this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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I'm sure we've got the technology somewhere. We just need like a giant fucking tree to suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and to desalinate the oceans. Something that's the size of an island all by itself.

I don't care if it's 100 billion trees woven together with some science fuckery, but we need an Yggsrasil if we want to fix the planet.

Think about it. A giant tree out in the middle of the ocean that sucks up all of our carbon dioxide and turns it into more trees and that sucks the salts and minerals and plastics out of the ocean and incorporates those into itself until it grows as tall as 100 billion trees woven together with dark science can possibly grow.

Sure, it'll cost I don't know several billion dollars to make this happen a trillion I don't fucking know, but if we had that the world would get better.

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[–] eleefece 3 points 9 hours ago

Sadly, our planet only makes life sustainable, there's absolutely no money to make for the shareholders, so there's little to no chance in hell that the powers that be are going to make any effort to prevent our planet going to shit. Remember: Life is temporary, short term gains are eternal

[–] [email protected] 14 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Desalinate the oceans?

Yea, fuck all that marine life that makes most of the oxygen in the atmosphere.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago

Ocean salinity has increased over the last 200 years, I'm just saying revert it to it's 1800s levels.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago

This is Yggdrasilly.

[–] Feathercrown 12 points 16 hours ago

That wpuld be cool but ineffective and solve none of the systemic issues.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The real Yggdrasil was the forests we cut along the way

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Gesprochen wie ein Löwe

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The world will never be safe until capitalism is dismantled. By definition, capitalism is a virus that expands to consume all resources. You can't use capitalism to make more resources for capitalism to consume in any other way than is resource-negative (laws of thermodynamics).

[–] grillgamesh0028 -2 points 11 hours ago

okay tankie.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We had the Amazon Rainforest....

[–] [email protected] 14 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The Amazon rainforest is often considered the lungs of the planet. It represents only a small part, the lungs are mainly our oceans.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

We can't even take care of that, how could we care for an Yggdrasil?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago

We can't even take care of that, how could we care for an Yggdrasil?

"Mom I want an Yggdrasil"

"We have Yggdrasil at home"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago

Oh, we could probably create giant trees with selective breeding and gene editing. But those trees would still need hundreds of years to grow (and that's a good thing, since it would store CO2 while growing) and if there are problems with the gene editing we would only notice after decades.

[–] Siegfried 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Humans would do literally anything before lowering their standard of life

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (3 children)

square-cube law means height, diameter, and weight are all going to be issues.

Isn't algae more effective per volume?

[–] jaggedrobotpubes 27 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Aren't you forgetting to factor the square of the magnitude of the raw fucking radness though

[–] recklessengagement 4 points 16 hours ago

Radness factor is left out of efficiency calculations way too often

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Yes. Algae would be much better. Just don’t mess up the oceans, and the algae will do their job.

[–] InverseParallax 7 points 1 day ago

Algae is the easiest and most likely to work.

We did experiments with iron seeding, the technology isn't too far, it's basically how the planet used to regulate before us.

[–] Dagamant 50 points 1 day ago

That’s just planting trees with extra steps.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago

Pretty sure that's what forestation is all about.

[–] lordnikon 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Was thinking the title was about the Linux distro and was like we can do that. but after reading this ocean algae is way beter for carbon capture than trees. They also don't tend to burn down and release that carbon.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I thought that OP's title was mentioning Yggdrasil as in the IPv6 P2P network.

[–] TARgz 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] NOT_RICK 2 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

I thought you were talking about the VR game in Overlord and was ready to post my support but you just want complicated forestry with no regards to marine life

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

The closest realization of this idea is to potentially cultivate/modify the gene pool and DNA of a tree probably with the use of CRISPR and selective breeding

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I thought you were talking about network

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

House of Leaves reference?

[–] Bach37strad 2 points 1 day ago