[wildmanx]

> For me, hydroponics really drove home how remarkable plants are: from a bin containing nothing but water and salts, a fully-formed plant emerges.

I feel this is a remarkably underappreciated feat of nature. Some people compare a plant seed to an SD card containing the drawings for a skyscraper. This is an unbelievable understatement. The seed does not just contain the genetic material describing the final object. It also contains information about the whole assembly process, and a very robust one in many cases. It also contains the information about all the tooling needed for the assembly process. And it also contains the initial basic tools to make all that happen. This is truly remarkable. Nobody would dream of putting an SD card into the ground and seeing a skyscraper grow. It's obvious that you need external tooling, knowledge, skill and materials (that have to be externally created from raw materials) for all of this to happen. Plant seed? Everything included.

What I find sad about this article is that it needed hydroponics for the appreciation for plants. Hydroponics is a very sterile and artificial way of growing plants, removed from their actual environment and only showcasing a single aspect of growing a plant. My appreciation for plants comes every time I step out into nature. Just take a step into a forest, you don't even need to move to see lots of wonders of nature around you. The complexity of all living things nature has to offer, from the molecular level all the way up to complex interactions in the ecosystem, that really dwarfs your k8s setup by orders of magnitude.

Tech people sometimes need to be a bit more humble. (To which this article contributes. I like that.)

[nonrandomstring]

As a systems person, what I really love is how this miracle you describe is itself just one small cog in vast machine of inter-dependent miracles. A plant growing from a seed is meaningless outside the context of soil, liquids and gases in the ecosystem, each part of some other life cycle.

This was brought home to me when a bachelors student presented a final year project for an "Aquaponics" [1] controller system. I'd never heard of such a thing but I was blown away by how far you can take control systems engineering in your own garden shed. Once you add fish, nutrients, acidity, micro-organisms and whatnot into the monitoring equations even the most simplified model takes on a majestic level of complexity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics

[arminiusreturns]

This is why I am so fascinated with closed loops systems such as aquaponiocs. If we can create a closed loop sustainable system in the small scale, we can then decentralize it to avoid the inevitable cause of the first likely long term international 21st century food crisis: monocultural devastation.

It also has space exploration implications.

[deepdriver]

You may enjoy reading about Lunar Palace 1, China's latest experiment with regenerative life support systems:

https://www.space.com/40610-china-mock-moon-mission-lunar-pa...

Or BIOS-3, the Soviet Union's experiments in this area during the in 1970s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3

The EU has the MELiSSA program, which has a nice website and lots of meetings but no human-scale enclosures of which I'm aware:

https://www.melissafoundation.org/

[nonrandomstring]

Amazing links. Thank you for posting.

[chubot]

The mostly failed Biosphere 2 project of the 90s, and the 1996 movie Bio Dome starring Pauly Shore, are relevant to those ideas :)

In all seriousness I do think it’s fascinating, and am interested in any developments since then

[alldayeveryday]

> What I find sad about this article is that it needed hydroponics for the appreciation for plants. Hydroponics is a very sterile and artificial way of growing plants, removed from their actual environment and only showcasing a single aspect of growing a plant.

In the end, the result was still the same - an appreciation for plants. I find it quite fascinating to see the wonders of nature taking place within the artificial environment. It provides such a stark contrast and there is something almost magical and transformational about a formerly purely artificial environment suddenly being awash with the natural. I think one can appreciate the unique characteristics of hydroponics, and also still respect and appreciate the wonders one finds in nature.

[SturgeonsLaw]

The seed is also recursive, in that it contains all the instructions necessary to get the resulting plant to produce more of the seed.

[Fiahil]

> to get the resulting plant to produce more of the seed.

Not _exactly_ the same seed, but _a_ seed that can (maybe) grow again.

[Teever]

You may find this idea interesting: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

[shellfishgene]

Minor nitpick: The genome does not describe the final object, but only the assembly process algorithms.

[mythrwy]

I don't even think it describes the assembly process. More a base template or seed data for the assembly process to act upon.

[frankzander]

> Tech people sometimes need to be a bit more humble.

Not sometimes but very often IMHO and not only a bit but a huge amount of humbleness is needed.

[Youden]

Would it be possible to artificially create a seed that grows into a house or building?

[hoseja]

Most certainly yes. But the best way we currently have to get that seed is manufacturing environment that rewards building-shaped trees and waiting a couple million years.

[empyrrhicist]

Maybe if we ever figure out true, self replicating nanomachines.

[mellavora]

They already do.

Oh, wait, you mean a house for people. Sorry, my mistake.

[infinite8s]

Not only that - the majority of the structural material in a plant comes directly from the air! (Plants use a bit of water to convert CO2 to cellulose and O2)

[mym1990]

There is a tangible difference between growing and nurturing something yourself, and seeing it do its own thing in the wild. Sure, nature is magnificent in its own right and displays that almost every time we walk out the door. But setting up your own system, whether it be a soil based system or hydroponics, gives a better sense of understanding and an appreciation for the actual process and end result.

FWIW I run a small hydroponics system off my porch and its amazing to see all the small changes that happen over the course of a day/week. Everything from water temp to nutrients levels to PH can change the outcome dramatically! And then there really is a sense of ownership/responsibility for the thing.

[0xbadcafebee]

> from a bin containing nothing but water and salts, a fully-formed plant emerges

From water, salts, and a crapton of airborne carbon. The plant takes electrons from the water and adds it to carbon dioxide to make glucose. Most of the plant is the carbon, so the plant is mostly made from air.

[wil421]

Thankfully I took a horticulture class in high school. We had a huge green house at the school. It really gave me an appreciation for plants. I have 2 plots at a community garden and a couple small ones at my house. Watching seeds grow is fascinating.