Short answer: the bank won’t give your shiny new tree-planting business a loan as easily as it will to a “liquid tank tree replacement” one.
Long answer:
- Trees take time to grow
- Trees need to be planted
- Trees make shade
- Animals like birds and insects like bees and mosquitos like to live next to them
- Trees don’t need electricity
- Trees take in heat radiated from the pavement
- Trees don’t look cool
While algae are more efficient at turning CO2 into oxygen in theory, in practice algae don’t have a good climate in such a tank (no oxygen without ventilation, i.e. constant electricity and they get cooked through the glass).
All in all, more of a gimmick than anything.
Aren’t like half of those bullet points positives? Also in addition to what you said once you got a tree you got a tree, those tanks need constant maintenence and cycling which I doubt anyone is going to bother with for more than a year after installing them.
The comment you replying to was trying to not so subtly point out this is a business plot and little else. Nobody is going to pay a subscription fee to have a tree in front of their business, but they might cough up money for a third party to maintain a tank of algae out front if it was sold right
Trees don’t look cool
You take that back!
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I had the same reaction until I read this.
TL;DR: it’s 10-50x more efficient at cleaning the air and actually generates both electricity and fertiliser.
Yes, it would be better to just get rid of all the cars generating the pollution in the first place and putting in some more trees, but there are clear advantages to this.
I appreciate Rebecca Watson’s opinion. Watched the 6min video, now convinced 👍
Also learned a new term: kneejerk cynicism
It provides fertilizer but needs “some food”.
How much food and what is it?
Typically for aquariums you have to feed these things fertilizer so it seems odd
How’s my dog supposed to piss on that
I don’t think your dog will see that as problematic.
Yeah, those are going to last at -40F/-40C nights we often experience where I live. Nor do I see them being able to add any cool relief from their shade on a hot day.
That said, it is hard to grow healthy trees in the poisoned soils of a big city. They tend to struggle and be sickly when choked by concrete and asphalt.
I don’t think anything’s wrong with trees, but maybe we could also have some of these as well as trees ?
Replace the advertisements on bus stops with a really cool green liquid wall 😮 (but they’d have to make the glass super thick, these things tend to be vandalized from time to time)
I don’t think anything’s wrong with trees, but maybe we could also have some of these as well as trees ?
First of all nobody is proposing to replace existing trees with that, that would be silly! AFAIU the people who created this also don’t want these to be used where trees could be planted. They are outspokenly designed for already densely packed cities that are already highly polluted and hostile to trees, to start turning things around. Rebecca Watson’s 6min take
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Wrong community, maybe? Lol
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iirc, algae are better oxygen producers per units of mass and volume, so a tank full of algae might actually be better than a tree. One issue though is that trees can grow on open ground, while algae require a tank to be built, most likely negating the economic benefits. Also, trees are more aesthetically pleasing.
What? You don’t like future jelly tree?
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Very cyberpunk
The most dystopian thing I’ve seen… Fuck, idk, it’s all pretty dystopian these days, I’ve lost count
Practical answer, fits in places trees may not. Pessimistic answer, fits in some guys cyberpunk ass vision for what he wants his office block to look like.
Trees grow and rip up the pavement around them. I do love the canopy though
So, uh, what’s wrong with that?
It makes it difficult to use the pavement, especially for elderly people and people with disabilities, costs the council a bunch of time and money to repair, and doing the repairs often require killing off the tree
So, uh, what’s wrong with that?
… with damaging infrastructure? Well, presumably the infrastructure will no longer be as good at serving its original purpose once it is damaged.
Have you ever seen how long it takes for a tree to grow?
Depends on the variety of course… my Willows need cutting down, whereas the acorns I planted before the willows are still tiny oaks in pots 🙂
Why is this in self hosted?
It has a USB port.
in case you want to self-host your own algae, I guess
Just give me a 4U tank somewhere where someone else can deal with harvesting the algae and a webcam aimed at it and I can enjoy it just fine from here. For me, selfhosting is mostly about the privacy, not principally about needing to be resistant to loss of Internet connectivity or the like.
I have seen a few guides on growing your own algae including from CodySlab.
Come on, you know there’s someone out there trying to work out how to selfhost one of these.
I have a birth bath I don’t ever replace the water in. Its like a shrub to me.
birth bath
Uhhhhhh you should probably at least drain out the placenta fluid…
You should look up “Walstad planted tank”. An all plants aquarium you don’t ever have to mess with (except to trim if you want to)
Nothing is wrong with trees, but the microalgae CO2 capture rate is 50x higher````` .
Their lifetime is also much shorter. Guess where all that CO2 goes, when they die ^^
Fertilizer
I have a solution. More algae.
Based and algae-pilled
I’m gonna bet that you’re going to get a much-more-economical return there by powdering whatever iron is used in building that thing and then dumping said iron powder into the ocean at an appropriate point.
I like how everyone is acting like it is normal to have this in self hosted
I love this about lemmy.
Like someone stumbling into the wrong house and still being welcomed.
It’s a lot more informal and relaxed than on the piss page of the Internet.
Is it FOSS?
Looks more like MOSS.
Trees are FOSS. This is a fork of trees.
Looks more like a complete rewrite to me.
As I recall, at least under US law, you can’t copyright genetically-engineered life, just get a twenty year biological patent. So I don’t think that FOSS status would be directly germane other than maybe in how some such licenses might deal with patent licensing.
