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Annoyance comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong
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Plants are also much better at converting sunlight into chemical energy than any system we can build.
But the issue isn't how well they store energy, but at how efficiently we can use the energy they store. You can't efficiently fuel an electricity-generating plant with corn - trying to use plant energy to power our civilization is hopeless.
That is totally incorrect. Plants are 1-2%. Good panels are around 20% - with experimental ones well beyond that. That's because most solar energy occurs at wavelengths unsuitable for photosynthesis.
Good panels are only that good under laboratory conditions, and require massive expenditures of energy to construct in the first place. Plants are self-replicating.
Equally as important, they produce chemical energy directly. Without an efficient way to produce and store hydrogen using electrical power, there's no alternative for chemical fuels.
"Plants are self-replicating"? In theory, will corn grow without our help? Sure! In practice? Not if you want it in neat, harvestable rows; not if you don't want it to compete with weeds; not if you want it to have a high per-acre yield; not if you want to control which seeds get to turn into plants next generation; not if you don't want crows to eat it; not if you want it to stick to your property and not take over the neighbor's alfalfa; and not if you take all of the plant's kernels and turn them into car fuel.
We don't settle for the replication rate of wild plants, so it's just not the case that they're "free". There's a legitimate question of whether it's costlier (along any given dimension or overall) to produce ethanol than to produce a solar panel which will generate the same amount of power over its useful life, and I don't know the answer, but please let's not extrapolate from the fact that plants sometimes grow unattended to the mistaken conclusion that corn has a negligible input cost.
After getting the facts so totally wrong, you are supposed to remain in embarassed silence, not argue the toss with still more dubious claims:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficiency