Quote Originally Posted by wumpus View Post
One painful issue with the whole "bring plants into space" idea is delivering the sunlight. The plants need to be kept to near atmospheric pressure levels (so you can breathe the air), and just scaling glass will wind up with the mass scaling with the area (because scaling by volume would block too much sunlight). I suspect that containing the plants in a more spherical (or at least low surface area structure) and lighting them with solar powered LEDs might work better.
I saw something interesting about how evolution dealt with plankton's need to receive light while having as full a calcium armour as they could to avoid being eaten. The solution came in the form of the very first eyeball (which our polyp ancestors likely inherited via horizontal gene transfer, because sometimes, you do gain your enemy's powers by devouring their heart).

The lens allows to take more light in than would happen by just letting what hits that area through, while in its original iteration, the retina was lined with chloroplasts.

Now I could just say that it's possible to concentrate light with lens or mirrors, bring it in via a rather small window, then diffuse it out at the desired surface in the same manner, but I find it way more interesting to bring up that this method not only occured naturally, but was also the eye's first function.