SF ideas, could they work?

[Johnny Pneumatic]

A flying plant that only has two leaves that double as fast flapping wings(like insect wings). It can fly from place to place to escape being eaten, or migrate for more sun and warmer climate when winter comes.

Second plant is like the first except instead of two flapping wings/leaves it has a prop that has three leaves/blades for flying.


Third plant is a living wind turbine. Can mechanical motion be turned into stored chemical energy or can only photons be used for building up biological molecules? This turbine tree would have leaves also but since it's windy where it grows wind would be very useful.



Could these work? Could they evolve, or would they have to be engineered via advanced genetics and nanotech?

 

[drkitten]

A flying plant that only has two leaves that double as fast flapping wings(like insect wings). It can fly from place to place to escape being eaten, or migrate for more sun and warmer climate when winter comes.

Unlikely, for energy density reasons. Basically, it takes energy
to move anything, which has to come from somewhere and be
stored somehow. You're unlikely to get the kind of energy it
takes to lift an object a few feet off the ground (never mind
moving fast enough to avoid predators and/or moving enough
of a distance to change climate) based on photosynthesis alone.

Even with animals, note that very few flying animals are herbivorous, and those that are tend to eat fruits, which are notoriously high-energy substances, and to eat a hell of a lot of them.

Second plant is like the first except instead of two flapping wings/leaves it has a prop that has three leaves/blades for flying.

Same argument, only more so, since propeller blades are hellishly inefficient flying devices.

Third plant is a living wind turbine. Can mechanical motion be turned into stored chemical energy or can only photons be used for building up biological molecules? This turbine tree would have leaves also but since it's windy where it grows wind would be very useful.

Specifically a wind turbine? True circular motion is very, very difficult to explain in a biological system because it's hard to evolve and hard to develop embryologically. For this reason, the ID proponents tend to point at cellular flagellae as "impossible to evolve," and even evolutionists like Richard Dawkins admit that it's quite likely that macro-scale circular motion would be very unlikely, perhaps impossible.

But the conversion of mechanical motion to electrochemical energy might be very possible. One mechanism I would look into would be piezoelectricity (q.v.), which refers to materials that, when deformed or bent, accumulate a charge on their surfaces. This charge could easily be used by a biochemical process to drive some sort of chemical synthesis.

 

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Re: Re: SF ideas, could they work?

Unlikely, for energy density reasons. Basically, it takes energy
to move anything, which has to come from somewhere and be
stored somehow. You're unlikely to get the kind of energy it
takes to lift an object a few feet off the ground (never mind
moving fast enough to avoid predators and/or moving enough
of a distance to change climate) based on photosynthesis alone.

But the conversion of mechanical motion to electrochemical energy might be very possible. One mechanism I would look into would be piezoelectricity (q.v.), which refers to materials that, when deformed or bent, accumulate a charge on their surfaces. This charge could easily be used by a biochemical process to drive some sort of chemical synthesis.

Stored as fat, or a strong sugar? I don't mean flying all the time anyway, just once in a while. If something tries to eat them they fly away. Their roots are "air roots" so they don't sink them into the soil; they just lay on the surface of the ground gathering watervapor and dust. Still unworkable? What about just seeds that fly far far away from their parent plant using flapping wings? The leaf wings are then the seeds' first leaves to give it a fast start at its new home.

 

[chance]

I suppose some sort of spring is not beyond imagination, as the seed pod dries the inner portions coil up, the pod husk opens a pair of petals (propeller), at some point the tension causes the pod to break free in a special way to retain the propeller action and actively drive away from the tree.