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
deleted by creator
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.
“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!”
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/
I mean, give us a break, if it took 60 million years the last time-
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.
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.
At least Florida has trees, though.
For now
I come from outer space: Your grass is too dry, lacks life and squishiness. Your rocks are sharp and uneven and stupidly confusing. Your sea is too deep, too empty (damn scary) and it lacks nutrients. What even is the point of running marathons? Cultural quirk to want to move that fast. The Trees are nice though, gotta leave you that.
The trees are damn nice.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Replace “machines” with “organisms”.
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.
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.
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).
Don’t forget the symbiotic organic filament network used to transmit raw materials and information between units
Shrooms fo life yo
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 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.There are even a few textile producing trees, like mulberry, that are even better, because it doesn’t need to be spun and woven. The raw inner bark can be pounded together to form sheets of barkcloth.
Like a factory game but you have to modify plants and animal’s with crispr
Monsantio
Children of time had a lot of this. One factions technology is mostly based on natural processes. Their most complicated computer systems are ant based if I remember well. Great book.
So did the Discworld books!
A setting I’m working on includes engineered plants for construction. Think a tree that can be shaped like a vine, a grow light box strapped to the leader node, the light box changes angles to get the plant to change direction of new growth, forming the main supports to have the floors built on. They’ve also got effectively artificial mycelium cultivated over entire planets that form internet connections and backup power grid, with fruiting bodies that provide solar energy to the system
deleted by creator
