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.
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.
With biodegradeable solar panels, even. And tasty ‘fruit’ sometimes, too.
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.
Farfetch’d
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!
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/
I mean, give us a break, if it took 60 million years the last time-
And all it took was eons of mass death.
farfetched
far-fetched
Fixed, thanks
Farf-etched
Star Trek writers seeing this and making a new movie
Replace oxygen with dilithium and introduce a primitive species that safeguards it at conflict with the rolls die cardassians. Throw in some beastie boys for good measure.
I feel Le Guin may have beat them to it.
Don’t tell conservatives, they’ll suspect the Jews invented them to like do something or something
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
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.
Update request? Sorry, best I can do is a new kind of cancer.
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.
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.
Not to make this sound less cool but you forgot to mention the speed.
That being said, there are some ridiculously fast growing plants on this planet.
They also look amazing, with a stunning variety of forms and foliage.
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.
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.
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).
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.
