The Prospenomics of Tillandsia

After exploring the Prospenomics of cupins (Brazilian earth termites), a new reflection emerges: the Prospenomics of Air Plants.

leia esta matéria em Português

One of the fundamental premises of Prospenomics is precisely the possibility of overcoming our prospenomic blindness — our inability to recognize resources, opportunities, and pathways to prosperity that already exist around us simply because we do not know how to see them.

And we do not need to rely only on science fiction to find such solutions. Biomimicry is another powerful tool. Nature has been experimenting with solutions for millions of years, and organisms such as termites and tillandsias can reveal strategies that we have not yet learned to imagine.

Contrary to popular belief, tillandsia is not a parasite on the tree; it only attaches itself to the tree's bark without access to the sap. Its feeding method comes from much more elaborate resources and is in harmony with the tree (you've seen it, tillandsia even grows on electrical wires, and electrical wires don't have nutrients).

At first glance, the Tillandsia seems like a true paradox of nature. How can a plant live without soil? Without roots buried in the ground? Suspended in the air, apparently disconnected from one of the main sources of resources available to plants?

Yet where many would see only scarcity, the tillandsia sees abundance.

Tillandsia belongs to a group of plants that, over millions of years of evolution, learned to transform their surroundings into a source of life. Instead of relying primarily on resources buried in the soil, it developed a completely different strategy: extracting from the air what other organisms do not even recognize as a resource.

Its leaves are covered with thousands of tiny trichomes, microscopic structures capable of capturing water and retaining particles carried by the wind. Along with them come small amounts of minerals and nutrients — including calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus — originating from dust, erosion, and other particles suspended in the atmosphere.

What looks to us like nothing more than dust can therefore become a source of nutrients for the tillandsia.

Evolution took millions of years to build this solution. Bromeliads emerged tens of millions of years ago, and different lineages of tillandsias gradually accumulated adaptations that allowed them to exploit environments where other plants would struggle to survive.

One of the most remarkable is CAM metabolism (Crassulacean Acid Metabolism).

While many plants open their stomata during the day to capture CO₂, inevitably losing water in the process, CAM plants do something different. Tillandsia can open its stomata primarily at night, when temperatures are lower and relative humidity is higher. The captured CO₂ is incorporated into organic acids and temporarily stored.

During the day, with the stomata closed, these compounds provide the carbon needed for photosynthesis.

It is an extraordinarily elegant solution: it separates the moment of capturing resources from the moment of producing energy.

Nature did not necessarily create more resources.

It created a smarter way of accessing them.

The Tillandsia Literally Gets Blood Out of Stone

Dust in the air, mineral particles, organic matter, and even microscopic structures associated with microorganisms are constantly floating around us.

We barely notice them.

The tillandsia does.

It transforms part of this seemingly insignificant material into biological resources.

Phosphorus can be obtained from phosphate compounds and incorporated into fundamental molecules such as ATP. Nitrogen can arrive in the form of nitrogen-containing compounds present in the atmosphere and in deposited particles. Calcium, for example, can be transported in microscopic mineral particles lifted through the erosion of soil, rocks, and other surfaces.

This is blood out of stone: minerals locked inside other materials are broken down into microscopic particles, carried through the environment, and eventually become nourishment for a plant that appears to live in nothingness.

The tillandsia reminds us of something we often forget:

A resource does not cease to exist simply because we do not recognize it as a resource.

And this may be one of the first great prospenomic lessons of the tillandsia:

Prosperity is not simply about having more resources. It is about developing ways to overcome prospenomic blindness and creating intelligent systems capable of recognizing, accessing, and transforming resources that already exist — but that nobody realizes are available.

The tillandsia did not create the water, carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, or minerals surrounding it.

It simply learned how to see them.

The Tillandsias of Our Economic Lives

As I said at the beginning, perhaps the hardest part of Prospenomics is precisely reducing prospenomic blindness: developing mechanisms capable of finding prosperity where, at first glance, we see nothing.

The best example is all around us, right now.

Just as a Tillandsia lives surrounded by resources that seem invisible — water suspended in the air, mineral dust, gases and energy — we too are immersed in an extraordinary amount of economic resources that we normally ignore.

The question is not necessarily how to create new resources, but how to recognize, capture and transform those that are already circulating around us.

This is where the Tillandsias of our economic lives begin.

1. The electromagnetic air — the invisible sororoca.

You cannot see it, but you are swimming in energy.

The world is covered by radio waves, cellular signals, Wi-Fi and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. There are millions of telecommunications towers and an even greater number of transmission points spread throughout our cities.

To us, it is simply “the air.” To certain technologies, however, it is a continuous flow of energy and information.

Companies such as Powercast, Ossia, WiTricity and Energous are working on ways to harvest ambient electromagnetic energy to power sensors and other low-consumption devices.

It is the principle of the Tillandsia's trichomes: capture what is already present in the environment and what nobody had considered a resource.

2. Petroleum — when waste became wealth

In the early days of the petroleum industry, crude oil was often treated as an inconvenience. In some contexts, its lighter fractions were difficult to store and transport and were burned or simply discarded.

We had to learn how to see what was inside that seemingly troublesome substance.

First came kerosene. Then gasoline, diesel, plastics, solvents and an extraordinary range of other products.

What had once been a problem became one of the greatest economic resources in modern history.

The prospenomic lesson is simple: a resource can exist long before we develop the ability to perceive it.

3. Waste heat — energy that has already been paid for

A large portion of the energy we produce never performs the work for which it was originally intended. In industrial processes, data centers, refrigeration systems, power plants and buildings, significant amounts simply become heat and are released into the environment.

But wasted heat is still energy.

District heating networks and industrial systems already recover this heat to warm water, buildings and other processes.

It is almost an economic CAM metabolism: storing or recovering today what would otherwise simply be lost to the environment.

4. CO₂ from the air — the poison that can become a raw material

Carbon dioxide is usually presented only as a climate problem. But it can also be a potential raw material.

Companies such as Climeworks capture CO₂ directly from the air. Other technologies use the gas to produce fuels, materials, food products or mineralized concrete.

The point is not to turn CO₂ into something “good,” but to recognize that even something we want to remove from the system may have economic value when we find a way to reuse it.

It is the Tillandsia logic: something dispersed and apparently useless can become a raw material.

5. Water from the air — the moisture nobody counts

The atmosphere contains an enormous amount of water.

In certain environments, technologies such as fog nets, atmospheric water generators and humidity-harvesting systems can turn vapor or microscopic droplets into usable water.

It may be the most literal analogy with the Tillandsia: you do not need to own a river to find water.

Sometimes, you simply need to learn how to capture it from the air.

6. Mineral dust — what we sweep away can feed us

You sweep away the dust.

The Tillandsia captures it.

Wind-borne mineral particles can contain calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and other elements. In agriculture, remineralization technologies use certain types of rock dust as mineral sources for soil.

What is dirt in one context can be an input in another.

Once again, the difference is not necessarily in the object itself, but in the perspective that assigns value to it.

7. Noise and vibration — the city is constantly shaking

A busy street produces noise, vibration and movement continuously.

We normally perceive these things as pollution or disturbance.

But energy-harvesting systems can convert mechanical vibrations into small amounts of energy to power sensors. Pavegen, for example, explores the conversion of pressure generated by people walking into electricity.

see more in Pavegen

It is not a giant power plant.

And that is precisely the point: a small amount of energy, multiplied by millions of events, can become a resource.

8. Diffuse light — prosperity also exists in the shade

Energy systems often imagine the Sun as a source of direct light: large panels, large areas, large-scale generation.

But there is also reflected, diffuse and indirect light everywhere.

Photovoltaic technologies designed for low-light environments are exploring ways to generate energy where direct sunlight is unavailable.

It is the Tillandsia living in the shade of a tree.

It does not need to own the Sun to make use of its light.

9. Sewage and urine — the new petroleum

We continuously produce things that we later pay to remove from our environment.

Sewage, sludge and urine contain nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as organic matter that can be transformed into different products.

see more in Reasons to Be Cheerful

Projects around the world are already working on recovering these nutrients for fertilizers, biogas, fuels and other materials.

The prospenomic inversion is powerful:

what we call waste may simply be a resource we have not yet learned to separate.

10. Bagasse, straw and rice husks — the field produces more than we think

Agriculture does not produce only what we sell as food.

It also produces straw, bagasse, husks, fibers and enormous amounts of residual biomass.

Sugarcane bagasse can become second-generation ethanol. Rice husks can be used for energy generation and the production of materials.

The logic is the same: we do not necessarily need to produce more biomass; we need to learn how to extract more prosperity from the biomass we already produce.

11. Rooftops and asphalt — infrastructure that already exists

Millions of square meters of rooftops, parking lots and other built surfaces remain economically underutilized.

A roof is already there.

It receives sunlight every day.

It can host solar panels.

It can collect water.

It can support vegetation.

It can produce energy without requiring a new industrial site.

It is almost the economic equivalent of a branch for a Tillandsia: a structure that already exists and can be made to support a new function.

12. The digital trail — data dust

Every brake recorded by a navigation app, every movement, every search and every digital interaction leaves behind a tiny trail.

For the individual, it may seem irrelevant.

Aggregated at scale, however, it becomes information about traffic, behavior, demand, prices and patterns of consumption.

It is the digital version of the trichome:

capture tiny particles scattered through the environment and transform them into something useful.

13. Idle CPU time and attention

Computers, smartphones and other devices spend much of their time without using their full capacity.

In much the same way, millions of people have small amounts of time, attention and cognitive capacity that never find an economic application.

Distributed-computing and crowdwork platforms attempt to transform part of this idle capacity into infrastructure.

It is not simply about producing more.

It is about asking:

how much of the capacity we already possess remains unused?

14. Dead code and ancestral knowledge

There is one more invisible resource: what has already been discovered but is no longer being used.

Abandoned code, expired patents, forgotten techniques, traditional recipes, agricultural knowledge and ancestral practices can remain dormant for decades.

My Cauim Tiakau is a very good example.

The alcoholic fermentation of manioc did not need to be invented from scratch. It is an ancestral technology for transforming an abundant plant into a beverage through a low-energy process.

The knowledge was already there.

Just as with the Tillandsia, we did not need to create a new branch. We needed to learn how to hold on to what already existed.

Perhaps this is one of the central ideas of Prospenomics:

prosperity is not necessarily found in what we still need to create. It may be hidden in what already exists — but what we have not yet learned to see.

References

Barfuss, M. H. J., Till, W., Leme, E. M. C., Pinzón, J. P., Manzanares, J. M., Halbritter, H., Samuel, R., & Brown, G. K. (2016). Taxonomic revision of Bromeliaceae subfam. Tillandsioideae based on multi-locus DNA sequence phylogeny and morphology. Phytotaxa, 279, 1–97.

Benzing, D. H. (2000). Bromeliaceae: Profile of an Adaptive Radiation. Cambridge University Press.

Givnish, T. J., Millam, K. C., Berry, P. E., & Sytsma, K. J. (2007). Phylogeny, adaptive radiation, and historical biogeography of Bromeliaceae inferred from ndhF sequence data. Aliso, 23(1), 3–26.

Givnish, T. J., Barfuss, M. H. J., Van Ee, B., Riina, R., Schulte, K., Horres, R., Gonsiska, P. A., Jabaily, R. S., Crayn, D. M., Smith, J. A. C., Winter, K., Brown, G. K., Evans, T. M., Holst, B. K., Luther, H., Till, W., Zizka, G., Berry, P. E., & Sytsma, K. J. (2011). Phylogeny, adaptive radiation, and historical biogeography in Bromeliaceae: Insights from an eight-locus plastid phylogeny. American Journal of Botany, 98(5), 872–895.

Givnish, T. J., et al. (2014). Adaptive radiation, correlated and contingent evolution, and net species diversification in Bromeliaceae. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

Givnish, T. J., et al. (2024). CAM evolution is associated with gene family expansion in an explosive bromeliad radiation. Nature Plants.

Holtum, J. A. M., Hancock, L. P., Edwards, E. J., & Winter, K. (2021). Engineering of Crassulacean Acid Metabolism. Annual Review of Plant Biology.

Lüttge, U. (2002). Crassulacean acid metabolism: Plastic, fantastic. Journal of Experimental Botany, 53(369), 569–580. https://doi.org/10.1093/jexbot/53.369.569

Schmitt, A. K., & Lüttge, U. (1989). Gas exchange and water vapor uptake in the atmospheric CAM bromeliad Tillandsia recurvata L.: The influence of trichomes. Botanica Acta, 102(1), 80–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1438-8677.1989.tb00070.x

Silvera, K., Santiago, L. S., Cushman, J. C., & Winter, K. (2009). Crassulacean acid metabolism and epiphytism linked to adaptive radiation in Bromeliaceae. Functional Plant Biology.

Electromagnetic Energy Harvesting and Wireless Power

Energous Corporation. (2026). Wireless Power Networks and Over-the-Air Power. Energous.

Ossia, Inc. (2026). Cota®: Real Wireless Power Technology & Charging. Ossia.

Powercast Corporation. (2026). Wireless Power Technologies. Powercast.

Powercast Corporation. (2026). Powerharvester® Receivers: Wireless Power Components for Converting RF Energy to DC Power. Powercast.

WiTricity. (2026). Wireless Power Transfer Technology. WiTricity.

Petroleum and the Transformation of Waste into Value

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2023). History of Gasoline. U.S. Department of Energy.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (n.d.). Basic Refinery Process — Description and History. U.S. Department of Labor.

Waste Heat and Energy Recovery

U.S. Department of Energy. (2023). Waste Heat Recovery Basics. Industrial Technologies Office.

U.S. Department of Energy. (2008). Waste Heat Recovery: Technology and Opportunities in U.S. Industry. Industrial Technologies Program.

U.S. Department of Energy. (2024). Best Practices Guide for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design. Federal Energy Management Program.

Carbon Capture and CO₂ Utilization

Climeworks. (2026). Direct Air Capture Technology: Innovations in CO₂ Removal. Climeworks.

CarbonCure Technologies. (2026). Putting CO₂ to Work in Concrete Production. CarbonCure.

CarbonCure Technologies, Central Concrete, & Heirloom. (2023). First-Ever Concrete Storage of Atmospheric CO₂ Captured by Direct Air Capture. CarbonCure Technologies.

Atmospheric Water Harvesting

Verbrugghe, N., & De Clerck, O. (2023). Water harvesting through fog collectors: A review of conceptual, experimental and operational aspects. International Journal of Low-Carbon Technologies, 18, 392–403. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijlct/ctac129

Kennedy, S., et al. (2024). Bio-inspired fog harvesting meshes: A review. Advanced Functional Materials. https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202306162

Ghosh, A., et al. (2023). An overview of atmospheric water harvesting methods: The inevitable path of the future in water supply. [Journal article].

World Design Organization. (2018). Warka Water: Designing for Accessible Clean Water and Sanitation.

Buckminster Fuller Institute. (2015). Warka Water.

Kinetic Energy Harvesting

Pavegen Systems Ltd. (2026). How Pavegen Works: The Science Behind Every Step & Kinetic Energy Flooring Explained. Pavegen.

Pavegen Systems Ltd. (2026). Pavegen: Every Step Generates a Powerful Connection. Pavegen.

Digital Commons and Accumulated Knowledge

GitHub. (2024). Octoverse 2024: AI Leads Python to Top Language as the Number of Global Developers Surges. GitHub Blog.

GitHub. (2025). Octoverse 2025: A New Developer Joins GitHub Every Second as AI Leads TypeScript to #1. GitHub Blog.

GitHub. (2025). What 986 Million Code Pushes Say About the Developer Workflow in 2025. GitHub Blog.

Botanical Classification

For the plant discussed in this article:

Tillandsia recurvata (L.) L.

Kingdom: Plantae
Phylum: Streptophyta
Class: Equisetopsida
Subclass: Magnoliidae
Order: Poales
Family: Bromeliaceae
Genus: Tillandsia L.
Species: Tillandsia recurvata (L.) L.

Research and Source Disclaimer

The examples presented in this article are intended to illustrate the central concept of Prospenomics: the possibility of recognizing economic value in resources that are overlooked, dispersed, underutilized, or traditionally classified as waste.

The technologies and companies mentioned are presented as examples of this broader principle and should not be interpreted as implying that all of them operate at the same technological maturity, economic scale, efficiency, or commercial viability. Some figures and examples are approximate, context-dependent, or evolving as technologies and markets develop.

In particular, energy harvesting from ambient electromagnetic radiation, low-light photovoltaic generation, atmospheric water harvesting, kinetic energy harvesting, CO₂ utilization, waste-heat recovery, and distributed computing remain highly context-dependent technologies. Their practical usefulness depends on factors such as energy density, efficiency, infrastructure, geography, economics, and application.

The Pavegen example should also be understood correctly: its commonly cited figure refers to approximately 3–5 watt-seconds (joules) of energy per step, rather than 3–5 watts of continuous power per step.

Likewise, the technologies of Climeworks and CarbonCure represent different stages of the same prospenomic logic: Climeworks focuses on capturing CO₂ directly from the atmosphere, while CarbonCure uses captured CO₂ in concrete production, where it becomes mineralized.

This article is therefore not intended as a technical, engineering, investment, or commercial assessment of the companies or technologies mentioned. Rather, they serve as real-world illustrations of a single proposition:

prosperity may already be present in the environment; what is missing is often not the resource itself, but our ability to perceive, capture, connect, and transform it.