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Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

newscenter.lbl.gov

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Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#41

Post by mmis1000 »

dzink wrote: post #19

Using this to reduce the need for fertilizer would be awesome, but the engineer in me has to ask “What could possibly go wrong”. Interstellar showed one scenario. A nitrogen absorbing crop-blight or species out-evolving out food crops and overtaking them. With far more fuel the odds would be in favor of species that can consume nitrogen, and how do you keep those at bay when it happens?

It's not necessarily leading to the overgrowth. Nitrogen fixation is a really expensive process. It means you will need to spend a lot of energy on this process. The nature is a self balanced eco system. Species need to have certain amount of growth speed to keep itself competitive. A species that growth much slower but not require extra supplement is not necessary going to win the original one if it just get wipe out of the ecosystem.

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#43

Post by tambourine_man »

geuis wrote: post #33
tambourine_man wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re an engineer, surely you recognize that the major plot whole in the movie is that doing an interstellar travel is way more difficult than whatever blight they had to fight.

Not the only plot hole, but yeah, agreed.

It’s not a mere plot hole, it’s the premise of the movie. To me that was a major turnoff

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#44

Post by sojuz151 »

advisedwang wrote: post #3

No doubt we'll see this transplanted into GM crops for reduced fertilizer need.

I don't think so. Biological nitrogen fixation is far too inefficient for this to make sense. Deceased in yield would be too big tfor this to make sense

To give some numbers, just the fixation takes 5.4 more energy, and photosynthesis is 6 times less efficient than solar panels. Moving to biological fixation would also increase water and pesticide usage

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#45

Post by sangnoir »

dzink wrote: post #19

Using this to reduce the need for fertilizer would be awesome, but the engineer in me has to ask “What could possibly go wrong”. Interstellar showed one scenario. A nitrogen absorbing crop-blight or species out-evolving out food crops and overtaking them. With far more fuel the odds would be in favor of species that can consume nitrogen, and how do you keep those at bay when it happens?

> ...or species out-evolving out food crops and overtaking them. With far more fuel the odds would be in favor of species that can consume nitrogen, and how do you keep those at bay when it happens?

We have always had this problem of other species outcompeting crops - we call the undesired-but-superiror-plants "weeds" and traditionally they were removed mechanically. The 20th century saw the invention of achieving the dame task via sprayed chemicals such as Round-Up.

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#46

Post by DennisP »

tambourine_man wrote: post #43
geuis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the only plot hole, but yeah, agreed.

It’s not a mere plot hole, it’s the premise of the movie. To me that was a major turnoff

I just assumed it was a metaphor for runaway climate change, which they didn't want to spell out because of the political noise it'd generate. Just like in Matrix I assumed that the nonsensical "humans as energy source" was a metaphor for "humans as coprocessors."

Basically if there's an easy way to change the explanations so the movie makes more sense to scientists, but it would have made less sense to much of the general audience, I just cut them some slack.

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#47

Post by DennisP »

ctrw wrote: post #30
mikewarot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." Albert Allen Bartlett If there is even a 0.001% chance of an organism with this artificially tacked on to it getting in to the wild, the experiment is not worth anything to be potentially learned from it. It could cause our starvation well before we could respond effectively.

If the exponent is so small that it's not reached 1 in 100,000,000 years we're safe until humanity goes extinct.

I know what you mean but "we're safe until we go extinct" doesn't give me warm fuzzies :)

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#48

Post by sherburt3 »

noduerme wrote: post #9
andenacitelli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I guess we need to figure out how to regression test humans then!

It'll be lots of fun when AGI starts doing unit tests on us .

It'll be too busy arguing with itself over whether its an integration test or not

Re: Scientists discover first nitrogen fixing organelle

#49

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

DennisP wrote: post #46
tambourine_man wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a mere plot hole, it’s the premise of the movie. To me that was a major turnoff

I just assumed it was a metaphor for runaway climate change, which they didn't want to spell out because of the political noise it'd generate. Just like in Matrix I assumed that the nonsensical "humans as energy source" was a metaphor for "humans as coprocessors." Basically if there's an easy way to change the explanations so the movie makes more sense to scientists, but it would have made less sense to much of the g…

You're at least definitely correct about The Matrix; humans as processors was the original idea. Unclear why it was changed, but probably a producer thought batteries would be more accessible.
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