Learning about this a while back absolutely blew my mind. (So much so that I submitted it to HN, where it was roundly ignored. Oh well :-)
Anyways, it's a new and strange idea to me that this organism, covering a mountainside, is really more properly thought of as an absolutely massive underground body that sends shoots above ground to breed and collect energy. Makes me feel weird when I consider the quantity and variety of life below my feet.
Secondly, it's 80,000 years old. That made me consider the variety of timescales that life exists in. I wonder if this is considered in the search for extraterrestrial life. Would we even be able to detect an organism whose life spans more than ten thousand years, and what about a million?
I wish we could see a timelapse of the above and below ground growth of this magnificent life form. I wonder if it has "moved" in that time, expanding and shifting into more fertile areas and atrophying in others.
Would an organism that lives for millions or hundreds of millions of years detect our momentary flash?
Our lives (and civilization) are incredibly short on a universal time frame. This is very cool - we are the fastest creators of complexity and order we know of. We are a piece of the universe that has become sentient; (arguably) the only part capable of choosing whether to grow or die.
Our understanding of life is inherently limited by our context; an enormous tree is nearly alien yet it is very closely related to us. At a philosophical level we can begin to assess the basic requirements for life: an infrastructure that can store, propagate, modify, and execute code to alter itself and the world around it.
I like that definition. I also tend to define humans as having a large spectrum of scale interactions. We explored and sensed from nanoscopic to cosmic.
Anyways, it's a new and strange idea to me that this organism, covering a mountainside, is really more properly thought of as an absolutely massive underground body that sends shoots above ground to breed and collect energy. Makes me feel weird when I consider the quantity and variety of life below my feet.
Secondly, it's 80,000 years old. That made me consider the variety of timescales that life exists in. I wonder if this is considered in the search for extraterrestrial life. Would we even be able to detect an organism whose life spans more than ten thousand years, and what about a million?
I wish we could see a timelapse of the above and below ground growth of this magnificent life form. I wonder if it has "moved" in that time, expanding and shifting into more fertile areas and atrophying in others.