How The Power of Bio Diversity Can Help Fix The Planet

When we think of plants we can relate to the process of photosynthesis. What we fail to remember is that generally photo synthesis is critical to our very way of life. For example the wood for our buildings, the fibres for our clothes and the food that we consume. The list is endless. The sad fact of this is that society will burn through enough resources in one year that took biodiversity a million years to produce.

Future processes rely heavily upon our ability to harness this great power that has remained largely invisible and unnoticed to the vast majority of humanity. Photosynthesis is a natural form of technology that biodiversity has self evolved and self developed itself without human interaction or need since the beginning of time. First this takes place in the dark and during the day using the leaf.

So How Does Photo Synthesis Work?

 There are two steps to this process. The first step is taking in the natural sunlight. It uses the sunlight to divide the water in to its individual components of oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is then released in to the atmosphere thus creating cleaner air for us humans to breathe. The hydrogen is stored within the plants structure themselves thus locking it away and removing greenhouse gases which in turn warm up the planet exponentially.

To replicate these two stages, students at Harvard University created a silicone based artificial leaf which was then immersed in to water and then actively processed the sunlight to break it down in to oxygen and hydrogen. The artificial leaf, then evolves this technique by bringing in a bacterium known as Ralstonia euphoria, which absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with the hydrogen produced by the aritificial leaf to create liquid fuels.

By replacing this bacterium with something different known as Xanthobacter autrophicus, they were able to further develop a device which fuses together the nitrogen from the air and the hydrogen from the leaf to produce a fertiliser. As a result of this, by using only the sunlight, air and the water, they were able to manufacture renewable energy which were the basic foundations for growing food.

Therefore it is wise to conclude that artificial photosynthesis is much more efficient than natural photosynthesis though the use of both is always better but we need to bring ourselves back to a position where photosynthesis outweighs human use of resources. Thinking in the longer term the possibilities that this can bring, we will see much more uses such as the manufacturing of plastics, pharmaceutical’s and be driven by the sun.

Eventually when we send humans to Mars, using these processes it is inevitable if not being done already that they can be used to break down astronaughts urine in to water and the vital vitamins that we all need by combining it with the carbon dioxide that they exhale. Now thats technology.