>>11730138I am very familiar with light pumps as I have researched them before. We had some fairly impressive versions in the past before light-bulbs took over. (see Anidolic lighting)
However light pumps and such can only do so much. They can move and spread the light, but they don't make more of it. You can use them so you can grow plants deeper into a building, in which case you just added a lot of stuff to move the plant instead of just growing it closer to the window. So that doesn't really change much in that case.
Worse yet is when you spread the light so you can have more growing area, you also lower the energy each plant receivers, which directly effects how much the plants grow. So you get more planets with less yield which again doesn't change much except for adding more complications.
This is where people start suggesting plants that do well with less light, while this can help it doesn't change much in the way of food as those plants tend to be lower calorie foods, because there is less energy.
You can see how we keep hitting the conservation of energy issues. We can move things around, but it doesn't really change much. Adding artificial lighting make it so much worse, which puts pressure for better energy sources. Which leads to suspended nuclear fusion for direct lighting as an ideal model. ... and we have once again gone full circle as that is how the Sun and planets do it in nature.
Regardless of if you say it was billions of years of evolution, or God's divine work. It should be self evident how hard to make a better setup. This is what vertical farms fail at time and time again. We have already developed and in some cases abandoned effective ways to address our food production demands. Shoving it in a tall building, just means you need a tall building to add to you cost.
