March 23rd - Timelines
Timelines
Trees are the antithesis of humans. Though we share 15% of the hundreds of millions of pairs of DNA that trees have, we're in opposite lanes of life. At 150 years of age, trees are just getting out of grade school and we're fertilizer.
The quicker we are, the quicker we have to think. In that way, people are somewhere in the middle of things with the stamina to chew on ideas over decades. Rabbits streamline the process by limiting their thoughts mostly to fleeing and fucking. If rabbits could talk, they'd have sailors' tongues. Tortoises mostly just think about how the sun feels good - so good that it takes all day to finish the thought. Tortoises can live nearly 200 years. Probably longer if we stopped people from sitting on them for pictures.
Imagine having many centuries to contemplate life. Add to that being rooted to one spot. Trees have to be enthusiastic neighbors to one-another and follow really strict social mores. Being too individualistic in the tree world cuts life a hundred years or more. Some trees do that anyway and they'll likely be the first to evolve into the next cycle of tree living.
Back in the primordial pool, some clever microbes decided that it'd be easier to live inside other microbes instead of working it out for themselves. It was often mutually beneficial, but sometimes it was tyrannical. These were the first governing bodies and we've stuck with it even to the macro-economic level. Anyway, eventually some of these guys saw a way out. They banded together and started sucking up sunlight and making sugar out of it. These forebears of algae were the first Producers. They were such successful little unionists that they formed flotilla factories. The waste by-product that they mainly produced in their factories is oxygen. Carbon sequestration and oxygen exhaustion.
The air at the time was mostly methane (CH4) and there wasn't much oxygen in the water either, but after a good long while, some of those microbial watersport teams that had been hangin' at the alkaline water spa got together to make the first Consumer cultures with all that extra oxygen around needed for sporting. They didn't really give anything back to the Producers which is why we still call lazy-good-for-nothing-people: Sponges. These sponges were the first animals, but they looked like plants. (Plants didn't yet look like plants.) It was like that for a long time until worms started worming around on the ocean floor and doing worm stuff.
Meanwhile, some algae washed onto the shoreline. Beach days are fun and there were all kinds of great new things to touch, but high tide would come in the evening and pull 'em back home. But, like anything brought to the beach, some were left behind.
That suited these alguys just fine for a while, they were happy mossing around, but then they started getting thirsty. Not far below them flowed underground streams, but how could they get to that water? Being Inventors and Producers, they devised a system of pumps called roots. These were the first mosses.
By the time the first amphibious fish started growing legs, those mosses had already figured out how to become ferns and horsetails and even tree-like. They had also figured out how to harness wind power to send their baby spores into every bit of land with something to eat. When food was scarce, the pioneers became food for the next generation because Producers gotta produce.
Trees are Producers. Humans are Consumers. We move fast. They move slow. We think with our big brains at the crown of our heads to command our bodies to move and find something to eat. They think with comparable neural-like electrical pathways in their underground roots up their trunks to their crowns to convert cosmic consistency into energy.
People love trees because they're literally awesome and because they provide everything we need to survive in one form or another, but trees definitely don't reciprocate the feeling. Trees just stand there, only talking to each other and contemplating the seasons in the slow lane. They just want to be left alone to do their tree things and hang with family. But that's not really an option for us, is it?