Why haven’t we created machine that produce food from water and sunlight like plants?

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Why haven’t we created machine that produce food from water and sunlight like plants?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Plants take water, metals (calcium, iron, potassium, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc), phosphorous, and nitrogen from the soil with their roots. Plant roots release an acid into the soil which helps dissolve the metals so they can absorb it.

Plants take carbon from the air, and use sunlight to help with this.

Air is mostly nitrogen (78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen) but it’s very hard for a plant to take nitrogen from the air.

Except for water, these other compounds don’t exist in air, and are important for food.

Nitrogen is very important for all life, and it’s a major part of DNA.

Some plants, especially legumes (beans, peas) have bacteria on their seeds and roots that can take nitrogen from the air and give it to a plant. As a result beans and other legumes are commonly farmed as the bacteria on their roots fertilize the soil.

Nitrogen also happens to be extremely explosive, and it’s an important part of gun powder and explosives.

During WWI, the Nazis were unable to gen enough gun powder and nitrogen, so a German Scientist, Frits Haber, designed a machine that could take Nitrogen from the air using electricity. Today this machine is used to produce fertilizer, and it allowed farmers to produce more food than ever allowing the world’s population to expand.

Metabolism – the ability to turn all these basic into new things is an important part of life. It’s easier for scientists to use things like algae or plants to take sunlight, water, and carbon from the air and turn these into food and oil.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We eat not only for nutrition. Food is very much a part of our culture and social behavior. This isn’t easy to change. If all that was needed was nutrition and not flavor, texture etc we can grow nutrient rich food like algae much faster and using much less land, water and pesticides. Essentially we don’t need to create a machine – nature has created a perfectly adequate biological factory.

The reason we don’t do this is most people would find eating green mush rather unexciting and the cost of trying to make that green mush something that looks and tastes good would cost a lot.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Plants don’t produce food from water and sunlight. They require a variety of nutrients and such, plus CO2 and oxygen.

That aside, humans evolved to eat large and complex organic molecules. In fact, we evolved to eat the molecules produced by plants. A machine to produce these molecules would require a fair amount of energy and complex many-step chemistry. Why bother?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because nature has had billions of years to perform countless experiments with zero budget concerns

We’ve been at it for maybe a few years

Anonymous 0 Comments

We don’t know how. Making an artificial plant that turns water and sunlight into food is really hard. Right now, its way easier to just grow more plants than it is to invent a machine that can do the things that plants naturally do.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because then you’d be eating the machine?plants are the food… or are you meaning like fruit bearing trees?

Anonymous 0 Comments

We have: use a photovoltaic (solar) panel to make electricity. Use this electricity to run the Haber process, generating fertiliser. Use the fertiliser to increase crop yields. Harvest the crops, and voila, you have converted sunlight (and water, nitrogen etc) into food!

Anonymous 0 Comments

The problem is that water and CO2(and other nutrients, but the point still stands) can be combined in different ways, which leads to different products.

As an example, both cellulose(plant fibers) and starch are made of glucose chains. The difference is simply the way the individual sugar molecules are linked together.

So we’d need to manipulate the ressources on a molecular level. This *can* be done, but we’d essentially have to build artificial plant cells. And at that point, we might as well just use plants.