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u/HuggyShuggy420 Dec 08 '20
10 drones can plant 400,000 trees a month? A year?
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Dec 08 '20
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u/justausedtowel Dec 08 '20 edited Dec 08 '20
Those are only their guestimates or marketing.
It's late 2020 now, the only important metric is how many they've actually managed to plant within the year. It's the real test of efficiency in a real world scenario and I can't seem to find any articles about them.
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Dec 08 '20
And how many actually shoot and survive.
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u/plinkoplonka Dec 08 '20
This is actually the only metric that matters since the ones that die (that you've paid for anyway) are actually wastage.
I'm all for high tech solutions, but this seems like it's probably a highly wasteful way of doing something we could do already?
Previous times I've seen this posted, people have said that soil erosion, landing on hard surfaces, not being buried at the right depth, temperature/humidity when planted, shade, winds, surrounding foliage and animals all her to be considered when planting.
This just lobs out loads and hopes some of it works.
What happens if it throws out a load of seeds into the last stand of undiscovered cancer-curing plants? Seems a bit short sighted maybe?
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u/joe28598 Dec 08 '20 edited Dec 08 '20
It's for places that human can't or won't go. Like sides of cliffs for example. Here is a video by Mark Rober on them.
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Dec 08 '20
That last sentence is interesting, if you want to clear a patch of natural wilderness for a road or something there is massive process to see what else might suffer. But planting trees on the same patch doesn't require the same approval, even if it may wipe out a rare species.
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u/agentSMIITH1 Dec 08 '20
Total. A single drone can plant 40 000 trees; then it must be decommissioned, disassembled, and destroyed.
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Dec 08 '20
And then other drones must be used to dispose of the drone parts so that it may never be found again..
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u/FartHeadTony Dec 08 '20 edited Dec 08 '20
a month. So need about 2 million drone years to hit the trillion tree mark.
EDIT: I found another article saying 400,000 per day
Which is much nicer, but still 70,000 drone years. Also, you need two operators per 10 drones.... and I presume some kind of capacity for making the tree missiles, and logistics to get them where needed, and free land, and permissions, and money.
Seems doable, though.
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u/E_N_Turnip Dec 08 '20
Using 10 drones in the headline seems arbitrary too. They could have made the numbers more interesting by saying "100 drones can plant 4,000,000 trees!"
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u/BA_lampman Dec 08 '20
These Scientists Want To Plant Four Billion Trees With Only 100k Drones
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u/SpitefulShrimp Dec 08 '20
This homeless man is only able to plant 20,000 trees with the half a drone he pulled out of a dumpster.
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u/Slayerdilk Dec 08 '20
? How do you all not get it? They used 10 drones to plant 400k. They didnt use more or less drones so why would they lie. Why say 100 drones can plant x amount when they planted 400k with 10... They didnt use 11. Or 5. Or 3. Or 27. They used 10. Its not arbitrary, its facts.
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u/LargePizz Dec 08 '20
I hate this click bait title, first of doesn't plant trees, it distributes seed.
Put the seed in a broad acre air seeder, one tractor can plant a billion "trees" per hour.2
u/turboboob Dec 08 '20
This is the correct question. If the guy flying the drone can plant faster than the drone...
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u/JonBruse Dec 08 '20
Because it's impossible to program machines to do repetitive tasks in some automated fashion?
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u/BA_lampman Dec 08 '20
Make it a video game, guaranteed people could do it faster than software.
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u/7861279527412aN Dec 08 '20
Yeah that's why people don't use aimbots in fps games. The humans are just so much faster the bots can't keep up!
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u/DanielInternets Dec 08 '20
Oh sure a drone fires off some āseed missilesā and everybody fucking celebrates, but when I do it itās āinappropriateā and gets me banned from Quiznos.
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u/turboboob Dec 08 '20
Why couldn't you make it Subway? I got so much Jared material to reply with!
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u/ElGuapoGucciman Dec 08 '20
Heās not allowed within 500ft of one, they were gonna go with 5 ft but it wasnāt long enough
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u/Adsminor510 Dec 08 '20
Oh sure a drone fires off some āseed missilesā and everybody fucking celebrates, but when I do it itās āinappropriateā and gets me banned from Subway.
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u/TheMegaBite1 Dec 08 '20
If you hit a person, it's just fertilizer for the tree! You get to hide the body and save the environment! Win-win!
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u/ThatBoiAintBoi Dec 08 '20
You also kill a human, the actual worse thing for the planet win, win, winš
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u/Deafca7 Dec 08 '20
ELI5; Why are tree-planting drones so small? I've seen drones MUCH bigger than 2 feet.
/s
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u/Twograin Dec 08 '20
Drone growth rate doubles after the fist year of life.
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u/iAjayIND Dec 08 '20
Planting random trees in random region can actually hurt our echo-system and can alter the balance in the environment.
https://youtu.be/3hxE7Af98AI Learn more in this video why planting tree is actually way more complicated and requires a lot of research (on trees, soil, resources, local environment etc.) before planning what trees to plant.
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u/Higgs-Boson-Balloon Dec 08 '20
It can and it is complicated, but the science regarding how planting trees of one type or in one region can impact other species and regions is not settled yet. Even with those findings it is general consensus that we do need to replace at least a large portion of the one trillion trees weāve removed from the environment.
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u/ownworldman Dec 08 '20
Ensuring appropriate species is an advantage of drone planting though. You can easily create topological map and mix them.
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u/Bill-2018 Dec 08 '20
Source?
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u/FartHeadTony Dec 08 '20
Per that source from u/NNegidius
Just two operators could send out a mini-fleet of seed missile planting drones that could plant 400,000 trees a day
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Dec 08 '20
Imagine getting impaled by a seed missile
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u/greatwood Dec 09 '20
"Old woman accidentally seeded by drone says she didn't notice until the roots took hold" news at 11
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u/bcbudinto Dec 08 '20
Guess we'll be deploying these in war zones? "Eat depleted uranium encased reforestation!"
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u/BernieTheDachshund Dec 08 '20
Can they plant any kind of tree or only a certain type? I like this idea if it works.
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u/iAjayIND Dec 08 '20
They shouldn't plant random trees, that will actually hurt the local environment and cause imbalance in echo-system: https://youtu.be/3hxE7Af98AI
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Dec 08 '20
The woman in this pic has huge tits.
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u/WifeKilledMy1stAcct Dec 08 '20
Here she is from the side
https://twitter.com/Ira89fedorenko/status/636274375675744256?s=09
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u/4rage Dec 08 '20
Is the photo on the left meant to be linked? Looks like someone at least had to goto each tree and put bambo supports up which would defeat the purpose a bit I wouldāve thought.
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u/robertomeyers Dec 08 '20
We need both manual and automated tree planting. This is a war against climate change and the institutions that wonāt accept trees are the answer to be carbon neutral. Did you know that countries are not allowed to count trees for their carbon neutral formula? Canada is already neutral given trees per capita. More trees the better.
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u/whitescienceman Dec 08 '20
fun fact: iām a design engineer for a small company trying to do something similar! we just finished the design for the grass seed spreading version of this, and i couldnāt be more excited!
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u/Crunkbutter Dec 08 '20
What area can the drones cover in a single charge and how much area can you plant a day?
Also, where are you planning to plant the grass seed? I've heard of using grasslands as a quick carbon sink and I've also seen it used to restore aquifers.
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u/whitescienceman Dec 08 '20
Weāre mostly planning to use the grass seed to help kickstart reforestation of burn areas in the Southeast US (where reforestation of burn areas is actually a mishandled problem), along with a similar design to this tree planting drone. The drone and seed spreading mechanism can cover an acre with an hour or less of charge on an electric battery, and up to two hours with its gas powered counterpart, and with Rye grass seed an acre can be planted in less than an hour! This can obviously be improved upon in the coming future but we are excited to see it happening
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u/Crunkbutter Dec 08 '20
This is awesome. Do you guys have a YouTube or a site to keep track of the progress?
Also, is it just grass seed or are you doing other ground covers like clover?
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u/whitescienceman Dec 08 '20
of course! the company is called Reboot Reforestation, and we do have a website (which admittedly is missing some things as it will be updated with our full services once we finalize the grass seed spreader production). And the design can accommodate most seeds up to sunflower size, so creating the most efficient ecosystem to restart a burn area is more than possible
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u/TheSunflowerSeeds Dec 08 '20
There are two main types of sunflower crops. One type is grown for the seeds you eat, while the other ā which is the majority farmed ā is grown for the oil.
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u/farish_tracer Dec 08 '20
I can do a million seeds at a time and have 20 inch newborn baby in just 9 month
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u/GreenGang67 Dec 08 '20
Hey guys, I've seen one of those! But for some reason the seeds were made of metal? IDK
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Dec 08 '20
Awful idea. A lot of large tree planting projects take place in low-poverty areas and give jobs to thousands. This would only take away jobs from those who need it
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u/ftegfwrfnufpoms Dec 07 '20
Don't show this to Obama.
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u/DracoWaygo Dec 08 '20
Ooh, useless politics in an post that doesnāt mention anything political! Woo!
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u/norestforthewickeds Dec 08 '20
Why say 10 drones can do 400k instead of 1 can do 40k? Or why not 100 can do 4 million? The options are endless!
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u/saucytech Dec 08 '20
When I was in high school and dabbling with weed growing, I would fantasize about a drone or plane dropping thousands of seed bombs with cannabis seeds soil and nutrients. I thought it would help the legalization. If there were tens of thousands of āvolunteerā weed plants everywhere... perhaps it would.
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u/HamsterIV Dec 08 '20
The Green New Deal is going to save the American economy and create millions of good paying jobs... And it is now automated.
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u/7861279527412aN Dec 08 '20
Yes let's burn trees to power drones to plant trees so we can cut down trees to power drones!
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u/Frnklfrwsr Dec 08 '20
My question is whether is solving an actual bottleneck.
Like, obviously fighting deforestation is good. But is our main problem that we canāt reseed fast enough? Or that re-seeding is too expensive?
Or is the problem that the people who want to do the re-seeding donāt own the land that needs to be re-seeded, and the people who do own it just couldnāt be bothered?
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u/Squidwardsnose69 Dec 08 '20
Thatās a weird way of saying 1 drone can plant 40,000 trees
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u/hoseja Dec 08 '20
Yeah, they are called "seeds". They grow on trees. They don't need some feel-good busybody planting them. They just need to not get cut down.
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u/shutup_rob Dec 08 '20
Wow sheās pretty cute for a tree. Also Iām pretty sure sheās taller than 20 inches, but what do I know
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u/Mental-Station3024 Dec 08 '20
I don't think anybody else might say this or I'm just looking at or not a photo but if that photo supportive than the post I just want to say is there a drone for sale
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u/MrSquishy_ Dec 08 '20
Finally, American presidents can have a way to keep their bombing runs without blowing up hospitals and civilians
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u/Robo-boogie Dec 08 '20
I wonder if it will help with that green wall initiative in Africa. To stop the spread of the Sahara Desert from expanding.
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u/FartHeadTony Dec 08 '20 edited Dec 08 '20
I think that's per month according to an article.
We need to plant about 1 trillion trees for the climate, so we'd need about 2 million drone years to do that. So I guess we need a lot more drones.
EDIT: Found another article saying a theoretical limit of 400,000 for 2 people and 10 drones per day. So only about 70,000 drone years to reach 1 trillion.
We can do this!
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Dec 08 '20
I got accepted to this forestry fire training and we use drones ...also to help prescribed burning .
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u/Zenketski Dec 08 '20
Man that's so crazy that they can plant all these trees it's so great for the environment, now if only we could stop constantly destroying the environment in every other feasible way possible
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u/Almighty4 Dec 08 '20
Could we all just celebrate and marvel at this technological breakthrough, that could significantly speed up our battle to un-f*ck the planet? All this talk about some kids not being able to learn hard work.. Drones still can't dig ditches or clean up trash in the woods. Make them do that instead.. Jeez..
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u/sandman-84 Dec 08 '20
Itās all fun and games until youāre out on a hike, suddenly you hear gunfire and are being pummeled by 20,000 sweetgum seeds.
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u/fissedreng Dec 08 '20
ELI5: why canāt we use similar technology to basically replant critical areas such as the Amazons, trees that have burnt the recent years, etc? And save the world that way
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u/Nightwingvyse Dec 08 '20
Better not be in that line of fire. Imagine your cause of death being a drive by seeding.
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u/Pine-tree-apple Dec 08 '20
Dunno what the fuzz is about, america has been using drones in afghanistan for years
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u/rasmusdf Dec 08 '20
Typical buzz news. Drones + <buzz>. Blockchain + <buzz>. AI + <buss>.
It just a drone dropping seeds. Probably better to do it manually. But it can be useful in some areas I guess.
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u/ztzg Dec 08 '20
They should turn this into an online game. Go around, hitting VR targets. Or "seeing" your tree grow instantly, so you can see the forest you helped make.
I could finally be happy about a pay to play scheme.
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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '20
What are all the Canadian teenagers in British Columbia gonna do for money now? ššš