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!
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
I found the noir one
I closed my eyes as I walked down the ramp, trying to shed the stress that’s been building. Routine etched into my body, I’m at one with the world. The curb arrives a step too soon and my whole body clenches, my eyes snap open. I noticed a Cadillac turning around, it’s diesel engine revving. I slowed and watched. He edges backwards and forwards too many times. The smell of gas overpowered the almost ever present mildew and moisture. My attention turned to the door. I raised my key to the lock, the resistance familiar and the clicking cathartic. An empty hallway, and another door. A satisfying click. A room. I turn the lights off. The other hallway is as lifeless as the first. I check each door, locked. One washroom clear, the next, spotless. I leave through the door I entered, diesel lingering in the air. I kept my eyes open for the walk up the ramp. I passed two women in a hushed conversation, a quick glance at my uniform and I’m quickly forgotten. The fleeting attention stirs me, a reminder of my solitude. I turn the corner, a gust of icy wind bites into my face and polyurethane coated Kevlar gloves. They aren’t right for the weather, being made to handle plate glass and sheet steel. Perfect for grabbing a blade, function over comfort. My eyes scan the lot, probing each corner. Empty. I reach where I began, my least favorite part. Crouching down, vulnerable, a bittersweet click unlocks this door, the latch along the bottom. Exposed to dirt, rain, slush, the lock drags me down to it’s level, every day, twice every hour. I’m exposed, just the same as it. The door opens and I straighten, nobody nearby. My gloves slip off and are thrown to the table, I’ve lost control to habit and routine. The cap comes off the pen and the tip presses to paper. “2134h. Patrolled, no issues.”
That’s fucking great
Edit this reminds me of years ago, I was very bored working my security job on a plaza, I wrote a log entry is this kind of way. Normal public plaza with metal patio furniture and umbrellas… like an alien landscape
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.
oh so it’s just like fish
Lots of trees can be bushes and do just fine that way if they don’t get big .
Entropy at its finest
The trees got Rhizz
Imagine aliens that don’t have anything like trees.
They’d be so fucking jealous.
Imagine being born on a world made of just mostly slimy grasslands, with bare rock and deserts and a shallow sea full of parasites. And the atmosphere is awful, so running a marathon would be like physically impossible. Actually, besides the dry parts, that kinda sounds like Florida… At least Florida has trees, though. Imagine how shit Florida would be without any trees at all.
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.
They also have several copies of their genome for redundancy.
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.
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!
And all it took was eons of mass death.
To be fair, it did also take several thousand years to develop instead of a few decades.
It took the Earth almost 1 billion years to come up with photosynthesis 🙃
And another 60 million (the Carboniferous period) to figure out how to break down lignin. Trees were the equivalent of our plastic pollution crises - no way to return the nutrients to the ecosystem or even deal with the mass other than burial or burning - for millions of years.
All fungi today that rot wood descend from just one fungal evolution event, and even today we don’t really understand how they manage to digest the lignin. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation/
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.
There are support tickets? I have a few complaints…
Theoretically you can submit complaints to the lead engineer, but there are very few, very old reports of anyone receiving a response and the sources are somewhat suspect.
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 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
Yeah I figured it was enough zeros to drive the point.
Noooooooooope
Don’t forget the symbiotic organic filament network used to transmit raw materials and information between units
Shrooms fo life yo
“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.
Your part of the globe sounds awesome. I suspect it’s close to my part of the globe.
“Burn Them!”
They also look amazing, with a stunning variety of forms and foliage.
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.
poor tree
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.
actually we have solar panels and electrolysis of water, which produces hydrogen, which you can perceive to be H2, which is H-(CH2)0-H, so it’s the simplest (zeroth) hydrocarbon if you will. Not quite glucose, but it’s something.
btw i give H2 the name zen-ane (where zen means zero and -ane means it’s an alcane).
I’d think we could probably engineer similarly insanely capable biotech if we were completely reckless, committed a serious fraction of our resources and people, and had infinite Earths to ruin in the process.
I’m not sure how GMO’s are handled, but I’m guessing it’s a quite restrictive on the engineering side and somewhat cautious in implementation.
We are likely a few hundred years away from actually synthesizing a close equivalent and if we do, this one most likely is THE molecule for planet Earth. Other molecules may be suited for other stars and other atmospheres, but clearly chlorophyll won the race of the most efficient simplest molecule to best utilize the resources of our planet.
