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If you planted a tree every second, it would take you 31 thousand ish years to plant them all. That said, if you had 100k people planting them itd take under a

If you planted a tree every second, it would take you 31 thousand ish years to plant them all. That said, if you had 100k people planting them itd take under a year. Can a machine plant 1 tree per second? Id be interested to learn that

ludamad 11y ago
That's an interesting thought. It immediately made me think of some fast moving contraption that buried seeds into the ground. Obvious difficulties would be navigating, and being small while being able to force something into the ground.
- aacook 11y ago
  There are people who get paid to manually plant trees. They're called Tree planters. Seeds seem more scalable but the industry appears to use saplings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs Maybe a drone could complete the two actions instead. 1. Jam rod thing into ground, pull it out, dump dirt 2. Stuff in tree A guy on Reddit claimed to have planted 1.25mm trees this way: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_125_million_trees_across_canada_in https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_12... Young trees need water until they're established, so I wonder how many little trees actually survive.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    You can wrap their bases with a porous bag of hydrated gel--like a yolk sac for saplings. Logically, it would be best to use industrial processes to factory-assemble a package that results in the lowest cost per established new tree when it is left in the wild with no further maintenance. Existing tree seeds are cheap and stupid, and limited by the state or the art in tree-seed technology, which is essentially to coax an animal into eating a fruit and crapping out the seed elsewhere in a nice, fertile pile of dung. Humans can do better, by sprouting the seeds in a controlled, indoor facility, culling any unsuitable saplings, and granting the sapling additional resources that the parent trees could not provide before planting it in a location distant from the parents that is already known to be suitable for the adult tree. ~Alternately, leave Robo on tree-planting detail, and skip ahead 1000 years in the Epoch to pick him up.~
- grogenaut 11y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking or not. The answer is a f'n bird.
  - ludamad 11y ago
    Creating tons of birds is not a solution.
geon 11y ago
> 31 thousand They would start planting themselves after a few decades.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pgreenwood 11y ago
We could do a lot better than planting 1 per second. How about planting 900,000 trees per day via aerial bombardment? http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown
- tiplus 11y ago
  Thank you so much for posting this, its so nice on a human level to think about turning mine laying tech into tree planting tech. At the end they mention a planting capacity of 3k square miles per year which is a lot but still small compared to deforestation rates of 46-58k square miles per year.
harryf 11y ago
In Southern India Project Green Hands ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_GreenHands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_GreenHands ) has focused on planting trees by hand. On 17th October 2007 they started a tree planting marathon that resulted in 852,587 saplings being planted in 6284 locations across 27 districts in Tamil Nadu by over 256,289 volunteers in just three days - fairly modest average per person but still enough to set a world record. Planting 1 trillion trees by 2020 would take each of us 7.3 billion planting around 140 trees over the next 4 years.
tremguy 11y ago
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/treerover-a-tree-planting-robot#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/treerover-a-tree-planting... Not quite 1/second, but imagine having a bunch of these running around in your neighbourhood.
Houshalter 11y ago
We plant far more crops like corn every year with machinery. I'm not sure the humans are even necessary, trees are pretty good at planting themselves. The biggest issue is outcompeting other smaller plants growing in the same place. It takes a long time for an area to naturally become a forest. I believe human intervention with weeding and watering can speed it up significantly. But that's a bigger investment than merely planting them.

ludamad 11y ago

That's an interesting thought. It immediately made me think of some fast moving contraption that buried seeds into the ground. Obvious difficulties would be navigating, and being small while being able to force something into the ground.

aacook 11y ago
There are people who get paid to manually plant trees. They're called Tree planters. Seeds seem more scalable but the industry appears to use saplings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs Maybe a drone could complete the two actions instead. 1. Jam rod thing into ground, pull it out, dump dirt 2. Stuff in tree A guy on Reddit claimed to have planted 1.25mm trees this way: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_125_million_trees_across_canada_in https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_12... Young trees need water until they're established, so I wonder how many little trees actually survive.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  You can wrap their bases with a porous bag of hydrated gel--like a yolk sac for saplings. Logically, it would be best to use industrial processes to factory-assemble a package that results in the lowest cost per established new tree when it is left in the wild with no further maintenance. Existing tree seeds are cheap and stupid, and limited by the state or the art in tree-seed technology, which is essentially to coax an animal into eating a fruit and crapping out the seed elsewhere in a nice, fertile pile of dung. Humans can do better, by sprouting the seeds in a controlled, indoor facility, culling any unsuitable saplings, and granting the sapling additional resources that the parent trees could not provide before planting it in a location distant from the parents that is already known to be suitable for the adult tree. ~Alternately, leave Robo on tree-planting detail, and skip ahead 1000 years in the Epoch to pick him up.~
grogenaut 11y ago
I can't tell if you're joking or not. The answer is a f'n bird.
- ludamad 11y ago
  Creating tons of birds is not a solution.

geon 11y ago

> 31 thousand They would start planting themselves after a few decades.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pgreenwood 11y ago

We could do a lot better than planting 1 per second. How about planting 900,000 trees per day via aerial bombardment? http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown

tiplus 11y ago
Thank you so much for posting this, its so nice on a human level to think about turning mine laying tech into tree planting tech. At the end they mention a planting capacity of 3k square miles per year which is a lot but still small compared to deforestation rates of 46-58k square miles per year.

harryf 11y ago

In Southern India Project Green Hands ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_GreenHands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_GreenHands ) has focused on planting trees by hand. On 17th October 2007 they started a tree planting marathon that resulted in 852,587 saplings being planted in 6284 locations across 27 districts in Tamil Nadu by over 256,289 volunteers in just three days - fairly modest average per person but still enough to set a world record. Planting 1 trillion trees by 2020 would take each of us 7.3 billion planting around 140 trees over the next 4 years.

tremguy 11y ago

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/treerover-a-tree-planting-robot#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/treerover-a-tree-planting... Not quite 1/second, but imagine having a bunch of these running around in your neighbourhood.

Houshalter 11y ago

We plant far more crops like corn every year with machinery. I'm not sure the humans are even necessary, trees are pretty good at planting themselves. The biggest issue is outcompeting other smaller plants growing in the same place. It takes a long time for an area to naturally become a forest. I believe human intervention with weeding and watering can speed it up significantly. But that's a bigger investment than merely planting them.