3 ms·
Bioluminescense is known as cold-light because it's so efficient - basically zero energy is wasted as heat. There will be fundamental limits (currently unknown)
by technotony 12y ago
Bioluminescense is known as cold-light because it's so efficient - basically zero energy is wasted as heat. There will be fundamental limits (currently unknown), most likely from toxicity or waste products hurting the cells, but we are far from pushing those boundaries yet.
- dekhn 12y agoRight, but a good first order estimate woudl be to take the brighest bioluminenscent molecule, pack it in a sphere with volume = your plant, and compute lux at 3 meters. Or something like that. Without growing lensing structures or other ways to focus/point light, the r3 falloff is gonna kill you.
- adwn 12y agoShouldn't the falloff be proportional to 1/r^2, instead of 1/r^3?
- jarman 12y ago1/r^3 = 1/r^2 (falloff in vacuum) * 1/r (light absorption by air)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 12y agopoint sphere radiating a point at distance r. I'm not doing the calculation the way a physicist would, or rather, I'm calculating the amount of EMF falling on a point, not the energy of the full surface. The reason being, a person standing and looking at something cares how much illumination falls on the destination point, not the total illumination of the scene.
- dekhn 12y agoAh, duh. Had to go back and look up some basic geometry. So, surface of sphere is proportional to r2. At distance r, with 1/r absorption, the illumination of a spot on a sphere at distance r would fall off as 1/r3. But I wasn't including absorption, so my original claim of 1/r3 due to spherical emission was wrong.