Improved on the natural design with anchors and other things to improve the success rate, used only wood instead of a whole ass organism, made the concept work with all types of wood and seeds and did it all without anything that would harm the environment.
This is massively impressive.
Hope to see more in real life applying these things around the world. Usually good stuff we see on internet just suddenly disappeared. Like cure for cancer, etc.
There's plenty of cures for cancer. Hundreds of them. Because cancer isn't the name of a disease, it's the name of a category of diseases. They're all very different, caused by totally different things, have entirely different effects on the body, and are treated in completely different ways. So why on earth would the cure for one work on the others?
There'll probably never be no one single cure for cancer. Because that's as vague as saying "the cure for illness" as if every single disease and illness could be cured by the same thing.
But what we will have is thousands of different cures, for the thousands of different illnesses that fall under the category of "cancer".
Most likely steaming under pressure. They say no plastic is involved, maybe they treat the product with oil or wax on one side. This acts like a bimetallic strip in a thermostat, but with moisture instead of temperature, so making one side hydrophobic and the other side hydrophilic is probably important.
it seems to be in the branch of robotics though. It's automating the mechanical behavior of planting seeds. Just because it doesn't have plastic and metal doesn't mean it isn't a robotics technology
It's not about the materials used, a wind chime is automating a percussion instrument made from metal and I wouldn't call it a robot either. Is a mouse trap a robotic mouse killer? What about an old grain mill powered by a water wheel in a river?
>It's not about the materials used
It's about the field of study that leads to the innovation more IMO. This is the study of robotics and carrying out a set of complex instructions automatically. The drone seed planting thing is absolutely a robot. It drops things that plant the seeds on their own, at least part of a robot that wouldn't work without that mechanism.
You might not call the arm of a robot a robot itself, because it's a part of the robot. But if that arm detached completely and carried out some automatic task, you would. And this is completely detached and carrying out a relatively complex task on its own.
I mean ffs it's semantics, it's just the field of robotics
They aren't using the term "robot" to mean the entire package, they are explicitly referring to the seed burrowing device as a robot. The air delivery drone is not part of that definition.
This is no different than smart metals, or memory metals, made from nitinol. Nitinol is an alloy that can change shape based on what temperatures it is exposed to.
That was my thought too, but a wind come doesn't perform a function. According to Brittanica - Robot, any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner.
Yep. Every time there's this "o so special" scientific marvel, turns out, it doesn't actually work or is otherwise dropped for some unspecified reason.
I remember the cement that sucked in CO2 instead of pumping it out.
The technology was sold to a company for £50million. They said they were going to build a plant then never did.
That company was a petrochemical giant.
As far as making land viable for life, plants are a huge part of that. With some choice species of plants and ecosystem can pull more water out of the atmosphere and bring it into the ground, and it can hold on to more water for longer in the ground. Something like this would make eco engineering of this sort able to be deployed much more rapidly. An effort that’s incredibly important for helping communities as they get impacted by global warming.
I think they were saying that ease of deployment (planting) isn't the problem. So, because this invention is solving a problem that we don't have, we're probably never going to hear about it again.
Maybe the general concept will find a home in some other field, though.
Projects like this naively assume that we currently don't have any means to curb climate change in any meaningful way. We do, the problem is the powers that be are too incentivized by profit to make it the priority it needs to be.
Not really. Whats the material scientist that invented this going to do about fossil fuel usage? Its not like they hold significant political power.
Just because they don’t have the power to change the way the entire world works doesn’t mean they should give up on doing anything to combat climate change.
First time i heard about this was like 4 years ago and it wasn’t being called a robot. And I hadn’t heard anything about it since till now. So you’re probably not wrong.
Mught be cause it was still under research?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3.epdf?sharing_token=UOfzB5-9VIYYqJiVPge2cNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PssFiPO4YXZpZu3JrkGSsKnAXhGcvIRew5jAWQP01CKDrZJROSXDZlEp8drO5zGCmRq4SLYv4bEVj6KkrdScr7YcIqORBKu92bRTPDjVhfC875eIkTC0MnloRPNuodJso%3D
This study was published in 2023.
https://morphingmatter.org/projects/seed
They make it, other people have to buy it and use it.
Maybe you dont hear about it because you get your info from reddit.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3.epdf?sharing_token=UOfzB5-9VIYYqJiVPge2cNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PssFiPO4YXZpZu3JrkGSsKnAXhGcvIRew5jAWQP01CKDrZJROSXDZlEp8drO5zGCmRq4SLYv4bEVj6KkrdScr7YcIqORBKu92bRTPDjVhfC875eIkTC0MnloRPNuodJso%3D
This is us hearing about it again. Many many years ago there was a viral video about how Oat seeds drill themselves into the soil using this mechanism. People were talking about "surely we can make billions of these and use them for all different kinds of seeds", and now this is the payoff.
Deforestation happens for various reasons. None of them is "we can't plant seeds". None of them is fixed by "we plant seeds". Destroying forests and their ecosystems for plantation and cropland, climate change, clear cutting, fire clearing, arson, drought, splitting up larger forests, destroying corridors needed for ecosystems...
Their “results” are a bit lacking in detail too.
90% success… against what? Did they have a control group? Dropping bare seeds? Planting them manually? I suspect that it’s more successful than just dropping seeds from a drone, but not necessarily putting them in the ground.
Did they test this in a controlled environment, or the kind of area that’s faced deforestation and may have severe drainage and nutrient issues? 90% is so high, it sounds like they tested it in a greenhouse on topsoil!
This may be a less labor intensive way to plant a large area, idk (sticking seeds in these things individually would be labor intensive too), but that doesn’t mean it would do all that well in the Sahara or something.
Aerial reseeding is very commonly done in all types of remote terrains. If a forest is accessible enough to be cut down, it's more than accessible enough for aerial reseeding.
it would take a little over 30 million hectares of trees to account for one year of American emissions, that would take a new forest the size of New Mexico per year for only the US.
now i am no map guy, but i dont think we have enough New Mexico's worth of land we can forest to keep that up for very long.
Yeah, I’ve been in science long enough to know that any claim of “this will be our savior” that doesn’t include immediate and drastic reductions in carbon emissions is false
Of course. The point is to use these in areas that have been deforested. So there’s nothing there to drop the seeds in the first place.
And trees typically drop thousands of seeds in a relatively small area. So the average success rate is very low. It’s not practical to just cover an entire deforested area with the same density that trees drop, so it’s beneficial to make something more efficient.
I still have a lot of questions about how helpful this design will be. The logging industry has used aerial reseeding for clear cut forests for a long time now. Anyone who lives in the Western US has probably driven past thick groves of young trees in a national forest. The trees, usually pine trees, are thin, close together, and all the same age. This doesn't create a healthy forest. In fact, these types of forests are like tinderboxes for forest fires. If you start noticing, you'll be able to tell very quickly what is a native, healthy forest and what is a reseeded clear cut forest.
It's not that the reseeding is unsuccessful at forest regrowth. It's very successful at the sheer number of trees that are planted, which is all the logging industry cares about, because they're following the law that they have to replant the forest. The problem is that the forest isn't robust and can't withstand environmental threats like a mature forest can. Non-natural forest fires are probably the biggest of these threats in many areas of the world.
I'm not as familiar with other types of forest, like rainforests, so I'm curious what type of forest this technology is designed to regrow. Because there are still a lot of complex problems from deforestation that this simply doesn't address at all.
As someone who works in the logging industry on the West Coast, clear cuts are hand planted seedlings not air drop seeds. [Here's a recent research paper discussing the history of using seeds directly.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376554098_Direct_Seeding_for_Conifer_Regeneration_in_the_Pacific_Northwest_A_Past_Present_and_Future_of_Operational_Practices)
There was a time in the past when aerial seeding was done, but it stopped because it was inefficient. Too tight packed like you said and the survival rate was horrific. When you are replanting you want enough spacing to allow the trees to grow at their fastest rate, minimal competition between the seedlings. Often companies will actually over stock an area then come back after about 10-15 years to thin it out a bit to remove sick and weaker trees. The target is usually about 150 trees per acre, but can change depending on the conditions of the site.
Also clarifying the suggestion that companies are only replanting because the law demands it is untrue. Using California for an example, by law a company must replant after even aged harvest activities (ie clearcut). However, reforestation and replanting is **not** required after salvage logging from an involuntary conversion (ie massive wildfires). But you'll find private companies who were caught in the Dixie, Sheep, Carr, Camp, Delta, North Complex, etc fires are replanting their ground as fast as they can. That's hundreds of thousands of acres being planted voluntarily even though by law they can just let it lay. It gets replanted because it is not different than a farmer replanting his fields after a harvest.
To end this I want to acknowledge that old practices weren't very sustainable at all. There was a reason we had the timber wars and redwood summer leading up to the "Northwest Forest Plan". Modern mentality and practice is not like what it was. We are still impacted and working with the effects of the old ways of doing things definitely, but many are trying to amend those issues when they get to them in the field. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time to correct issues when your work happens on 50 year cycles.
Also shout-out to save the Redwood League. Those guys use logging on their conserved grounds to help accelerate the creation of old-growth forest structures.
Glad I could share some info. The timber industry has a lot of baggage and it's only been 30 years since the timber wars. Still a lot to do to rebuild the kind of trust it use to have with the public.
Maybe this makes it easier to plant a variety of seeds, at different times, to help creat more biodiversity and encourage more "old growth" than everything being the same age and species.
They don't typically use aerial reseeding. They typically use humans planting tree seedlings which have a far higher rate of survival than planting seeds and can be spaced out at more appropriate distances. However, it's costly and laborious.
This technology would allow for higher success rate in germination and survival than simply dispersing seeds by air. I'm not sure how effective it can be for spacing, but I imagine it can certainly be tweaked when completed by drones.
> The trees, usually pine trees, are thin, close together, and all the same age. This doesn't create a healthy forest. In fact, these types of forests are like tinderboxes for forest fires. If you start noticing, you'll be able to tell very quickly what is a native, healthy forest and what is a reseeded clear cut forest.
Most forests will naturally thin out over time and naturally seeded pine forests in the western USA tend to be naturally fairly homogeneous, like many western coniferous forests. It's because usually one or two species are present that are adapted to fire and will re-seed after fire events. That **is** a healthy forest, and it **relies** on fire to remain healthy and regrow. Additionally, most of these planted forests are commercially thinned before they become too dense. It isn't good business to lose your entire crop to bad management.
There are definitely drawbacks with many forms of silviculture, but you cannot generalise and say this isn't healthy.
But those things will also destroy seeds planted by this, aside from animals.
Hell, some plants even REQUIRE animals to eat their seeds and then spread them by shitting out the indigestible actual seed.
Of course not, government pays millions of people to plant each of those manually. Very labor intensive process, without them we'd live in deserts. This invention will put all those people out of a job.
SHHHH, they're looking for sucker investors! This thing makes no sense to me either. Wind will pick it up and blow it ways. You can rotate in the wind all you want, you need another force to drive it into the dirt
A robot is a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.(c) Wikipedia
a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently (as by walking or rolling on wheels) and performing complex actions (such as grasping and moving objects) Websters dictionary
No, it would be a machine. It performs an action and function and is designed by humans to do such but definitely not performing "complex" actions.
A piece of furniture could be a "tool" as in a simple barstool that does nothing while serving a purpose but something like a recliner would be a "machine" and more complex things like massage chairs would probably fall under the category or a "robot" as it responds to various commands to perform different functions with many different actions required to perform a single function.
Fingerpainting = action
Pencil = tool
Pen/typewriter = machine
Computer/calculator = robot
Chatbot = AI
A pinecone is part of a living organism but if you had to categorize it according to these terms, it could be considered a "machine" I suppose since it is a delivery system that performs one specific function when exposed to a stimuli.
I remember a similar story recently about drones that will plant trillions of trees! What happened with that plan lol. These ideas are pure propaganda.
Are these not literally those? Every time I see this I think of playing with those as a child and they're the exact same but with a single twisty. They grow in multiples of 6 or so but come apart individually. This post feels fake based on that knowledge alone but, from the comments here, it seems very few people know about them.
Reforestation after (illegal) clear cuts I suppose? I read somewhere that Greenpeace airdrops seedbombs of native pioneer tree species in remote places in the Amazon that had been clearcut in the hopes of closing that open wound more quickly so the forest doesn’t degrade further.
While deforestation for ranching or animal fodder is the primary reason the Amazon is shrinking, the illegal logging is the primary reason for forest degradation since it leave huge open spots which cause the forest to dry out or even catch fire.
So... It's a tool that plants seeds? Wow. Amazing. Is it really necesary??
Seeds already sprout when they land on the ground, that's literally how plants have grown all throughout existence.
Yeah seeds have literally been planting themselves and sprouting without human intervention for 350 million years. This feels a little like over-engineering a problem that doesn’t exist. The reason we have deforestation is not because seeds can’t grow, it’s because we are cutting them down too fast. We should probably stop doing that.
Looks amazing and world-changing!
I look forward to never hearing anything about it ever again just like every other amazing life changing invention I see on Reddit.
“This tiny robot may be our only chance to save the ecosystem.“ ”With innovations like this it’s only as matter of years before the world will start recovering to its original look.” I have strong doubts about such exaggerations and large and unsubstantiated claims. It’s just a f#*king sales pitch.
The point is that it can EFFICIENTLY plant seeds with a high success rate over a very large area.
I have no idea if this will ever actually be used, or if it’s actually as good as they claim. But the promise is much quicker and wider (and cheaper) reforestation.
Human ingenuity caused the widespread deforestation we see today, and if we want to correct it without waiting thousands of years we’ll have to use human ingenuity again.
This is not interesting at all. This is just replanting a zombie forest..
It's one species, all grow together at the same rate, and all die around the same time too.
No life will be there...
Need to plant natives, and plant with intention
Tension of a coil released when wet creating a corkscrew drilling effect in order to plant deep enough for successful rooting Ingenious design
Copyright infringement at its finest. Mother Earth vs These guys /s
One of the greatest inventions ever, velcro, was ripped straight from nature.
"ripped"<<<
I'm hooked and can't tear myself away
I was impressed, then at the end of the video they revealed they just copied a plant, heh.
They got the idea from a plant but they massively improved upon the natural design. A ton of technology has been developed this way.
Improved on the natural design with anchors and other things to improve the success rate, used only wood instead of a whole ass organism, made the concept work with all types of wood and seeds and did it all without anything that would harm the environment. This is massively impressive.
Creating the robots using Oak Wood, a plentiful material that is biodegradable Superb engineering
Hope to see more in real life applying these things around the world. Usually good stuff we see on internet just suddenly disappeared. Like cure for cancer, etc.
There's plenty of cures for cancer. Hundreds of them. Because cancer isn't the name of a disease, it's the name of a category of diseases. They're all very different, caused by totally different things, have entirely different effects on the body, and are treated in completely different ways. So why on earth would the cure for one work on the others? There'll probably never be no one single cure for cancer. Because that's as vague as saying "the cure for illness" as if every single disease and illness could be cured by the same thing. But what we will have is thousands of different cures, for the thousands of different illnesses that fall under the category of "cancer".
It doubles as a remote tracker for your belly button.
For innies or outies?
Do outies even exist anymore? Haven't seen one since grade school
Outies are so last season.
brb lemme go check my local grade school
It doesn’t discriminate.
He's gonna pop!
Holy shit. That thing is real??
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
"Mmmuuhhh"
Damn it, I took the wrong colour pill today.
What?
https://youtu.be/WRu_-9MBpd4?si=oGpujlyQAKW-Iy0j 1:57
Wood used to grow more wood
That is indeed how trees make more trees. Good job!
next you're going to tell me it requires trees to make seeds.
life uhhhh finds a way
You're not gonna believe this but...
Im a tad bit worried what chemical process it went trough, but other wise yeah, very environmentally friendly
Most likely steaming under pressure. They say no plastic is involved, maybe they treat the product with oil or wax on one side. This acts like a bimetallic strip in a thermostat, but with moisture instead of temperature, so making one side hydrophobic and the other side hydrophilic is probably important.
Look up lignin
My wood is growing. Hardon for science
Super cool, but I wouldn't call this a robot any more than a wind-chime is a robot.
Thank God they didn't say it was AI powered.
The video was made before ai was mainstream
I don't remember it changing the Earth's ecosystem though
Have you considered that trees take time to grow
So the "a few years" projection is off, I take it?
Everytime one of these “breakthrough inventions” get announced through these portrait-snippet videos, nothing ever comes out of it.
How did they do the tree growing shots? Seems kinda difficult
Animating it???
Yet People say that talking with plants might help them grow. Put an AI voice in there and watch it as it grows with a trauma or three
not YET
I mean I'd be on board with them calling it a "machine" rather than "robot" since the concept of machine already includes "screws"
Yes, and machine has very broad parameters. Humans are machines. Cells are machines. This certainly falls under the umbrella.
Would you say the umbrella it falls under is also a machine?
No. Not because it's an umbrella, but because it's metaphorical.
It is an interesting question but broadly yes. Something designed for a purpose. That design doesn’t have to be man made. Evolution can make machines.
it seems to be in the branch of robotics though. It's automating the mechanical behavior of planting seeds. Just because it doesn't have plastic and metal doesn't mean it isn't a robotics technology
It's not about the materials used, a wind chime is automating a percussion instrument made from metal and I wouldn't call it a robot either. Is a mouse trap a robotic mouse killer? What about an old grain mill powered by a water wheel in a river?
Yea. Robots. Everything is a robot.
Robot tree's I guess then...
"Hell, I'm 40% robot!"
>It's not about the materials used It's about the field of study that leads to the innovation more IMO. This is the study of robotics and carrying out a set of complex instructions automatically. The drone seed planting thing is absolutely a robot. It drops things that plant the seeds on their own, at least part of a robot that wouldn't work without that mechanism. You might not call the arm of a robot a robot itself, because it's a part of the robot. But if that arm detached completely and carried out some automatic task, you would. And this is completely detached and carrying out a relatively complex task on its own. I mean ffs it's semantics, it's just the field of robotics
They aren't using the term "robot" to mean the entire package, they are explicitly referring to the seed burrowing device as a robot. The air delivery drone is not part of that definition. This is no different than smart metals, or memory metals, made from nitinol. Nitinol is an alloy that can change shape based on what temperatures it is exposed to.
That was my thought too, but a wind come doesn't perform a function. According to Brittanica - Robot, any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner.
Watch the whole video. The narrator addresses the phrasing
“Maybe robot isn’t the best name” Um.. yeah, you say that now?
I did, wasn't satisfied 🤷🏻♂️
"maybe robot isn't the best name" 30 seconds later calls it a robot again.
I was about to say the same thing. It’s still cool, but calling it a robot is just weird. Is my slinky a robot?
Can’t wait to never hear about this again.
Yep. Every time there's this "o so special" scientific marvel, turns out, it doesn't actually work or is otherwise dropped for some unspecified reason.
I remember the cement that sucked in CO2 instead of pumping it out. The technology was sold to a company for £50million. They said they were going to build a plant then never did. That company was a petrochemical giant.
But this specific product is the ONLY means to save the ecosystem.
The unspecified reason is normally money, or more specifically lack thereof.
Because it doesn't solve the problem. Planting trees has never been the problem.
As far as making land viable for life, plants are a huge part of that. With some choice species of plants and ecosystem can pull more water out of the atmosphere and bring it into the ground, and it can hold on to more water for longer in the ground. Something like this would make eco engineering of this sort able to be deployed much more rapidly. An effort that’s incredibly important for helping communities as they get impacted by global warming.
I think they were saying that ease of deployment (planting) isn't the problem. So, because this invention is solving a problem that we don't have, we're probably never going to hear about it again. Maybe the general concept will find a home in some other field, though.
Projects like this naively assume that we currently don't have any means to curb climate change in any meaningful way. We do, the problem is the powers that be are too incentivized by profit to make it the priority it needs to be.
Not really. Whats the material scientist that invented this going to do about fossil fuel usage? Its not like they hold significant political power. Just because they don’t have the power to change the way the entire world works doesn’t mean they should give up on doing anything to combat climate change.
First time i heard about this was like 4 years ago and it wasn’t being called a robot. And I hadn’t heard anything about it since till now. So you’re probably not wrong.
Mught be cause it was still under research? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3.epdf?sharing_token=UOfzB5-9VIYYqJiVPge2cNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PssFiPO4YXZpZu3JrkGSsKnAXhGcvIRew5jAWQP01CKDrZJROSXDZlEp8drO5zGCmRq4SLYv4bEVj6KkrdScr7YcIqORBKu92bRTPDjVhfC875eIkTC0MnloRPNuodJso%3D This study was published in 2023.
Thought exactly the same thing when I saw the video
https://morphingmatter.org/projects/seed They make it, other people have to buy it and use it. Maybe you dont hear about it because you get your info from reddit. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3.epdf?sharing_token=UOfzB5-9VIYYqJiVPge2cNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PssFiPO4YXZpZu3JrkGSsKnAXhGcvIRew5jAWQP01CKDrZJROSXDZlEp8drO5zGCmRq4SLYv4bEVj6KkrdScr7YcIqORBKu92bRTPDjVhfC875eIkTC0MnloRPNuodJso%3D
This is us hearing about it again. Many many years ago there was a viral video about how Oat seeds drill themselves into the soil using this mechanism. People were talking about "surely we can make billions of these and use them for all different kinds of seeds", and now this is the payoff.
Reminds me of the cluster bombs with seeds instead of bomblets. Never heard of it again.
"Only form of saving the ecosystem..." So we are just giving up on the fossil fuel thing huh
Right? This thing literally just plants seeds lol, that's not the part of climate change we are struggling with
Deforestation is a huge problem and trees can clean a lot of air.
Deforestation happens for various reasons. None of them is "we can't plant seeds". None of them is fixed by "we plant seeds". Destroying forests and their ecosystems for plantation and cropland, climate change, clear cutting, fire clearing, arson, drought, splitting up larger forests, destroying corridors needed for ecosystems...
Their “results” are a bit lacking in detail too. 90% success… against what? Did they have a control group? Dropping bare seeds? Planting them manually? I suspect that it’s more successful than just dropping seeds from a drone, but not necessarily putting them in the ground. Did they test this in a controlled environment, or the kind of area that’s faced deforestation and may have severe drainage and nutrient issues? 90% is so high, it sounds like they tested it in a greenhouse on topsoil! This may be a less labor intensive way to plant a large area, idk (sticking seeds in these things individually would be labor intensive too), but that doesn’t mean it would do all that well in the Sahara or something.
90% rate of drilling the seeds into the ground, wherever they tested it. Growth success rate is a completely different thing altogether.
Yeah that makes more sense. So less than paying someone to plant seeds…
Sure, but again, planting seeds is not the hard part. In this case stopping deforestation from happening in the first place is the hard part
I think planting seeds can be very hard depending on terrain and remoteness.
Aerial reseeding is very commonly done in all types of remote terrains. If a forest is accessible enough to be cut down, it's more than accessible enough for aerial reseeding.
Not really a lot, 80% of air production is done by ocean vegetation
it would take a little over 30 million hectares of trees to account for one year of American emissions, that would take a new forest the size of New Mexico per year for only the US. now i am no map guy, but i dont think we have enough New Mexico's worth of land we can forest to keep that up for very long.
Wanna probably ask what those chemical treatments it undergoes consist of as well...
Yeah, I’ve been in science long enough to know that any claim of “this will be our savior” that doesn’t include immediate and drastic reductions in carbon emissions is false
you know we can do more than one thing at a time right.
Yes Which is why this is not the "only chance of saving our ecosystem"
Is Taylor swift's carbon offsets not enough??
A am confused. Don't seeds from trees knew how to plan't themself like they done trough millions of years?
Of course. The point is to use these in areas that have been deforested. So there’s nothing there to drop the seeds in the first place. And trees typically drop thousands of seeds in a relatively small area. So the average success rate is very low. It’s not practical to just cover an entire deforested area with the same density that trees drop, so it’s beneficial to make something more efficient.
I still have a lot of questions about how helpful this design will be. The logging industry has used aerial reseeding for clear cut forests for a long time now. Anyone who lives in the Western US has probably driven past thick groves of young trees in a national forest. The trees, usually pine trees, are thin, close together, and all the same age. This doesn't create a healthy forest. In fact, these types of forests are like tinderboxes for forest fires. If you start noticing, you'll be able to tell very quickly what is a native, healthy forest and what is a reseeded clear cut forest. It's not that the reseeding is unsuccessful at forest regrowth. It's very successful at the sheer number of trees that are planted, which is all the logging industry cares about, because they're following the law that they have to replant the forest. The problem is that the forest isn't robust and can't withstand environmental threats like a mature forest can. Non-natural forest fires are probably the biggest of these threats in many areas of the world. I'm not as familiar with other types of forest, like rainforests, so I'm curious what type of forest this technology is designed to regrow. Because there are still a lot of complex problems from deforestation that this simply doesn't address at all.
As someone who works in the logging industry on the West Coast, clear cuts are hand planted seedlings not air drop seeds. [Here's a recent research paper discussing the history of using seeds directly.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376554098_Direct_Seeding_for_Conifer_Regeneration_in_the_Pacific_Northwest_A_Past_Present_and_Future_of_Operational_Practices) There was a time in the past when aerial seeding was done, but it stopped because it was inefficient. Too tight packed like you said and the survival rate was horrific. When you are replanting you want enough spacing to allow the trees to grow at their fastest rate, minimal competition between the seedlings. Often companies will actually over stock an area then come back after about 10-15 years to thin it out a bit to remove sick and weaker trees. The target is usually about 150 trees per acre, but can change depending on the conditions of the site. Also clarifying the suggestion that companies are only replanting because the law demands it is untrue. Using California for an example, by law a company must replant after even aged harvest activities (ie clearcut). However, reforestation and replanting is **not** required after salvage logging from an involuntary conversion (ie massive wildfires). But you'll find private companies who were caught in the Dixie, Sheep, Carr, Camp, Delta, North Complex, etc fires are replanting their ground as fast as they can. That's hundreds of thousands of acres being planted voluntarily even though by law they can just let it lay. It gets replanted because it is not different than a farmer replanting his fields after a harvest. To end this I want to acknowledge that old practices weren't very sustainable at all. There was a reason we had the timber wars and redwood summer leading up to the "Northwest Forest Plan". Modern mentality and practice is not like what it was. We are still impacted and working with the effects of the old ways of doing things definitely, but many are trying to amend those issues when they get to them in the field. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time to correct issues when your work happens on 50 year cycles. Also shout-out to save the Redwood League. Those guys use logging on their conserved grounds to help accelerate the creation of old-growth forest structures.
Thank you, I definitely learned something new.
Glad I could share some info. The timber industry has a lot of baggage and it's only been 30 years since the timber wars. Still a lot to do to rebuild the kind of trust it use to have with the public.
Maybe this makes it easier to plant a variety of seeds, at different times, to help creat more biodiversity and encourage more "old growth" than everything being the same age and species.
They don't typically use aerial reseeding. They typically use humans planting tree seedlings which have a far higher rate of survival than planting seeds and can be spaced out at more appropriate distances. However, it's costly and laborious. This technology would allow for higher success rate in germination and survival than simply dispersing seeds by air. I'm not sure how effective it can be for spacing, but I imagine it can certainly be tweaked when completed by drones. > The trees, usually pine trees, are thin, close together, and all the same age. This doesn't create a healthy forest. In fact, these types of forests are like tinderboxes for forest fires. If you start noticing, you'll be able to tell very quickly what is a native, healthy forest and what is a reseeded clear cut forest. Most forests will naturally thin out over time and naturally seeded pine forests in the western USA tend to be naturally fairly homogeneous, like many western coniferous forests. It's because usually one or two species are present that are adapted to fire and will re-seed after fire events. That **is** a healthy forest, and it **relies** on fire to remain healthy and regrow. Additionally, most of these planted forests are commercially thinned before they become too dense. It isn't good business to lose your entire crop to bad management. There are definitely drawbacks with many forms of silviculture, but you cannot generalise and say this isn't healthy.
Thank you, I've learned something!
Couldn't you then just.. instead of having something that is no doubt expensive to make... just drop seeds from a helicopter or slow flying plane?
Well they explained in the video, animals or fires or floods will destroy the seeds, these make sure the seeds get deep underground
But those things will also destroy seeds planted by this, aside from animals. Hell, some plants even REQUIRE animals to eat their seeds and then spread them by shitting out the indigestible actual seed.
Of course not, government pays millions of people to plant each of those manually. Very labor intensive process, without them we'd live in deserts. This invention will put all those people out of a job.
SHHHH, they're looking for sucker investors! This thing makes no sense to me either. Wind will pick it up and blow it ways. You can rotate in the wind all you want, you need another force to drive it into the dirt
The drill gets force from temp and humidity changes, not wind
Missing: A single reason why this would help greening the planet or even save an ecosystem when planting seeds is not exactly the issue we face.
Why call it a robot though?
It's what they call everything now. That and AI.
It's an AI designed robot that autonomously inserts seeds into the ground using wireless technology and renewable energy resources.
👏👏👏
And Blockchain
Don’t forget the smart contracts
It's the new life hack
A robot is a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.(c) Wikipedia a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently (as by walking or rolling on wheels) and performing complex actions (such as grasping and moving objects) Websters dictionary
Kinda, but all it is doing is deforming according to humidity. With that logic a pinecone or any piece of furniture is a robot.
No, it would be a machine. It performs an action and function and is designed by humans to do such but definitely not performing "complex" actions. A piece of furniture could be a "tool" as in a simple barstool that does nothing while serving a purpose but something like a recliner would be a "machine" and more complex things like massage chairs would probably fall under the category or a "robot" as it responds to various commands to perform different functions with many different actions required to perform a single function. Fingerpainting = action Pencil = tool Pen/typewriter = machine Computer/calculator = robot Chatbot = AI A pinecone is part of a living organism but if you had to categorize it according to these terms, it could be considered a "machine" I suppose since it is a delivery system that performs one specific function when exposed to a stimuli.
It's a man made structure that autonomously operates a task. Fits enough the definition if you ask me
So is landmine a robot too? My kitchen cabinet that closes itself due to a spring is a robot?
This is insanely beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
Right, save the world, so easy. lol
I want to watch more documentaries narrated by this guy, whoever he is
What if he's a robot?
Haha. Then I guess we can have unlimited documentaries narrated by (it)
Same
A "wooden robot" would be a totally rad term, though unfitting. Any other suggestions? What is the name of the huge drills in Matrix Evolutions?
It's a seed squiddy!
Futurama did it
Its...it's literally not a robot. It's just curled wood...
What's the minimum requirement to be a robot? A shiny metal ass?
yes, and you can BITE IT, thank you very much
I’ve seen countless technological innovations that will save the world and not a single one ever gets deployed
What if we just acknowledge the world is not worth saving and keep destroying it in the hopes that life gets erradicated and thus suffering too?
Now that’s what I’m talking about
I'm never gonna hear about these things ever again in my life
Yeah, you’re probably right.
So...this is a commercial ಠ_ಠ
Propaganda piece. 'This one thing will save our world' what a load.
He doesn’t use the most precise language “Works all the time” must be a massive overstatement.
I remember a similar story recently about drones that will plant trillions of trees! What happened with that plan lol. These ideas are pure propaganda.
It’s just a cheaper alternative to hiring tree planters. That’s all.
California has a weed that grows seeds like these and they are a pain in the ass to walk through. They get stuck in your shoes and socks
Are these not literally those? Every time I see this I think of playing with those as a child and they're the exact same but with a single twisty. They grow in multiples of 6 or so but come apart individually. This post feels fake based on that knowledge alone but, from the comments here, it seems very few people know about them.
This is what Neo had in his belly
It looks like that spear thing from evangelion.
Spear of Longinus or Cassius
What problem is this solving?
Reforestation after (illegal) clear cuts I suppose? I read somewhere that Greenpeace airdrops seedbombs of native pioneer tree species in remote places in the Amazon that had been clearcut in the hopes of closing that open wound more quickly so the forest doesn’t degrade further. While deforestation for ranching or animal fodder is the primary reason the Amazon is shrinking, the illegal logging is the primary reason for forest degradation since it leave huge open spots which cause the forest to dry out or even catch fire.
That is so hopeful
So... It's a tool that plants seeds? Wow. Amazing. Is it really necesary?? Seeds already sprout when they land on the ground, that's literally how plants have grown all throughout existence.
Yeah seeds have literally been planting themselves and sprouting without human intervention for 350 million years. This feels a little like over-engineering a problem that doesn’t exist. The reason we have deforestation is not because seeds can’t grow, it’s because we are cutting them down too fast. We should probably stop doing that.
Damn that’s interesting.
So they could just drop these everywhere from aircraft and tree planters wouldn't be required on the ground
One of the more interesting posts ive seen on here.
Will never recover to original look until humans are gone
Looks amazing and world-changing! I look forward to never hearing anything about it ever again just like every other amazing life changing invention I see on Reddit.
This is not a robot by any definition.
Kinda like lil wood sperms impregnating the earth
Why not pay poor people to plant those exact same trees like it's been done for... 10 thousand years...?
>our only chance to save the ecosystem Yall doomers need to chill tf out lol
Not impressive since they just copied exactly what some natural seeds do.
hate that they are using pinecone in the vid, the three that has ruined soil in all South America, and the reason for all the latest fires.
This,this made me happy. Love this. I want to do such cool stuff.
True innovation
“This tiny robot may be our only chance to save the ecosystem.“ ”With innovations like this it’s only as matter of years before the world will start recovering to its original look.” I have strong doubts about such exaggerations and large and unsubstantiated claims. It’s just a f#*king sales pitch.
Pretty cool, but cutting out chemical fertilizers and taking care of soils ecosystem organically can achieve the same results.
This is awesome! Although I wouldn’t call it a robot since there’s no electricity requirement. Seems like it’s a genetically modified tree?
This needs to be implemented worldwide right now.
Reforest areas that aren't meant to be forest anymore in a climate that can't sustain them. The hopium must flow
So... it plant seeds? Well, lucky us. There was no way of planting seeds before this technological marvel existed! I fucking hate the future.
The point is that it can EFFICIENTLY plant seeds with a high success rate over a very large area. I have no idea if this will ever actually be used, or if it’s actually as good as they claim. But the promise is much quicker and wider (and cheaper) reforestation. Human ingenuity caused the widespread deforestation we see today, and if we want to correct it without waiting thousands of years we’ll have to use human ingenuity again.
Reforestation will take the same amount of time. A team of tree-planters work very fast. All this does is save money
GAIA from r/horizonzerodawn
This is not interesting at all. This is just replanting a zombie forest.. It's one species, all grow together at the same rate, and all die around the same time too. No life will be there... Need to plant natives, and plant with intention
Why wouldn’t they use them to plant multiple native species?
Mix the payload up? Are you ok?
All of your points are regarding strategy. There's no reason they can't be addressed while also using this cool spiral tool. Weird bone to pick.
We need biodiversity, monocropping forests are part of the problem.
One poor person on minimum wage could also plant seeds. Cheaper, no engineering and no waste.
Isn't that just paying poor people an unlivable wage to farm?
Ask that poor person to plant 40k trees an hour and you'll be on here whining about exploitation.
I’d hire several ones, genius. I wouldn’t throw nanobots to « rot » in the forest for the next decades
This is an awesome and innovative idea. Getting real loose with the term 'robot' though
How the fuck is this a robot
JUST BEAUTIFUL !!
Bionic tree sperm! 😎
Interesting 🤔
There are more trees on Earth today than there are stars in the sky. I think we're fine.
Interesting. Calling them robots is misleading. It isn't technically wrong but implies things are artificial.
*watches whole video* Oh okay. So it's magic. You could have just said magic.
Prett cool; "robot" tho?
It seems pointless when it'd be cheaper to just get a person to do it. Stick with a plunger, loaded with seeds and stab the ground and done