Careful. Muskrat might read this and think it’s a good idea to try to waste loads of CO2 emissions manufacturing synthetic trees
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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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.
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Yeah, this is a really really neat way of looking at nature that I sometimes thought about. Nature is pretty fucking darn technologically advanced
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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.
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.
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Farfetch'd
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.
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 Simpsons were the real sci-fi all along with Tomacco
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.
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"Leviathan" by Scott Westerfeld ?
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
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!
Like a factory game but you have to modify plants and animal's with crispr
Monsantio
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.
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.
"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.
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“Burn Them!”
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.
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.
Update request? Sorry, best I can do is a new kind of cancer.
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