People Twitter

Cells are basically the self replicating nanobots that sci fi sometimes has as an example of highly advanced technology, but naturally occurring.

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.

"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.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology.

Yeah, this is a really really neat way of looking at nature that I sometimes thought about. Nature is pretty fucking darn technologically advanced

Don't tell conservatives, they'll suspect the Jews invented them to like do something or something

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!

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.

Went out on a limb for that one.

They also look amazing, with a stunning variety of forms and foliage.

To make it more sci-fi: We have only found such thing in one planet in the whole galaxy, maybe universe.

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.

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

With biodegradeable solar panels, even. And tasty 'fruit' sometimes, too.

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.

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 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.

Star Trek writers seeing this and making a new movie

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.