Unfortunately we have beaten nature only at a single stage of what is needed. There are 2 more steps needed to be able to do what a plant does. The second ste

Unfortunately we have beaten nature only at a single stage of what is needed. There are 2 more steps needed to be able to do what a plant does. The second step after capturing solar energy is to use that energy with a good efficiency to capture from the air carbon dioxide and nitrogen (perhaps also water vapor) by converting them into some simple organic substances, perhaps a simple amino-acid like glycine and some other simple HCO molecule, e.g. glycerol. With such simple organic substances, one could feed a culture of genetically-modified fungi or other fungus-like organisms, which could produce high-quality proteins and fatty substances (there already exist genetically-modified fungus strains, e.g. of Trichoderma, which can produce whey protein or egg-white protein, i.e. much higher-quality proteins than those that can be extracted from plants). While the first 2 stages of capturing solar energy into simple organic substances are things at which we should be able to beat nature, at the synthesis of complex organic substances like those that are necessary as food, but also for various industrial applications, there is no known method that could beat the biological enzymatic syntheses, so for such things the solution are genetically-modified bacterial or fungal organisms, not machines.