Image not available

1682x938

file.jpg

🧡 Lumber Research?

bibo No. 16468456

Why aren't scientists working on making larger trees? Or faster growing hardwood trees?

We should be driving down the cost of lumber to basically zero. It seems like an extremely important issue and basically no organizations are working on it

Anonymous No. 16468460

Reforestation is a really good idea but it's never happening because of politics

bibo No. 16468530

>>16468460
reforestation is great, but I believe a focus on improving the genes of lumber producing species would pay even greater dividends - imagine if each tree could grow 1% faster each year, or if wood was harder allowing for the use of less wood to make the same structure for a home.

Anonymous No. 16468550

>>16468460
IIRC Iceland, Ireland, and Scotland have ongoing reforestation projects

Anonymous No. 16468593

Easy: Plant more trees now. It’s that simple.

Go do your genetic engineering on trees, fine. But plan on decades before you get useful results. Meanwhile the trees you planted now will be fully grown.

Anonymous No. 16468644

>>16468456
>Why aren't scientists working on making larger trees? Or faster growing hardwood trees?
They are, e.g. hybrid poplars

Anonymous No. 16468744

>>16468550
I don't know about Ireland's but Scotland's and Iceland's are very incipient, other places have done it way faster so I imagine there's some lack of political will behind it. Hell, there's examples of China turning desert areas green within a couple years, surely some small hamlet of an area that a small country like one of those tree would dedicate to that doesn't need to wait a century if only they actually wanted it. Iceland must be more tricky but Scotland and Ireland should be more straightforward. The West is like an old man who never has enough energy to do anything significant.

Unrelated note: haven't posted in forever, now there's a 15 minute timer to do the captcha, let alone post? What is this horseshit, might as well pull the plug on the website (but I guess the glowies in charge still find value in the data generated, even if much of it isn't organic)

Anonymous No. 16468758

>>16468593
>Easy: Plant more trees now. It’s that simple.
A certain country had peopel planting trees. The locals were enraged, they often are, so they ripped them all up. not that long after they had a massive flooding that the trees were intended to hold back and people died in droves.
Yet you still cannot get them to accept tree planting.

Anonymous No. 16468904

>>16468456
Shut the fuck up libtard. G-d hates trees, fags, and hippies.

β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”β€”
Dave β€œLightning” Miller
β€˜69 Dodge Superbee (parts matching)
USMC β€˜89-β€˜90
SEMPER FI!

Anonymous No. 16468971

>>16468456
A tree's height is limited by capillary action and it's rate of growth is limited by solar insolation. It would be more interesting to try to make space adapted trees and start building an Ouster/Templar biosphere around the sun. It would require much more advances space capabilities than we have, but we could start working on the trees at least.

Image not available

1952x2608

Borgund_stavkirke.jpg

Anonymous No. 16470777

>>16468530
Fast growing trees are weak and mostly suitable for paper production. Slow growing trees where the rings are very tight and more resilient. Proper forest stewardship also helps, but few care anyomore. Pic. related is what you can have when the forest has been handled right.

Anonymous No. 16471764

>>16468456
Sure, with all the wildfires and a wildfire season that has practically become continuous, that is exactly what we need, more large swathes of tinderboxes that become highly flammable much quicker than they already do.

Anonymous No. 16471772

I'm not a treeologist but my impression has been that the faster you make a tree grow beyond its normal growth, the softer it will end up being. Perhaps there's a physics limit or botanical limit on how many inputs can be turned into wood in a given amount of time.

Anonymous No. 16471805

>>16471772
Can calculate a theoretical limit from energy content of wood, photosynthetic efficiency, and solar insolation. At 19 MJ/kg, maximum average solar irradiance 300W/m^2, photosynthetic efficiency 3% gives 150 metric tons/hectare/year.
Fastest growing actual trees currently seem to be about 20 tons/hectare/year but bamboo and some C4 grasses is more biomass (but no wood)

Anonymous No. 16471813

>>16468456
Why lumber? Why not just develop seeds you plant that grow into houses?

Anonymous No. 16471854

>>16468456
I am currently working towards this goal but my clean sterile laboratory won't be set up for at least a year. I have to fund and build it all myself. However simple gene gun GMO experiments should yield me promising results to gather more resources with. To be fair I haven't checked if anyone else is publicly working on GMO trees and they could always be doing it in private and we have no way to know.

>>16468530
It's a two bids with one stone situation. The #1 fast growing softwood for construction is of course Pine. Roughly 30 years from seedling to harvest for lumber. The shortest turnaround of any tree species, 1/3 the time as hardwood lumber, and 99% of construction uses softwood anyways. I love hardwoods for many reasons but 95% of lumber and pulp needs can be served by fast growing pine. So you would GMO pine to grow faster, say 20 years to harvest. I'm of course focusing my GMO goals on quicker carbon sequestration into the wood of the tree. Trees eat gaseous CO2 and convert it into hard lumber aka sequestration. The losers who claim this won't solve the excess atmospheric CO2 issues base this on one misguided untrue fact....that all those extra trees will be allowed to die and decay in the forest making about as much methane as they took out CO2, measured by damage done not volume. That's stupid, we wouldn't waste the wood. 90% of that new fast growing wood goes into homes and yes SKYSCRAPERS. Look up wooden frame large buildings. We GMO the trees to eat twice as much carbon, plant mecha-trees everywhere, harvest the lumber for goods and homes, No housing crisis, no excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It's really that easy....but then a lot of rich people lose a lot of money unless they are in the right industries to capitalize on this great advancement of society. Always and forever the greedy elites at the top will sabotage progress if it threatens their entrenched monopolies on profits or power.
(1/2)
t. mad horticulturalist

Anonymous No. 16471864

>>16468593
Based take, plant trees, enough said.
>>16468644
>Hybrid poplars
Not useful for anything but firewood or pulp unlike yellow pine. Also seems the hybrids are weak genetically and have many diseases. I'm also curious in it's CO2 uptake rates per year vs a normal poplar. Simple breeding without hideously unnatural GMO splicing won't yield the results we need to do the things that need to be done.
>>16468971
Stupidest take ITT
>16470777
Incorrect as I stated Yellow Pine is what most homes in the USA and Canada are made out of. GMO means you can make hardwoods grow faster and make softwoods grow stronger. Simple as, STFU.
>16471764
Second stupidest take ITT based on fantasy
>16471772
Using traditional breeding sure, like someone posted the Hybrid Popular. It's weak, shit. GMO solves all these issues as you are cutting out all the bad parts and adding things to boost up where you need it. Like putting hardwood genes into Pine to make it stronger.
>>16471805
>but bamboo and some C4 grasses
DING DING DING.....we have a winner Johnny!!! That's right, I will be working with C4 grass genes to work them into trees. Good job anon, not stupid after all.

(2/2)
blame the spam filter for me not properly tagging your post.

Anonymous No. 16471885

>>16471864
How exactly are the trillions of dollars in damages from wildfires over the past couple of decades fantasies?

Anonymous No. 16473109

>>16468456
>We should be driving down the cost of lumber to basically zero.
The cost of lumber isn't because of tree supply as someone mentioned wildfires, it is because of all the processing and treatment necessary to turn a tree into construction quality lumber.

Anonymous No. 16473276

>>16468460
>never happening because of politics
*costs money
Nothing stopping you spending your own money to buy land and grow trees of your choice on it. But you want other people to be forced to pay for it, hence you've run into problems (its not your money).

Anonymous No. 16473278

>>16468530
>imagine if each tree could grow 1% faster each year
This is an interesting topic: what plant grows woody tissue the fastest? Bamboo is always touted as growing a meter a day, but I think that's only after the rest of the plant has stored up energy over a year.
Essentially the question is "what plant puts on the highest dry-weight biomass by % of it's body weight?".

Preferably we could eventually genetically engineer/domesticate a tree to grow easily harvested, thick, long, and strait branches which would allow the rest of the tree to stay alive and heal, then grow new limbs. As if harvesting fruit but wood instead. This reduces the time wasted by the tree growing from a sapling.

Anonymous No. 16473282

>>16470777
a significant time for trees to grow to harvestable size is wasted growing from seed to maturity. GE/domestication could eliminate this

Anonymous No. 16473289

>>16471854
>Trees eat gaseous CO2 and convert it into hard lumber aka sequestration.
Other than putting wood in buildings, how else is this hoped to be accomplished?
I doubt the construction market can be enticed to adopt wood in large constructions on these matters:
Ease of construction; concrete is set easily, build a mold, pour a liquid in. Wood doesn't appear as simple as that. Increase time and skill of labor drives costs.
Strength to price ratio; raw wood might conceivably be engineered into a material strong enough to compete with steel/concrete, but how does this effect it's price compared to current materials?
Fire; wood burns unlike steel/concrete, are currently avalible cladding materials sufficient to protect the structure from fire? When wood or steel heat up they weaken, does wood weaken at a lower temperature than steel? Wood insulates heat, in a steel construction, a beam heated in one portion will have the heat wicked away, keeping it cooler for longer.

>No housing crisis
That's a matter of government intervention in the market; restricting supply of new houses via regulations (need permission to build a house on your own land!) and encouraging mass migration with welfare, causing increased demand for homes.

bibo No. 16474688

>>16471854
>I am currently working towards this goal but my clean sterile laboratory won't be set up for at least a year
I don't think you really need that advanced of equipment to do this type of research do you? I don't know

Anonymous No. 16475710

>>16468456
>Optimizing Rubisco and its regulation for greater resource use efficiency
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pce.12425

Anonymous No. 16475758

>>16468456
plastic is already a perfected form of lumber
lumber is just fibers with glue (cellulose bonded with lignin)
So the same as some micarta-like type of material
All you need is fibers and a bonding plastic, but fibers can also be made of plastic so, plain plastic is enough
You can make a house from plastic

Anonymous No. 16476714

>>16473289
Concrete is good for compressive strength but is unsuitable for tensile and shear forces. Wood is suitable for both.
Wood is nature's own composite, a cellulose reinforced lignine matrix.
You can make large structures such as bridges with wood but it requries skill.

Image not available

935x501

usa land use.png

Anonymous No. 16476728

>>16468456
wow genius you figured it out.
you might actually have a point there might be some way to bio-engineer trees but you would have to watch what it does to the soil

Anonymous No. 16477065

>>16473276
The government already wastes billions of taxpayer dollars on retarded initiatives, it'd be a nice change of pace for them to finally adhere to their mandate and govern with national and citizen welfare in mind