[Scriptor]

I bought some houseplants a bit back and it's been fascinating to see how quickly they grow. The vast majority of that new mass literally comes from thin air.

[agumonkey]

Then think about the internals, the subtleties of cellular matrices. It's as beautiful as processor manufacturing, if not more, and right before your eyes all around.

I laugh yellow~ when people dream of robotics.. when I see an annoying mosquito, I look at how thin all this is and yet it lives, flies, perceive the world quite a bit ...

To an extent I think the future will just be the same old past except we'll now understand nature a bit more. I hope so.

[tabs_masterrace]

Dragonflies is where its at. These guys supposedly have one of the best eye vision of all species. Now compare that thing with flying camera drones. Anything we can build is so much inferior to what a Dragonfly can do.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

I’d doubt that. Compound eyes have inferior resolution compared to mammal/reptile/bird eyes.

E.g. a compound eye with the angular resolution of your current eyes would be about the size of your head.

Edit: nope, even bigger:

>To see with a resolution comparable to our simple eyes, humans would require very large compound eyes, around 11 metres (36 ft) in radius.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye

[Pxtl]

My favourite for this are South American tillandsia. They have no roots. They just sit on a tree branch and eat air.

[Scriptor]

Yeah, it's neat how roots mostly just bring in phosphates, nitrates, and water. Incidentally, carnivorous plants only get their phosphates and nitrates from whatever they trap. All of the actual carbon in all plants come from the air or from dissolved CO2 in the water.