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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.

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

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.

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.

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

Don’t forget the symbiotic organic filament network used to transmit raw materials and information between units

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.

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.

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

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

Star Trek writers seeing this and making a new movie

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.

They also have several copies of their genome for redundancy.

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.

Farfetch'd