I think this is a missed trope for solarpunkish scifi: manipulating plants to grow anything. Fabric for clothes growing as bark. Tomatoes with pracetamol in them. Flowers depositing certain minerals it picks up from the ground in them. Stuff like this.
The cotton plant, hemp and flax do grow fabric for clothes, and willow bark contains the active ingredient of Aspirin.
Flowers (Fabaceae) can even pick up nitrogen from the air and deposit it into the ground where it acts as fertilizer.
There are even a few textile producing trees, like mulberry, that are even better, because it doesn’t need to be spun and woven. The raw inner bark can be pounded together to form sheets of barkcloth.
Children of time had a lot of this. One factions technology is mostly based on natural processes. Their most complicated computer systems are ant based if I remember well. Great book.
A setting I’m working on includes engineered plants for construction. Think a tree that can be shaped like a vine, a grow light box strapped to the leader node, the light box changes angles to get the plant to change direction of new growth, forming the main supports to have the floors built on. They’ve also got effectively artificial mycelium cultivated over entire planets that form internet connections and backup power grid, with fruiting bodies that provide solar energy to the system
I think this is a missed trope for solarpunkish scifi: manipulating plants to grow anything. Fabric for clothes growing as bark. Tomatoes with pracetamol in them. Flowers depositing certain minerals it picks up from the ground in them. Stuff like this.
The cotton plant, hemp and flax do grow fabric for clothes, and willow bark contains the active ingredient of Aspirin.
Flowers (Fabaceae) can even pick up nitrogen from the air and deposit it into the ground where it acts as fertilizer.
There are even a few textile producing trees, like mulberry, that are even better, because it doesn’t need to be spun and woven. The raw inner bark can be pounded together to form sheets of barkcloth.
Like a factory game but you have to modify plants and animal’s with crispr
Monsantio
Children of time had a lot of this. One factions technology is mostly based on natural processes. Their most complicated computer systems are ant based if I remember well. Great book.
So did the Discworld books!
The Simpsons were the real sci-fi all along with Tomacco
“Leviathan” by Scott Westerfeld ?
A setting I’m working on includes engineered plants for construction. Think a tree that can be shaped like a vine, a grow light box strapped to the leader node, the light box changes angles to get the plant to change direction of new growth, forming the main supports to have the floors built on. They’ve also got effectively artificial mycelium cultivated over entire planets that form internet connections and backup power grid, with fruiting bodies that provide solar energy to the system