
| add the capital needed for the Solar panel factory too, when
| comparing with photosynthesis).
| adrian_b wrote:
| Unfortunately we have beaten nature only at a single stage of
| what is needed.
|
| There are 2 more steps needed to be able to do what a plant
| does.
|
| The second step after capturing solar energy is to use that
| energy with a good efficiency to capture from the air carbon
| dioxide and nitrogen (perhaps also water vapor) by converting
| them into some simple organic substances, perhaps a simple
| amino-acid like glycine and some other simple HCO molecule,
| e.g. glycerol.
|
| With such simple organic substances, one could feed a culture
| of genetically-modified fungi or other fungus-like organisms,
| which could produce high-quality proteins and fatty substances
| (there already exist genetically-modified fungus strains, e.g.
| of Trichoderma, which can produce whey protein or egg-white
| protein, i.e. much higher-quality proteins than those that can
| be extracted from plants).
|
| While the first 2 stages of capturing solar energy into simple
| organic substances are things at which we should be able to
| beat nature, at the synthesis of complex organic substances
| like those that are necessary as food, but also for various
| industrial applications, there is no known method that could
| beat the biological enzymatic syntheses, so for such things the
| solution are genetically-modified bacterial or fungal
| organisms, not machines.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Basically, we have already beaten nature.
|
| Are you really sure?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We have also beaten plants on some experimental schemes for
| air-carbon capture. But organic synthesis is still incredibly
| inefficient.
|
| We are probably on the low 0.1%s of total efficiency of
| converting solar power into organic molecules. And it's still
| very capital intensive.
| daveguy wrote:
| > Basically, we have already beaten nature. Aiming to copy
| nature at this game is probably fruitless.
|
| As long as nature only consists of electricity. If it involves
| matter we might not be quite at 20% efficiency (output:
| physical work).
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