Ok, so since energy obviously isn’t much of a problem for it (it doesn’t use as much as a human body since it just flies up and then glides around), since flying is it’s primary use of energy, I’m assuming flying is one of the things you are asking for the math for. Well, it doesn’t just float with hydrogen, the bladders are there to assist it, so I don’t need to do the math for them yet, besides, they are quite large anyway in the picture, so flying wouldn’t require a ton of energy. What might be even more important is structural integrity, but again, hydrogen bladders really help there, the wings won’t just snap off, because the hydrogen bladders can hold the wings up, just not the middle portion, so the wings certainly won’t fall off, but what if the wings float off? You may ask, simple, the buoyancy is fairly neutral if you remove the middle portion, so when adding the middle portion back, the wings will want to stay at about the same level except when falling really fast, which it never does. Well now that I’ve narrowed it down to just hydrogen bladders, here: 1 m³ lifts about 1.2 lbs, and the leaves with muscles obviously are quite light, so less than 1 m³ could lift them. So the hydrogen bladders could lift the wings, and the body would be the only weight pulling it down, which would be counteracted by the wings. I really want to see plant civs in thrive, but obviously they need to be possible irl, so all feedback is welcome.
wouldn’t it be more efficient to have an extremely light, hard, and durable vacuum bladder as a vacuum is far less dense than hydrogen meaning a lot more buoyancy for the same amount of space
How would that evolve?
probably something with hydrogen bladders making their hydrogen bladders harder and emptier until the bladders had nothing in them
So, you’re telling me it was entirely unnecessary to drop to my knees, look up at the sky with tears in my eyes, and shout “What have I done???”
Darn.
I always thought the best plantimal would be one that hibernates basically in reverse of how bears do it irl. you hibernate in the summer and let your hair become the leaves to build up glucose/fat for the winter, hairs on the lower body could grow out to roots . you have a number of options for reproduction in this case. you could do standard animal mating, you could go flowers and pollinators, or even wind blown pollen.
course if you were an omnivore for the non hibernating periods you would only need to become plant when times became harsh. this is kind of how they did it in the book dragons egg.
Don’t double post, you can edit it, but welcome back!
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to make some sort of plant-like organisms that also has a brain.
it definitely is possible but you would have to invent an extremely fast version of RuBisCO because how much of it plants have is what weighs them down so much they cannot move easily.
The topic isn’t about plants, it’s about plantoids, as in organisms similar to plants. Also, what does movement have to do with this?
Based on this PDF, a fire ant colony needs 1.14±0.29Kcal/gramweek in food to sustain themselves. I couldn’t find any sources on other ants, or on how intellectual fire ants specifically were, so I’ll round it up and double it to get about 2.86Kcal/gwk. Assuming an individual ant weighs 5mg, then each ant would require 14.2cal/wk, or about 99μW. Because they will be in darkness for around half their life, I’ll double it and make it 0.2mW. This source states that crops have at most a 2% efficiency, which for this ant-mind requires that it must be illuminated with a power of 10mW during the day. It should be able to turn its leaves, so this value can be left unaltered. This says atmosphere absorbs 70% of incoming light, and this states that the most illuminated portion of Earth’s surface receives 1360W/m^2. Together this shows that for an Earth-like planet, the most illuminated portion of the surface receives around 400W/m^2 during the day. With these figures, we can see that a creature with the intellect and strength of an ant would require a leaf no greater than 25mm^2 in area. If this leaf were circular, it would be about 3mm in radius, which given that the ants it’s based on is at minimum only 2mm, seems reasonable enough
EDIT: 50gens has informed me that I have made an error in my calculations, specifically that it is 47% of sunlight, not 30%, that reachs the surface (source). Hence, the surface receives 639W/m^2, and hence the ant-like would require only 16mm^2, or a circular leaf that’s 5mm across
chlorophyl is heavy
and makes energy very slowly
meaning that overall
its a waste of energy to get it as an animal
again. it is not the chlorophyll that is the problem. it is the RuBisCO being slow and the organism needing too much of it for moving to be efficient. though the chlorophyll does contribute it is a very small portion of the problem.
Brains are pretty energy efficient. Human brains use only around 12 watts, and a smaller brain would logically use less. So I think a plant-like human could have a brain like Earth animals do. But fast movement of the whole body definitely is unrealistic like you guys are saying.
yes, fast movement as a plantoid is unrealistic unless you find a way to increase the efficiency of your RuBisCO and thus need less of it which means less weight and more energy to move more which means increased viability as most plantoids will need to eat every so often. increased viability means more mutations(it should be represented as an MP discount based on their population) which means more chances to speed up your RuBisCO and that way a positive feedback loop can be created that ends in only a few RuBisCO proteins per chloroplast which will reduce the weight enough that you could have trees that weigh little enough to be able to walk if you give them the legs of an elephant and everything needed to maintain and operate them if your planet has gravity three quarters as strong as on earth.
No my guy, the human brain alone uses almost as much energy as the rest of the body.
Also, there is no reason for a plant to evolve a brain.
Not really. Like 20% of the energy, but it is much less than 20% of the body mass, so it is very energy intensive type of organ.
just to save gard about brain energy use:
not if it is like an earth plant but if it has muscles and an animal that keeps eating the majority of it’s seeds then it does.
It could just evolve seeds capable of surviving the animal’s digestive system.