From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat May 19 2001 - 11:29:59 MDT
CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
>
> Organisms with complex macrostructural construction abilities
> have rather slow doubling times. If you want to look at a house-
Not if they're nutrient unlimited. Doubling time of biomass
in a fermenter is quite impressive.
> builder, the appropriate model is a tree, with doubling times in
> years or decades. Further, we're a very long way from
> enigneering trees to grow particular shapes. And think how
That's arguable. It's a threshold thing, so you can't extrapolate
from presence or absence of progress in current time window.
> long it will take to test it! :-)
My main quibble is parasite load. Artificial structures
can stay clear (for a while) because of the founder effect.
Parasites sap vigor, and hence feedstock ROI. They also
tie up a scarce resource (people's attention) thus sapping
elsewhere by proxy.
Understanding biology will not necessarily be relevant to
industrial productivity, but for medical purposes and substrate
migration that knowledge is invaluable.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:07:43 MST