Even UV (10…400 nm) can be harmful. Not all plants can handle that very well. Intensity plays a role too. Just a little bit of <400 nm radiation should be fine, but if you increase the power output, it’s going to start damaging the plant. Some plants actually produce compounds that mitigate the harmful effects of UV radiation.
Hamartiogonic
joined 2 years ago
And an organic life form. They tend to be very picky about the conditions they consider suitable. This involves variables like temperature, pressure, radiation, pH, water, concentration of several nutrients and so on. Once all of these are approximately right, the organism itself can handle all the fine tuning (AKA homeostasis).
Some life forms have a very narrow operational window, so you may be required to adjust the environment accordingly. For example, providing radiation in the 400-700 nm wavelength is usually acceptable. Radiation outside that range will not be utilized and may even have detrimental effects to DNA integrity.
The degree of hardening undoubtedly plays a role. Mild hardening appears to be entirely reversible, but there must also also be a threshold where irreversible reactions begin to occur in the starch matrix. At that point, applying mechanical force to separate the reaction products from the metal surface may be your only option. If that fails, pyrolysis should work regardless.
I was thinking of succulents and cacti. If you travel somewhere for 2 weeks and forgot to water the plants before you go, it's ok. Some plants can just handle it regardless. Once a week plants are pretty average IMO. Bonsai and orchids are high maintenance plants for those who need a new hobby.
The water requirement depends on species. What you got there is clearly not a low maintenance entry level plant.
I think it’s also a systemic problem. If you just rely on sheer willpower to keep your population healthy, you’ll run into problems like this. The world should be designed so that it’s harder to choose unhealthy options and easier to stay healthy. Like, driving everyone instead of walking, bicycling or taking public transportation is one of those choices. Food is another major category where systemic changes are in order.
People tend to take the easiest option, but we would need to make sure the most popular option is actually good for the people.
What could possibly go right.
Most processes were built very large to reap the benefits of the economies of scale. This means that after each shutdown it may take days for things reach optimal temperature, concentration, speed or some other metric. For example, when baking bread or freezing vegetables, the relevant machine would need to reach a particular temperature before it can actually start producing. Larger the machine, longer it takes. This is the fundamental problem why startups take so much time.
If you went really small scale, the startup time would be cut to a fraction. If you’ve ever made ice cream at home, you’ll know it only takes about 30 minutes for the machine to get cold enough and about 60 min for the ice cream to be ready. If all industry happened at this scale, you totally could shutdown every night. It’s just that small scale production is woefully inefficient. The amount of energy and materials it requires is just absurd when compared to industrial scale.
I wonder what would it take to get the best of the both worlds. No idea if that’s even possible.
Sure is. Animals can drop to various kinds of low activity states such as sleep or even hibernation. Sleep occurs every night, and animals seem to be pretty good at it.
In an industrial context though, frequent shutdowns and startups are avoided, because they’re really complicated to carry out. It also takes a while to get product quality back to normal, so you’ll be wasting materials and energy in the meanwhile. Shutdowns are needed though, because machines wear down and require maintenance, filth builds up and requires cleaning.
If only factories were built that way.
In reality, the amount of adjustable load is rather small. Currently, we’re using that in the reserve market to balance the grid a little bit. It’s enough to deal with some frequency deviations, but nowhere enough to handle intermittent energy production.
Generally speaking, factories are designed to run 24/7, and it’s not easy way to drop production rate without causing some strange problems. That’s why you need grid energy storage.
But if factories could drop to 10% at night, and gradually ramp up to 100% in the noon, that would be ideal from the energy perspective. Storting energy is hard and comes with all sorts of issues, so factories like that could avoid all those issues. Would be great, but that’s not the world we live in.
Hmm… I wonder if that can be fixed with water and time.
It's also entirely possible that OP is an extreme case where even low doses can trigger various symptoms. It's all very complex when psychosomatic factors are involved, but you still have to consider the physiological factors too. In medicine and toxicology, it's really common that different people respond very differently to the same dose of the same compound.
If OP is a rare exception, their opinion should be viewed in that light. BTW that makes the opinion equally rare, and consequently unpopular.