Chapter 336 Customization

Chapter 336 Customization

Chapter 336 Customization
Under the guidance of Ah Hai, Jiang Miao came to the observation window of another planting room.

Through the transparent glass of the window, you can see special plants that are completely different from the previous growing room.

The royal lotus in the previous growing room is a balanced artificial crop and also an aquatic plant.

The plant in this growing room is a semi-aquatic plant.

Its genetic parent is also a plant of the Nymphaeaceae family, or more precisely, a plant of the genus Nelumbo that is native to East Asia.

The leaves of the Emperor Water Lily are close to the water surface, while the leaves of this artificial plant called the Babel Lotus can reach two or three meters from the ground. The area of ​​a single leaf can reach two or three square meters, and the main stem that supports the leaves is just like a tree.

The lotus has some genes from the banyan tree and rice inserted into it, so it can take root in water.

It usually has four to five leaves, and the surface of the leaves is similar to that of the royal lotus, densely covered with spongy structural cells with a thickness of three or four centimeters. These spongy structural cells contain super chloroplasts.

Compared with the Emperor Water Lily, the Bamboo Sceptre does not require a large amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and trace elements after entering the mature stage, because Jiang Miao has carried out specialized modifications on it so that the Bamboo Sceptre only secretes oil and does not produce starch and protein.

Ah Hai reported the situation on the side: "Currently, the aerial roots of these Tongtianlian can produce a large amount of vegetable oil every day, with an output of about 16 kilograms per mu per day."

Jiang Miao saw the aerial roots hanging from the bottom of the leaves of the Babel, which were about as thick as chopsticks. The laboratory used plastic hoses to connect these aerial roots, and then continuously received the plant oils synthesized by the leaves of the Babel every day.

Since the core components of vegetable oils and fats are triglycerides and fatty acids, the main constituent elements are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

Therefore, when the mature lotus enters the stage, it only needs water and carbon dioxide to continuously synthesize vegetable oil in its leaves.

Now these Tongtian Lotus have not yet entered the mature stage. According to the design of Jiang Miao in their genetic sequence, Tongtian Lotus needs a growth cycle of six months before it can enter the mature stage, and its life cycle is about 10 years.

Once it reaches maturity, each acre of Bamboo Shoots can produce about 30 kilograms of vegetable oil per day, and about 12 tons of vegetable oil per year.

This is a highly efficient solution to the fuel problem.

At present, the fuel consumption within Seres is still at a relatively high proportion. This is mainly because the accumulation of fuel vehicles, fuel ships and aircraft over the years has led to high fuel consumption.

For example, last year 2028.

全国消耗掉各类非生物衍生的燃油总量，差不多就是4.2亿吨，其中汽油1.62亿吨、柴油2.05亿吨、煤油4052万吨、船舶重油1977万吨。

This is even the case with the strong rise of biodiesel, which has caused ordinary gasoline and diesel to lose the internal motivation to continue growing.

Last year, the country produced a total of 5749 million tons of biodiesel, the raw materials of which are waste vegetable oils and genetically modified soybean oil sold directly from oil mills.

If it weren't for the global food crisis, China's biodiesel production capacity could have increased by another 20 to 30 million tons last year.

With the Tongtianlian, if the country needs to replace most of the refined fuels from petroleum and coal, it will have to replace 4.2 million tons of petrochemical fuels.

The country only needs to open up 3500 million mu of indoor arable land to produce about 4.5 million tons of biodiesel each year.

Of course, this is estimated based on the planting area being in the tropics and subtropics. If it is in the temperate and subarctic zones, the planting scale would have to be doubled.

But this scale of planting is actually nothing big for Seris at this time.

Even if there is no planting space on land, it is possible to consider setting up floating island planting areas on the sea.

For example, the large floating islands arranged by the Hailufeng Group in the shallow waters of various archipelagos in the South China Sea can be used as planting bases for the lotus if they are transformed.

The economic value of the per-acre yield of Tongtianlian is not bad. After several shocks, the current domestic fuel prices, whether fossil fuel or biodiesel, have a retail price of about 4500 yuan per ton.

The purchase price of genetically modified soybean oil, which is the raw material for biodiesel, has remained at around 2700 yuan per ton.

If the selling price of Tongtianlian oil is also 2700 yuan per ton, then one acre of Tongtianlian can generate an economic value of 3.24 yuan per year.

The per-acre yield is quite valuable. After deducting various costs, the profit per mu is about 20,000 yuan.

In fact, vigorously promoting biodiesel is also beneficial to the carbon balance of the global atmosphere.

As long as the carbon dioxide extracted from the air by the Tongtian Lotus is released back into the atmosphere by burning fuel, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere can be maintained in a stable range.

Jiang Miao continued to walk towards the next planting room.

He created a total of five new artificial plants, namely the Emperor Water Lily, the Babel Lotus, and the umbrella sugarcane, umbrella papaya, and umbrella bean that he will investigate next.

From the names, you can know the characteristics of the following three artificial plants.

Umbrella sugarcane is a sugarcane that has been further modified through genetic engineering. It can continuously produce sugar liquid and can produce about 15 tons of sucrose per acre per year.

Umbrella papaya is an artificial plant that has been genetically modified based on plants such as papaya, pumpkin, chestnut, and jackfruit. It can produce starch-rich papaya and can produce about 15 tons of starch per acre per year.

Umbrella pea is an artificial plant transformed from the legume plant. Its characteristic is that it can produce protein-rich fruits and can produce about 8 tons of protein powder per acre per year.

This is the power of biological and genetic technology.

No wonder some people say that the 21st century is a weird era, with a backward social system and god-like technology. Isn’t this a kind of cyberpunk?

Jiang Miao's purpose in developing these artificial plants is not only for food security and energy security, but also for deeper considerations.

For example, the exploration of outer space requires the use of this technology.

These artificial plants may play a huge role in Jiang Miao's dream of exploring Venus.

You should know that the total mass of gases in Venus' atmosphere is 93 times that of the Earth's atmosphere.

The atmospheric density near its surface is about 50 times that of the Earth, and the surface pressure is about 93 times that of the Earth, of which carbon dioxide accounts for about 96.5% and nitrogen accounts for about 3.5%.

In other words, there is almost an inexhaustible supply of carbon dioxide in Venus' atmosphere.

However, in order for plants to fix carbon, Venus' atmosphere or surface still lacks another important condition, that is, water, or hydrogen-containing compounds.

Due to the serious out-of-control greenhouse effect on Venus in ancient times, the liquid water on the surface of Venus has long evaporated and escaped into outer space, turning into stardust in the solar system.

Therefore, if Venus is to be developed on a large scale.

The problem of water supply must be solved.

There are currently three main plans in the scientific community: stardust collection, deep mining in the Venus crust, and asteroid transportation.

The stardust collection plan is a plan that is better than nothing. Even if the solar wind has a relatively high concentration of hydrogen and helium particles, each square meter of collector can collect less than a few milligrams of hydrogen and helium particles per year.

The deep crust mining plan for Venus has a relatively suitable distance and can also obtain a large amount of hydrogen-containing compounds.

The only trouble is that this plan requires entering the surface of Venus, where the air pressure is extremely high and contains a large amount of sulfuric acid gas. In addition, geological activities on the surface of Venus are very frequent, which increases the difficulty of building a mining base.

The final asteroid mining plan can also obtain a large amount of hydrogen-containing compounds, but it also has a disadvantage, which is the time cost.

Currently, asteroids with high ice content are mainly concentrated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is too far to push icy asteroids from the asteroid belt to the orbit of Venus. It is even better to mine hydrogen compounds on the closer Mercury.

After all, there is permanent ice in the polar shadow regions of Mercury.

From a technical point of view.

In order to start large-scale infrastructure projects on Venus, the problem of supply of building materials must be solved locally.

Therefore, his idea is not to use hydrogen-containing materials as building materials, but to use pure carbon materials, such as carbon fiber, carbon nanotubes, graphene and other materials.

After all, there is too much carbon dioxide in Venus' atmosphere. Even if hundreds of sky cities are built, there is no way to significantly reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.

In fact, if gravity is not taken into account, Jupiter is also a planet more suitable for human survival.

Of course, this Jupiter does not refer to Jupiter itself, but to its natural satellites, because these natural satellites contain a large amount of water resources, methane, carbon dioxide and the like, which can serve as raw materials for the survival of carbon-based organisms.

The biggest advantage of Venus is that its gravity is very close to that of the Earth, allowing humans to settle there for a long time.

Jiang Miao had read the list of technical challenges of the scientific research division and Blue Whale Aerospace, which included a research project to use solar energy to generate electricity, extract carbon dioxide as raw material, extract carbon dioxide, and then synthesize various carbon materials.

Pure carbon materials can only be used in the upper atmosphere of Venus and cannot enter its surface at all.

There is no way. The air pressure on the surface of Venus is too high, and the temperature is also very high. It also contains a large amount of corrosive gases. This is definitely a hellish environment.

Pure carbon materials will be corroded quickly when entering this environment.

Unless the carbon dioxide concentration in Venus' atmosphere can be reduced to a level lower than that in Earth's atmosphere, causing it to lose its superb thermal insulation ability, it will be difficult to use carbon materials on the surface of Venus.

Even materials such as carbon fiber and carbon nanotubes, which can withstand temperatures of two to three thousand degrees Celsius, still cannot withstand the combined destruction of various adverse factors on the surface of Venus.

...

After looking at the remaining three artificial plants.

Jiang Miao did not leave, but instead gave Ah Hai some instructions.

At the same time, he is also thinking about how to further improve the energy utilization rate of photosynthesis in plants.

Currently, the genetic engineering modification of super chloroplasts has actually reached a bottleneck, which mainly occurs in the light absorption band of plant photosynthesis.

Normally, plants can only utilize a small portion of visible light. Through genetic engineering, Jiang Miao has enabled super chloroplasts to absorb the entire visible light band. Combined with the layered structure and special light energy storage mechanism, the photosynthetic energy utilization rate of artificial plants has been increased to the upper limit of 14.3%.

If you want to continue to enhance.

The only way is to include the infrared light that plants cannot absorb into the spectrum range that plants can absorb.

After all, infrared light accounts for about 50% of the energy in sunlight, which is higher than the 43% of visible light.

If the chloroplasts of plants can absorb infrared light, the energy utilization rate of plant photosynthesis may be increased to about 30%, which also means that the various outputs of plants can be doubled again.

As for the idea that plants use infrared light for photosynthesis, whether it is a fantasy, in fact, this idea is possible.

Jiang Miao has consulted scientific research databases around the world and knows that some algae can carry out a certain degree of photosynthesis under near-infrared light. This is because they contain a special light-harvesting antenna complex, chlorophyll f, which can absorb near-infrared light, but this is different from the photosynthesis mechanism of general plants.

Therefore, his next step is to study the photosynthesis mechanism of algae and integrate it into the system of artificial plants.

That night.

Jiang Miao returned to the headquarters.

After having dinner with his family, he and Shuya took their daughter for a walk on the streets of Xinxiang.

"Have artificial plants developed to this extent?" Shuya was very surprised.

Jiang Miao carried his daughter on his back and watched the setting sun. "This is a derivative technology of non-rejection organs. From the moment the non-rejection organs are successfully developed, it means that artificial plant technology is not difficult at all."

Hearing her husband's understatement, Shuya laughed and complained, "This is not difficult, only for you. If it were someone else, it would probably be impossible to figure it out without 10 or 8 years of hard research."

"How's your research going?"

"I completed the research on ham fermentation bacteria this month. Currently, there are 4 types of beneficial bacteria for ham fermentation in the four major types of ham in China, and all of them have been artificially cultivated and mass-produced. As for how to mix the types of bacteria, I did not conduct in-depth research and left it to other researchers to do."

With just a little effort from Shuya, she reached a level that other researchers could hardly reach.

For her, it is not difficult to make this kind of special strain of bacteria for fermenting food. As long as the company needs it, Shuya doesn't mind doing it herself.

"Oh? It seems that we will have ham freedom in the future." Jiang Miao joked.

Shuya pulled a handful of dogtail grass on the roadside and said, "Of course, in the past, fermenting ham depended on the weather, which was almost a gamble. This is not the model of modern agriculture."

This is actually what the Hailufeng Group has been promoting all along, that is, agricultural modernization, agricultural scientificization, and agricultural mechanization.

Traditional ham is a typical non-standard product.

However, the flavor fermentation of the better modern ham varieties is not ideal because a lot of things have been discarded for the sake of industrial production.

Therefore, the Commercial Research Center of Hailufeng Group specially established the "Golden Leg" project and specifically asked Shuya to take action to deal with those special fermentation bacteria.

After completing the most difficult part, the next thing will be handed over to the scientific research department and the business research center.

Before they knew it, the family of three arrived near the Yandunshan Feed Factory in Yancheng Village.

Although the factory still maintains production, its main work has shifted to scientific research.

"Eh? Boss!"

Jiang Miao turned his head and looked not far away, and found that it was Fang Yi, the manager of the feed division: "Mr. Fang, you're off work so late?"

Fang Yi explained: "I just had a meeting and I'm having dinner at the factory. I'm about to get off work."

"I see." Jiang Miao knew that the company did not encourage overtime work, because the company's current daily overtime pay is three times that of normal working hours, and five times during holidays.

Therefore, the company would rather hire more employees than let them work overtime.

He chatted with Fang Yi for a while, and then the other party left. After all, seeing the proprietress was there, Fang Yi didn't want to be a light bulb.

Jiang Miao saw that it was almost time, so he carried his daughter on his back and walked back.

(End of this chapter)