Cells are basically the self replicating nanobots that sci fi sometimes has as an example of highly advanced technology, but naturally occurring.
R&D life cycle... hundreds of millions of years.
The manufacturer takes a really long time to respond to new feature requests, and most of the support tickets are still open.
Plus major patch releases only seem to happen after major events that make old renditions obsolete, if not downright broken and dismantled.
Although new software does have a ton of useless speghetti code.
Typical enshittification. Brilliant and amazing technology taken over by private equity and run into the ground
Update request? Sorry, best I can do is a new kind of cancer.
Trees are unbelievably cool. My favorite fact is that the actual living surface of a tree's roots, called the rhizosphere, consists of extremely small, ephemeral hairlike structures that supply the whole, gigantic tree. The large roots we think of are mainly structural. Where the actual "rubber meets the road" of the life form is incredibly small. Within that rhizosphere the interplay of plant, fungi, bacteria, and soil is so intricate that it's difficult to even say where the soil ends and the tree begins.
So many amazing things happen in this space. For example, the tree exudes sugars out of the roots because it creates an electrical gradient that pushes nutrients into the root cells. This way the trees, which are masters of energy efficiency, can use passive transport to uptake nutrients. Fungi have adapted to this energy and symbiotically extend the rhizosphere beyond what the tree is capable of alone. In fact an entire world of organisms has evolved inside the rhizosphere. Similar worlds exist in the bark, the cambium, the buds, the leaves, the flower, and the fruit.
It's like this enormous organism is a fractal masterpiece, and the closer you look the more clever it is. And we all depend on it, because plants are the only organisms capable of turning sunlight into usable energy. Apart from some things living off deep-sea vents, that's it. Even the energy you're using to read this right now passed through a chloroplast. It's just so cool.
Another thing that’s crazy about trees is that there is no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically.
As in: there is no branch on the tree of life for trees. There is no first tree from which all trees are descended. There are trees that have a common ancestor that was definitely not a tree, and there are there are plants that are definitely not trees that are descended from trees.
If you look at the tree of life for plants, you see trees evolving into other types of plants and evolving back into trees all over the place.
Lots of trees can be bushes and do just fine that way if they don't get big .
oh so it's just like fish
"wow, cool. Let's see how people interact with these magical creatures"
They are mowed down faster than they can regrow and are replaced with asphalt. Oh.
I do live in a bit of a different part of the globe. It is a losing battle here on side of humans. Trees pop up and every year there are less people around.
I like it here, may it make me a hillbilly on a flat ground or not.
“Burn Them!”
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology.
It's astounding how far simple trial and error has brought us. No need for scrum or agile!
Yeah, this is a really really neat way of looking at nature that I sometimes thought about. Nature is pretty fucking darn technologically advanced
They have JUST a slight time advantage: over 1.1 billion years. And that's LESS than ¼ of Terra's age.
Well, yeah, because we can't make that yet. If you describe anything in nature we can't make with technology as technology then it sounds like science fiction. That's just tautological!
Went out on a limb for that one.
No reason to bark at them, it has a nice ring to it.
Leaf them bee
I'm rooting for them
Take a bough.
Don't tell conservatives, they'll suspect the Jews invented them to like do something or something
To make it more sci-fi: We have only found such thing in one planet in the whole galaxy, maybe universe.
That's not saying much, since we have only observed roughly 0.0000001% of our galaxy's planets. For all we know there are more planets with trees than without.
I mean, it wouldn't have been surprising if you said universe, bur in our Galaxy?! That's crazy, when does a planet count as observed?
Since we are talking about trees, I would say when we are able to tell if a planet has trees or not.
Lol, fair enough. I got zero clue how we'd find that out efficiently.
I know you probably just typed a random small number, but you’re gunna need at least 10 more zeros to be close. Absolutely mind boggling
They also look amazing, with a stunning variety of forms and foliage.
Life in all its forms is pretty damn amazing. At work while I’m working on my computer shit I am fortunately able to look out the windows at the trees, the birds, the deer, and whatever else wanders by. And even at home we have a bunch of animals.
So much amazing stuff just gets ignored by so many people. That goes for pretty much the entire universe though, not just trees.
This time of year the flowers and birds are quite active.
Yup. To put it another way, we'd be hard-pressed to replicate all of that with our current non-tree-based technology track, at even a fraction of the same efficiency. Chlorophyll is basically a miracle-molecule that makes all that possible, and we have yet to engineer anything like it.
Don’t forget the symbiotic organic filament network used to transmit raw materials and information between units
Is there a term for this kind of sci-fi esque reframing of what we'd otherwise think of as "normal" to highlight how ridiculously cool or weird something is?
Thinking along the lines of Body Ritual Among The Nacirema
Self-replicating, solar-powered machines with long life cycles that synthesise carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen, sturdy building materials and sometimes edible products, while providing shade, cooling and ground stabilisation.
With biodegradeable solar panels, even. And tasty 'fruit' sometimes, too.
I think this is a missed trope for solarpunkish scifi: manipulating plants to grow anything. Fabric for clothes growing as bark. Tomatoes with pracetamol in them. Flowers depositing certain minerals it picks up from the ground in them. Stuff like this.
The cotton plant, hemp and flax do grow fabric for clothes, and willow bark contains the active ingredient of Aspirin.
Flowers (Fabaceae) can even pick up nitrogen from the air and deposit it into the ground where it acts as fertilizer.
I have to keep reminding myself that effectively our technology is just a loosely-based, extremely primitive, and extremely inefficient mimicry of shit that started happening on its own billions and billions of years ago across the entire universe and perfectly scales from microscopic to galactic levels.
They also have several copies of their genome for redundancy.
You actually see this kind of shit in tech bro spheres where they describe some "new groundbreaking invention" using terms like this when it's something we already have, but they're version is shittier.
Adam Something on Youtube has a saddening amount of videos on this sort of shit.
I was talking to someone the other day who was really gung-ho about carbon capture technology. I listened patiently, and then asked: "You mean like trees?" Which set him off talking about using genetically modified algae for carbon capture, which is a neat idea, I guess, but the impression I got was that there's just no money in planting more trees so he wasn't interested in them.
I had a huge Magnolia tree in my backyard. My backyard is not that big. But after I cut it down, the silence was deafening. It was very sad. The tree was too big for my small yard and it was dropping leaves like crazy. Every other day I had to go pick up like three trash cans of leaves.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
