Interestingly, the Solar System as a whole also works this way. You sometimes hear futurists proposing that in the long term, humanity might use self-replicating robots to dismantle Mercury, and use the material to construct a Dyson swarm, allowing humanity to access untold levels of energy and matter.
The big downside to this is that you can’t just start taking apart pieces of the Solar System. While the planets aren’t in a true resonance pattern with each other, they do have a certain clockwork stability to them. The planets we have now were not the first generation of worlds in this star system. Multiple rounds of planet formation happened, sometimes with multiple terrestrial worlds forming in the same or similar orbits. The early inner Solar System had dozens of Mars-sized rocks in it. They kept forming, colliding, breaking, merging, and shattering until the system found a state that would be stable for billions of years. Simulations on the future of the Sol system show it to be dynamically stable for billions of years into the future. But if you remove any piece of the Solar System from that clockwork intricacy, that stability disappears. Then you have to worry about the planets slowly perturbing each other’s orbits, small nudges building up over millions of years until world’s are colliding or being ejected from Solar orbit entirely.
mirshafie@europe.pub 1 day ago
Bye-bye is probably a bit of an overstatement. Yes plants need phosphorous but the Amazon wouldn’t disappear without it. Change - sure, probably - but there’s still plenty of nutrients and water for vast forests to continue existing there.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The soil itself is pretty barren in the Amazon. The vast majority of the nutrients and minerals in that biome are in the trees and plants themselves. Without the continual topping-up from the Sahara, the Amazon is on a ticking clock.
Gaze upon the Amazon River:
Image
Consider its breadth and depth. A titanic quantity of water, enough to drain a continent, emptying in endless torrent into the abyss of the sea. Except it’s not just water. Look at the color of it. It’s not blue; it’s brown. Consider the amount of water in that river. Then think of how much soil and dead plant matter must be flowing with it in order to turn it to such a rich chocolate brown.
That is where the Amazon’s phosphorous ultimately ends up. Nothing lives forever. Every plant and animal eventually dies. When it does, much of what it was gets recycled back into the plants and animals of the Amazon, but some doesn’t. A lot doesn’t.
Without the Sahara, the Amazon is on borrowed time.
mirshafie@europe.pub 1 day ago
Let’s say that if the nutrients of the Sahara were consumed by plants and animals in the Sahara, then the Amazon would be deprived. Let’s say the Amazon would disappear.
In turn, we’d get a forest in the Sahara that would be about 30% bigger than the Amazon. So a net win I guess?
Anyway, it’s not the point. I’m just saying it’s moronic to belive that we can terraform fucking Mars.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I would say that you should have more faith in your fellow human beings. We would have never accomplished anything if our ancestors had your poor misanthropic attitude.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
We could use Brawndo, it has electrolytes.
mirshafie@europe.pub 1 day ago
It’s what plants crave.