Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

Well, I think there is a sense in which this isn't terribly surprising. I remember oh, I don't know, fourteen, fifteen years ago when libertarianism was poised to be the future of the Republican party (at least this is the way everyone was talking; we know now that is was a bunch of bullshit). There was a lot of debate over rugged individualism and personal independence. And I think a lot of the modern (populist) left identity bears the marks of that argument and was pressed to emphasize ways in which we actually are interdependent and can't stand alone—and they needed to do so in such a way that this didn't seem like a bad thing. I think this is a period that kind of intensified the progressive left's attraction to socialist or at least social democratic thought.

Now these critiques of liberal society as too alienated and too atomized have long prefigured this shift in the popular culture of the American political left. There is a great deal of left-wing and feminist criticism of Kant, for example, insofar as he seeks to mold us into subjects that are principally independent and don't depend on other people. The 21st Century versions of this are in turn prefigured and influenced by Marxist critiques of "bourgeois individualism" in the 20th. You might also turn to the critiques of the Romantic "heroic individual" who is in some sense outside of society and sees his (from the feminist critic: his) alienation as insurmountable. Of course this isn't strictly a left-wing idea: obshchina in the Russian context is a curious mixture of conservative and socialist.

It does seem to me that there are a few dimensions that favor pre-modern "collectivity." One is that we do seem to have a longing to be part of things that are larger than ourselves and this can be things so simple as playing in a band. But we notice that these sorts of collective enterprise, in order to really work as the things that they are, involve a kind of unalienated attitude toward other individuals in the collective—an attitude that liberal individualism makes it harder to articulate or at very least forces a kind of reductive view where the division between weak and strong evaluation dissolves. You might also be inspired to take arms against the independence ideal by how lonely and disconnected the world seems to be growing. Sometimes instrumental rationality inadvertantly brings us to experience things that did not initially appear on our list of goods and it seems that society and technology are restructuring the means of achieving certain items on our given (immature) list such that they make less and less contact with the things that really matter. They no longer add the important things to the list. And we find ourselves needing something that we struggle to articulate to ourselves or otherwise find ourselves without a non-embarrassing way of seeking after those things.

Of course individualist modernity has given us many wonderful things. It seems like modern acceptance of homosexuality, for example, would be very difficult to achieve without it. We have to be alienated to the degree that we can get what we need without others needing to like us or approve of our lifestyle. It can't be the end of the story if your (unalienated) support network will cut you off when you say "I don't want to get married and have children. I want to start a household with my lesbian lover." But notice that this kind of independence is facilitated by the liberal state (and indeed, it is what the liberal state sees itself as being for) and its explicit maintenance of impartial systems of exchange (be those market or planned). But, of course, even the libertarian has to admit that much.

author is scared of me = terrified of ambiguity, uses excruciatingly precise language to avoid being misinterpreted, treats diversity as a box-ticking exercise, bends over backwards to explain itself when Literally No One Asked, all morally grey actions have to be immediately justified and resolved