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Clouds are just water... no surprises there. However, they usually form at around the 5000ft ASL mark, where humidity is often condensed as a result of aerial thermoclines (The boundaries between layers of differing temperatures and densities). They also contain a fair bit of dust, which tends to be
exactly the sort of accessible minerals and nutrients that plants and fungus require.
Fungi are an underexploited food resource that grow well in humid and moist conditions. Rather than waste arable land with mushroom farms I can see massive banks of lighter than air craft, growing many tons of fungal protein, for human consumption.
To harvest... let them grow too heavy to stay aloft, then pick the edible fruiting bodies and run them back up to growing height.
Not a simple project, but a worthy one.
[link]
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Hey I saw this exact thing in some sci-fi book. |
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Seriously? I was daydreaming, on the ferry on my way to work today, watching clouds. The algae growing on the cliffs by the river gave me the idea. [Vernon]'s Mushroom Cloud idea precipitated it. |
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I can't find it, but there was an idea posted on HB about lighter-than-air algae. |
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Growing fungus theoretically does not waste arable land, because fungus does not require sunlight to grow (thus mushroom farms can be set up in places where normal farms cannot, eg caves). |
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Perhaps market cloud balloons. Just like a regular child's balloon, but biodegradable, seeded with fungus, and with a pressure control valve designed to keep balloon at appropriate height. Let go on a cloudy day, and you just might drop a bundle of high-protien mushrooms on some hungry person's lap. Or high-psilocybin mushrooms on a bored person's lap. |
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I love mushrooms. The lighter the better. |
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More like "Hammer to Fall" by Queen ("..we who grew up tall and proud, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud")
I was never much of a mycologist, but funghi don't photosynthesize, do they? They just live off other organisms, so you'd end up with pretty much the mass you started with, unless the funghi were growing on active photosynthetic plants. Besides, all the shadows cast would stunt the growth of ground crops. |
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If I'm not much mistaken, fungi like warm, dark places. Clouds tend to be cold and light. Still - fungi are a fairly adaptive bunch. |
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I don't think clouds contain that much
by way of nutrients. Plus, if fungi
haven't found a way to exploit this
niche in the last few hundred million
years, it's probably not one of your
prime niches, niche-wise. |
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[cop]//They just live off other organisms, so you'd end up with pretty much the mass you started with// This would be the case with plants as well - they don't turn energy into mass. I assume the substrate used for growing mushrooms would be contained onboard the mushloons. |
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//they don't turn energy into mass// No, obviously, but they do convert gaseous CO2 into biomass. |
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//Hey I saw this exact thing in some sci-fi book.// |
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There's something similar in Diamond Mask by Julian May. |
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Fungi don't photosynthesise, no. They get their C for biomass by breaking down detritus into small molecules and absorbing it directly. Hence many fungi form symbiotic relationships with plants. |
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[copro] //but they do convert gaseous
CO2 into biomass.// errrr, no. Think
yeast. Reverse process. |
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[Basepair] I don't understand your anno - I thought the point of photosynthesis was to take CO2, water and sunlight and produce sugars and all that stuff. Yeasts IIRC take sugar and excrete CO2 and alcohol. Mmmmm alcohol... |
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[Hazel] Yes. As soon as I read this idea I thought the same as [desertfox] and I think this is indeed from Julian may. And: Darn you beat me to it, Fungi don't have chlorofyl so no photosynthesizing.
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Still, cannot find this is baked so ... |
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Line the balloon with an appropriate fertilizer, and it will produce sufficient gas to run a space heater. |
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The organic material needed wouldn't have to be bulky. |
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No, it wouldn't need to be heavy or bulky. We could trap cow farts and pump them up to the fungi. Some of them metabolise methane. |
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Isn't it that mushrooms don't have chlorophyll (which makes plants green), which do the whole photosynthesis thing (been recently doing world of plants as biology topic...)? |
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Well, this gives me a nice daydream to think about, so bun... |
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[Tolpuddle] My point was this. [Copro]
said that fungi convert CO2 into
biomass. My response was that, no,
they actually break biomass down and
turn it into CO2 - i.e., the reverse
process; yeast (a fungus) is an example
of this (and it happens also to produce
alcohol). Plants do indeed use
photosynthesis to turn CO2 into sugar,
and plants are not fungi (nor vice
versa).
For the purposes of
this discussion, plants do
photosynthesis (CO2 > oxygen +
sugars etc) whilst fungi, like animals, do
respiration (oxygen + sugars etc >
CO2).
As [fgh] points out, you
need plants up there, not fungi. I'd
suggest algae, though I still don't think
it'd work. |
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//I still don't think it'd work.// Well, I think that's what they whole idea of the Halfbakery is about. |
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[basepair] I think you've got me wrong - I never intended to say that funghi fixed CO2 - I was responding to [worldengineer]'s assertion (with which I agree) that _plants_ don't convert energy to mass, but they do use solar radiation, CO2 and water to produce sugar.
My reading of the idea was, that given a slightly positively buoyant blimp, plants suspended below, watered by clouds and fed on atmospheric CO2 would cause the mass of the ballast to increase and hence the blimp to descend. Any funghi growing on the plants would increase in mass but mostly at the expense of the mass of the plants. (I think that is what thought) |
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Very interesting[+]. Sounds dangerous too, as air & fungi spores are highly internationally mobile, and we don't all want this in our lungs & engines. |
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Maybe you could grow this in Kitty O'Sullivan Krause's big balloon swimming pool over her house. |
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// I'd suggest algae, though I still don't think it'd work.// |
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I watched an interesting show last week speculating about life on another planet. Algae grew in the atmosphere. This was possible because the atmosphere ‘there’ is 3x as dense as ours. It made a nice meal for the flying whales. |
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I know I've read fact-based speculation suggesting that there may be life within the Venereal atmosphere. |
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Was the show in any way inspired by A space odyssee? [shz]?
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// fact-based speculation // Coowie!! I'll keep that frase for the morning coffee discussions. |
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Yeah, I was looking for a couple of words to express “scientific evidence suggests it may be possible…” |
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scientific speculation?
evidenced possibility? |
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It’s a well considered theory, at any rate. :) |
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Whales would be able to swim in any atmosphere as dense as water. |
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Do you think they can get any longer? |
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