Hi Colin,
Thanks for your intriguing question. As one of the early contributors who worked on AskNature I was also tempted to add in ideas from Earth’s geology such as: crystallization of minerals, iridescence of opals, and the movement of plate tectonics, just to name a few. Earth processes and geological forms are certainly just as fascinating as living critters.

Janine has emphasized that biomimicry is first about “bio” or life. So I could end my response here and say that the very definition of biomimicry excludes anything non-living.

But let’s tease this out a bit. If we go back in time to the very beginning, how did life first appear on this planet? Some suggest life started with the elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus. Remember the early experiment where Stanley Miller put an electric charge into a mixture of natural gases and got amino acids, the building blocks of proteins! Life on primordial earth may have started with little strands of nucleic acids. Life is really a form of chemistry that has the ability to replicate.

So living organisms are different than non-living rock. Life emerged out of conditions that were conducive to life. And yet, it is our planet that sustains all living things. Oxygen, carbon, water, and nutrients keep us alive. Many of those nutrients are locked up in rocks themselves. But it is living organisms that are able to extract them.

Geomimicry could provide another very clever science. Could we mimic geologic forms, processes and systems and apply them to human needs? Would they be sustainable? Would these ideas meet Life’s Principles? Would they meet the performance standards of nature? These are the key questions one would need to answer.

Best Regards, Robyn

Thanks for your replies,

I had a feeling there would also a different field called "geomimicry" but I failed in researching this before my post. I do find the geology world and biology world both intriguing. (Probably has a lot to do with my father and uncle and now brother all being geologists).

My next question/suggestion may seem like an odd one but I can't help to think about it more and more and that is, Reverse Biomimicry.

I can hear you asking what that is, and my answer is that right now it is probably nothing more than an idea of mine. I know this website is set up in order to help inventors look to nature to find solutions for their problems, but why not go further than that?

Why not look at nature, see what marvels it does, then see where in the world you can apply it and make a new invention from that, or improve on an existing invention that may not be as effecient as it could be if it looked at biomimicry?

As a serial entrepeneur this idea of reverse biomimicry intrigues me and I would could divulge a lot of time to it but unfortunately don't have the resources (databases) of knowledge that this website could potentially have.

Just food for thought I guess.

Colin, Just to clarify, "geomimicry" is a word that both Sherry and I created independent of each other. I don't know if anyone has attempted to birth this idea. That is, it's not a real phenomenon that I know of. Talk about parallel evolution! I guess Sherry and I think alike. We had a private chuckle. Cheers, Robyn

Colin,

The reason we focus on biological systems is because living organisms have spent 3.8 billions years doing what industry has been trying to do for hundreds of years: harnessing energy and using it in a controlled way to create complex systems (ex, nature developed the solar-based electron transport chain and the chemical transformations of photosynthesis, and man created the power-generating turbine and the petrochemical manufacturing facility).

Industry and biological systems differ in that living organisms have developed complex systems while maintaining life friendly conditions throughout the life cycle of these systems, whereas modern industry still largely defecates where it sleeps.

Geological systems, on the other hand, are completely passive. They do not make any attempt to harness energy or build complex systems. On the contrary, they always seek the path of least resistance, taking whatever energy comes their way (heat, gravity, chemistry, etc.) and allow it to dissipate quickly, such as water or rock flowing downhill, or metals oxidizing.

So by focusing on the strategies and mechanisms of biological systems, we hit a much richer vein of potential solutions to modern industrial challenges.