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Comment by reizorc | Hacker News Reader

I really wish they'd make tree planting robots

I have to imagine that blanketing an area with seeds dropped from a flying drone would be far more effective than a ground based robot which planted trees. Obviously the success rate of a ground based robot would be far higher, but I think we'd be better off going for quantity over quality.

If that assumption is true, then we already have the tech to do this.

I recall when HN was discussing dropping seeds from an AC-130 few years ago, someone pointed out that it would be much more cost-effective to just hire locals to do it by hand. The same will probably apply to drone-planters.

Not even "locals" - depending on location, you could bus in (or even fly in) masses of low-paid low-skill workers from somewhere else, like it happens for other agri tasks.

There are a few startups working on this. DroneSeed is the one I'm most familiar with.

Trees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot.

> Trees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot.

Do you mean a robot to guard the forest from loggers, or something else?

It was tongue-in-cheek. Because if we'd be allowed to deploy a robot to stop loggers, then we'd also be allowed to just not let the loggers log.

The problem is humans are taking over nature. Planting a couple of trees here and there is pointless if you're going to cut them down again for real estate or farm developments.

We have tractors already optimized for such things. You want 10000 trees planted in an hour? You had that tech about 60 years ago!

Depends on the terrain. A lot of forestry land is on hillsides that are unsuitable for farming and are therefore difficult for tractors to access.

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