Hydroponics: Growing an appreciation for plants
> For me, hydroponics really drove home how remarkable plants are: from a bin containing nothing but water and salts, a fully-formed plant emerges.<p>I feel this is a remarkably underappreciated feat of nature. Some people compare a plant seed to an SD card containing the drawings for a skyscraper. This is an unbelievable understatement. The seed does not just contain the genetic material describing the final object. It <i>also</i> contains information about the whole assembly process, and a very robust one in many cases. It <i>also</i> contains the information about all the tooling needed for the assembly process. And it <i>also</i> contains the initial basic tools to make all that happen. This is truly remarkable. Nobody would dream of putting an SD card into the ground and seeing a skyscraper grow. It's obvious that you need external tooling, knowledge, skill and materials (that have to be externally created from raw materials) for all of this to happen. Plant seed? Everything included.<p>What I find sad about this article is that it needed hydroponics for the appreciation for plants. Hydroponics is a very sterile and artificial way of growing plants, removed from their actual environment and only showcasing a single aspect of growing a plant. My appreciation for plants comes every time I step out into nature. Just take a step into a forest, you don't even need to move to see lots of wonders of nature around you. The complexity of all living things nature has to offer, from the molecular level all the way up to complex interactions in the ecosystem, that really dwarfs your k8s setup by orders of magnitude.<p>Tech people sometimes need to be a bit more humble. (To which this article contributes. I like that.)