Experiment 3: Accelerated plant growth

This is a thought experiment. It is designed to question the possibility of accelerated plant growth. There are two distinct approaches; growing them bigger and growing them faster. But first, a little history reminder: there was a time in our Earth's development when plant dominated its entire surface. They grew in huge numbers and sizes. That period is called Carboniferous. For example the Carboniferous lycophytes of the order Lepidodendrales, were huge trees with trunks 30 meters high and up to 1.5 meters in diameter. Most of our coal supplies were formed in this period.

Those facts gave me an idea. Maybe we could examine and replicate the conditions in which the plants obviously thrived. After some research, I came up with the following list of factors that determine plant height and speed of growth:

1. the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air
2. the air pressure
3. the qualities of light (color and intensity)
4. the qualities of plant nutrients (they do intake them, via their roots)
5. the qualities of the medium in which the plant grows (ground, water, air)

If a lab was made with the purpose of testing the influence of those factors on plant growth, I'm certain they would come up with some excellent and surprising results. The downside is, the entire experiment would take a lot of time and work. Let's put that into perspective.

Imagine you had 10 different plant species, 10 samples of each species. That's 100 plants. If you were to measure 10 different levels of each of the 5 main growth factors (listed above) on those 100 plants, that would add up to 10000000 (10 million) different experiments. And this is barely scratching the surface.

Hope you found this informative. I'm looking forward to your comments.