Just a weird thought.... Can we manipulate oak tree genes to produce a living house including the bathroom and food system like grape juice dispenser and perhaps giant beans as protein etc... and a temperature controlled cellular structure for air conditioning etc...
Hello, Maybe you are being sarcastic.....I dunno.........I am sure we can do much screwing around with mother nature, not build a house though, but who knows where is might end....I am not a huge fan of messing with DNA/Gene Manipulation/cloning...etc......I am not sure how we expect to be able to tell the differance between what we should be manipulating or not.
Actually the idea is from early to mid sixties... I read an article during that time regarding this and filed away. I guess my brain was defraging and cleaning up stored junk...it just popped in my head... Technically it is possible through gene manipulation...how long it will take us to master that art? Perhaps another 1000 years only.
kmguru, Genetically, maybe, but surely through modern-day horticultural techniques? Just prune it and stick stuff in the tree until it grows into the desired shape...kind of like japanese bonsai, but not. Think of it as "treehouse-ai". I know we don't have any techniques to specifically prune a tree into a treehouse but i'm sure some horticultural/tree pruning expert could figure it out..right? Yeah.
While searching for some stuff on gene manipulation of plant life such as nitrogen fixing from air etc. I ran into this weird site.... Little Green People, who are intelligent plant life are made of chlorophyll, and live in orbit about the Centauri globular star cluster located 17,000 light years from earth. It takes about two billion pieces of genetic information to describe one little green person; hence, using mathematical probability theory, a little green person is duplicated about every two billion births thus forming an interstellar communications network between themselves and their genetic likeness. Because they are genetic duplicates and nearly identical, their telepathic messages (which are transmitted by the surrounding magnetic energy field) emanate on the same radio frequency, thus establishing the above communication network. Since their telepathic language is structured similarly to that of whales and dolphins on our earth, we may learn how to send them intelligent greetings using a transmitter, like the giant radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, they live on planets orbiting the center of our Milky Way galaxy; hence the round trip of the transmitted signal (from us to them and back) would take 34,000 years, since the distance from earth to their galactic orbit ring is about 17,000 light years away. (A light year is the distance light will travel in one year, knowing it always travels exactly 186,000 miles per second or approximately 7 1/2 times around the earth in one second,) i.e., a New York to Tokyo phone call, which seems to be instantaneous, actually takes one-twentieth of a second because of the speed of light rule. ...END TRANSMISSION
Science Fiction and Intelligent plants: Edmond Hamilton, Alien Earth, in Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction: Sixth Series, Eds: Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, 1984, Bonanza Books, pages 135-159. First Published: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1949. A serum makes men a hundred times slower until "you live at the same tempo as plants." At that speed the jungle plants appear active, and humans can even hear the thoughts of the trees. ============== Murray Leinster, Proxima Centauri, in Before the Golden Age, edited by Isaac Asimov, Doubleday & Co., New York, 1974, pages 606-648. First published 1935. The major race, Centaurians, evolved from plants. They value any animal product above gold. Structures (even spaceships) are grown, not built. =============== Ursula K. Le Guin, Vaster than Empires and More Slow, in New Dimensions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg, Avon Science Fiction, New York, 1971, pages 99-133. A ten-person deep-space survey team lands on a planet with only plant life, no animal life. They come to realize the entire planet is one huge being, and the ganglionic structures at the root of every plant are like nerve cells in human brains. Having no senses, the being is essentially unconscious - no concept of "other," change, cause or effect, universe, or even more than one. When it senses the team's presence, it is terrified: even the possible existence of anything (else) is an utterly alien thought. The team's antagonistic empath, who had been literally driving the rest of them crazy, is reluctantly left behind when he disappears into the forest to calm the entity and avoid further confinement with the team's emotional effluvium. ================= J. R. R. Tolkein, The Two Towers, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, (III):4, pages 75-81. The Ents are a race of old, wise, very slow moving, tree-like creatures. ================ A. E. van Vogt, Process, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1950, pages 565-571. A world is covered by a few enormous, sentient forest/trees fighting each other for land. They discover how to make atomic explosions by piling enough radioactive material together. The ensuing nuclear war reduces them to near nonsentience, only remembering that radioactives can be useful. ================== Black Orchid, DC comics. She is a living hybrid of human and plant consciousness. Swamp Thing, DC comics. Alex Holland was in a fire in the Louisiana bayous. But he didn't die; his consciousness was imprinted in the flora. Now he is a living plant creature.
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A serum makes men a hundred times slower until "you live at the same tempo as plants." At that speed the jungle plants appear active, and humans can even hear the thoughts of the trees. Where can I buy some?
