Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
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Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#2Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#3Oh man, here comes the grey goo.
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#4Could you “clean the air” by creating many such breaks and having it pull co2 out of the air?
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#5Protomolecule
Excuse the drive-by one-liner. Hard to resist.
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#6Could you “clean the air” by creating many such breaks and having it pull co2 out of the air?
Technically yes, but practically no.
It'd be a very inefficient and slow way to "clean the air. The materials still need to be invested with whatever energy (e.g. glucose) is going to be consumed by the process, and once it finishes you're stuck with some hardened inert lumps which may not be cheaply recycle-able.
Pound of cure, ounce of prevention -- the cheapest and easiest way to clean the air is top stop putting schmutz in it.
That said, if you're really interested in using biotech to pull carbon out of the air, probably the best approach involves reusing existing plant or algae species. and simply harvesting them to bury in such a way that they won't be uncovered for a couple hundred million years.
After all, they're far more robust, feature-packed, and battle-tested than any grey-goo we can make for ourselves in the near future.
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#7Could you “clean the air” by creating many such breaks and having it pull co2 out of the air?
As a thought experiment, we release 40 billion tons of co2 per year. An average skyscraper weights around 250,000 tons. So that would be the equivalent of 160,000 skyscrapers worth of this stuff. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers current at 317. So it would be the equivalent of building the skyscrapers for a city that is 500 x the size of Hong Kong every year.
Not that you'd have to build skyscrapers with the material, but just to put this idea in some sort of perspective.
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#8Anyone in the field that can say as to when this is actually feasible? It says that they have investigated production by the ton but went back to improving its properties. Are we talking 10 years? 20? 50? I just want a ballpark estimate.
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#9> While there has been widespread effort to develop self-healing materials that could mimic this ability of biological organisms, the researchers say, these have all required an active outside input to function. Heating, UV light, mechanical stress, or chemical treatment were needed to activate the process. By contrast, these materials need nothing but ambient light, and they incorporate mass from carbon in the atmosphere, which is ubiquitous.
Mechanical stress, I wonder if such materials would serve well as coating atop an office floor to reduce the indoor co2. Every step that gets taken would activate the process. Probably won't make as much of a difference as a decent AC unit though.
Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air
#10Could you “clean the air” by creating many such breaks and having it pull co2 out of the air?
As a thought experiment, we release 40 billion tons of co2 per year. An average skyscraper weights around 250,000 tons. So that would be the equivalent of 160,000 skyscrapers worth of this stuff. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers current at 317. So it would be the equivalent of building the skyscrapers for a city that is 500 x the size of Hong Kong every year. Not that you'd have to build skyscrapers with the materi…
Skyscrapers are mostly empty space inside. The Great Pyramid of Giza weighs about 6 million tons, so we’d be producing about 7000 of them annually. Maybe we could just plop them all in the ocean? ;)