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I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the Earth's oxygen; most oxygen (50-80%) is cre
by naikrovek 4y ago
I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the Earth's oxygen; most oxygen (50-80%) is created by phytoplankton in the ocean.
Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
- valarauko 4y agoI think it's a fair comparison if the point is to communicate to a lay audience. Most people have a reasonable mental model of how large a tree is, and the volume it occupies. Comparing the device to something like "the average daily output of 3000 deciliters of equatorial surface seawater" (made up comparison) is a harder sell. We'd have to fall back to comparisons like "4 football fields" or "2 school buses" worth of seawater - though it'd be an interesting comparison.
- mc32 4y agoIt gives people a false sense of connection. How much oxygen does a small tree produce, over what period of time, what species of tree? It's like someone saying, "hey I knew your cousin Dan". Nice, I have no idea of their relationship but they're trying to "break the ice" so to speak with an irrelevant tidbit.
- CyanBird 4y agoWell, that's the natural give and take when you need to address a global audience with unknown levels of background level knowledge on the topic, a tree is relatable and conveys a workable metric despite the values being unknown
- valarauko 4y agoI feel the goal of the comparison is to give people a quick heuristic, rather than a detailed breakdown. The article does say the device produces 6 grams of oxygen per hour. In there any species of tree that would be intimately known to a global anglophone audience?
- HPsquared 4y agoBonsai or giant sequoia?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gouggoug 4y agoThe issue with the a "tree's worth of oxygen" is that in people's mind a tree is very big, so this comparison gives the impression of a very large amount of oxygen is being produced, when, in fact, barely any is produced at all. A better analogy would be anything that can be expressed in volumes. For this reason, "4 football stadiums" and "2 school buses" would actually be pretty good.
- TomVDB 4y agoHow many giraffes is that?
- withinboredom 4y agoI’m looking at a tree right now. It is not very big.
- revolvingocelot 4y agoOn the Internet, nobody knows you're 14 feet tall
- withinboredom 4y agoNope, just a baby tree.
- robofanatic 4y agoa banana maybe? I mean does a tree produce 1 banana worth of oxygen?
- throwaway09223 4y agoBy mass or by volume? Or by economic value?
- leokennis 4y agoNo I meant by itself
- irrational 4y agoThe trees in my backyard are 150+ feet tall and the trunks are 3+ feet in diameter. That is what I imagine when I imagine a tree.
- valarauko 4y agoThe article (not the headline) says "small tree" - how big do you imagine a "small tree"?
- irrational 4y agoThe smallest trees we have around here are about 40 feet tall with 1-1.5 foot trunks.
- gsk22 4y agoSurely there are trees smaller than that, unless they just pop out of the ground 40 feet tall?
- irrational 4y agoI assume a small tree means a mature small tree, not a sapling.
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoAre you seriously insisting that you can’t believe that “small” tree doesn’t refer to a 40+ ft tall tree? Like to what end are you making this ridiculous point?
- InCityDreams 4y agoDouble-negative confusion? Is the word 'like' required? Like maybe they aren't seriously insisting they can believe that "small" tree does refer to a 40+ft tree.
- NegativeLatency 4y agoFractions of what a human requires per day would be a more meaningful unit.
- tablespoon 4y ago> I think it's a fair comparison if the point is to communicate to a lay audience. It's not a very good comparison to communicate to a lay audience. A far, far better one would be in terms of "resting oxygen requirement of an average human."
- Insanity 4y agoNeither of those comparisons tell me how useful it is. I don’t know how many trees nor how many school buses I breathe in a day.
- jxramos 4y agothat's the bottom line, it's meaningless without additional context. Because how many of us are familiar with the volume of a tree or how much O2 a tree produces. It's not even clear what aspect/property of the tree they're trying to highlight as relatable.
- ISL 4y agoThe great joy of organisms is that you only need to ship a few and then they'll make more all on their own. The hard part is generating the oceans in which phytoplankton might live.
- pixl97 4y agoOceans may be a problem, but smaller saline pools shouldn't be. Saline pools would have multiple benefits. Not only when kept warm could you use them to generate oxygen with phytoplankton, if you have to cut off power for some reason, they'll work as a great thermal heatsink, and they will not freeze as fast so they present less risk of piping damage.
- wereHamster 4y agoI would much rather see a comparison to how many people (or fractions of an average person) this current device could sustain.
- Baeocystin 4y agoAverage person uses around 375 liters of STP oxygen/day. A liter of O2 is about 1.4 grams.
- throwaway09223 4y agoSo about a quarter of what a human needs.
- LelouBil 4y agoThat's pretty impressive, considering it's size !
- samatman 4y agoYou can work backward from this and get the number of carbon-carbon bonds a human should consume as food, which is fun to think about.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoMy understanding is that it took ~450 million years for Oxygen to go from nothing to a significant portion of the atmosphere. Is there anyway we could do that in several orders of magnitude less on Mars? Even 1 million times faster is still several human life-times.
- dheera 4y agoIn all honesty I think at that time scale it may be more practical to create a lifeform that does not depend on oxygen or water, and only needs sunlight for energy. It may have to be silicon based, and I use the word "lifeform" in a very liberal sense.
- LegitShady 4y agothat lifeform ia gpt-3
- ncmncm 4y agoMars will never be terraformed, or colonized. Place is a dump with no appealing features. Any off-Earth population will have to live in cans rotating to simulate gravity.
- troad 4y agoI feel like this is something you’d hear in 1500 about America. “A forlorn land covered in crages and stormes, and wholly bereft of life giving aether, this continente of ‘Columbia’ is a kingdom moste unsuitable for a civilised Englishman.”
- ncmncm 4y agoIt had air, water, game, forest, and immediately arable land (cleared by people who had died in imported pandemics). It even had gravity. What does Mars have besides caustic dirt? We have no valid reason to assume a pregnancy could be carried to term in Mars gravity.
- 4y ago
- notorandit 4y agoAnd a tree's with of oxygen implies time. There are tree that live for 20, 50, 200 years...
- outworlder 4y ago> I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the Earth's oxygen They produce quite a lot of oxygen. The main issue is that they don't produce much surplus oxygen as they consume it too. And make no oxygen when the sun goes down. > Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so. Yes. But then, these are living organisms that need to be cared for and fed. If there's a malfunction that wipes out your oxygen producing organisms, you have a big problem. You need to give them light, control the temperature and keep it in a very narrow range, provide them with water, nutrients, shield them from radiation, avoid contamination by other organisms, etc. Water and nutrients are not easy to come by in Mars, at least not yet. At this point, they aren't very different from a machine, it's just going to be a large bioreactor. At large scale, they are probably still the best bet. But it will take a while until we have the proper environment for them. The good news is that, once there's such an environment, we don't have to ship tons of them. Let them replicate. MOXIE is nice as it's a machine. You can store it away, bring more capacity online, etc. It can be added to both bases and vehicles (potentially suits(?)).
- BurningFrog 4y agoI read it as meaning how much a (growing) tree produces. Trees as a collective do not increase or decrease oxygen to the atmosphere in this era.
- _8j50 4y agoLet's sending all this melting ice water to mars and put phytoplankton on it. Let it be killed by solar radiation on mars than by human pollution on earth.
- Maursault 4y ago> most oxygen (50-80%) is created by phytoplankton in the ocean. True, but not the whole story. Phytoplankton did not create Earth's oxygen atmosphere but today is the majority producer of oxygen. Earth's oxygen atmosphere was initially created by cyanobacteria up to 3.5Bya and which today still produce about 10% of atmospheric oxygen. The detail I am unsure of is what produced most of the current volume of Earth's oxygen. While phytoplankton today produces the most, that does not mean that most of Earth's oxygen was created by phytoplankton. My suspicion is that, though today cyanobacteria does not produce the majority of oxygen, that cyanobacteria in fact created most of the oxygen currently in our atmosphere. Surely someone here knows for certain and can speculate on whether the idea of installing cyanobacteria on Mars is any good.