Trees and Mycelium form a very interesting form of proto-internet where not only information but also nutrients, water and other forms of data is shared between the network, albeit at a limited rate.
While not as efficient as microprocessors, if one were to somehow able turn individual tree into a processing nodes, one could create a small army of organized bot-net out of a forest. There is a catch however, the speed will be severely limited by distance, modern CPUs are getting smaller and smaller trying to fit more into the same tiny little square is due to this, more distance, more travel time of electrons, less processing speed.
This would mean our tree/mushroom computer would not be able run Crysis 2 on max settings.
But it can do computer things if given enough time. Making it more suitable for more larger and complex problems, simulations, formulas, prototyping, stuff like that.
If you really want to turn this into a reality, the trees will need a type of Governor that understands a complexity of a given problem, breaks it down to a smaller more approachable problem and distributes them to the nodes(trees) and collects them once they're done and assembles it back to return a satisfactory answer. Essentially how a multicore cpu handles itself. Lacking this it is likely the trees will be doing a duplicate work that wastes processing cycles. As such the governor might need to be highly intelligent, and not a tree, an Elf that basically plugs into the system to give orders for example. Or give them a bigass gigachad tree that acts as the governor.
I like this, but it doesn’t address the most important issue:
How the fuck does it even know WHAT to compute?
I mean, computers have keyboards, which send electric signals to the motherboard.
If we make it so that 1 tree = to 1 bit to flip, that’ll be crazy inefficient.
Luckily, there are alternatives to digital (switching bits (1’s and 0’s)). Such as analog computing.
I don’t think trees can ever evolve, or even sustain, human brains, since those take up a fuckton of energy, and require all sorts of chemistry that make me remember why idgaf about school.
But perhaps the tree-net can grow fungi on the trunk, and evolve to interact with it.
If the tree grows roots which do A, then the fungus reacts with B.
If the fungus does C, the tree “senses” it, and does D.
And fungus and plants really do have complicated systems, but their not really suitable for making a computer. More like something of a brain. But hey, just use handwavium.
First, it evolved to interact with fungi, which gave them nutrients/water.
After that, they learned to share info about the weather.
Third, they learned to sense tree-destroyers, like beavers. (Idk, do beavers even chop trees, or just take dead ones?)
The senses that sensed the insects, could be flowers.
Then the Elves can perhaps have “Sacred Druids”, who must be a cute, thicc elf waifu.
These druids (or whatever the female equivalent is) have planted small flowers in the places where roots and fungi come together, and when they change their chemistry, the flowers change color, because magic.
In this way, they “communicate” with the Forest.
Or perhaps just make it that a tree spirit (Tree of Aeon has one that tries to make it work, but it’s too much handwavium for my tastes) has inhabited one tree and can vaguely communicate with other, non-sapient/sentient trees. At first, she was just a part of it, but she slowly began to take it over for efficiencies sake.
Forests are big. You know what, i’ll try to calculate some things for how ”smart” it could be.
Anyway, fun little thought :)
I like this, but it doesn’t address the most important issue:
How the fuck does it even know WHAT to compute?
I mean, computers have keyboards, which send electric signals to the motherboard.
If we make it so that 1 tree = to 1 bit to flip, that’ll be crazy inefficient.
Luckily, there are alternatives to digital (switching bits (1’s and 0’s)). Such as analog computing.
I don’t think trees can ever evolve, or even sustain, human brains, since those take up a fuckton of energy, and require all sorts of chemistry that make me remember why idgaf about school.
But perhaps the tree-net can grow fungi on the trunk, and evolve to interact with it.
If the tree grows roots which do A, then the fungus reacts with B.
If the fungus does C, the tree “senses” it, and does D.
And fungus and plants really do have complicated systems, but their not really suitable for making a computer. More like something of a brain. But hey, just use handwavium.
First, it evolved to interact with fungi, which gave them nutrients/water.
After that, they learned to share info about the weather.
Third, they learned to sense tree-destroyers, like beavers. (Idk, do beavers even chop trees, or just take dead ones?)
The senses that sensed the insects, could be flowers.
Then the Elves can perhaps have “Sacred Druids”, who must be a cute, thicc elf waifu.
These druids (or whatever the female equivalent is) have planted small flowers in the places where roots and fungi come together, and when they change their chemistry, the flowers change color, because magic.
In this way, they “communicate” with the Forest.
Or perhaps just make it that a tree spirit (Tree of Aeon has one that tries to make it work, but it’s too much handwavium for my tastes) has inhabited one tree and can vaguely communicate with other, non-sapient/sentient trees. At first, she was just a part of it, but she slowly began to take it over for efficiencies sake.
Forests are big. You know what, i’ll try to calculate some things for how ”smart” it could be.
Anyway, fun little thought :)
Hello. I’m going to calculate some things now.
Here’s a bit of text I stole from Quora (
https://www.quora.com/How-many-trees-are-in-the-Black-Forest-in-Southern-Germany?share=1):
According to this website (
Allgemeine Fragen zum Wald) Germany has a total of around 90 billion trees on 11,4 million hectares.
So on average there are around 7900 trees per hectare.
According to this website (
ForstBW: Schwarzwald) the Schwarzwald covers 350.000 hectares of which 75% are actual forrests.
If we apply what we found out earlier this would add up to just over 2 billion trees (350.000 hectars * 75% * 7900 trees/hectare).
——
But the Black Forest is big AF, so let’s assume you have… a fifth of that.
2,000,000,000/5=400,000,000 trees.
But wait!
What about the fungi?
Let’s assume every tree has evolved some electric-plantic-cables, so that they’re pretty speedy. Like a human nervous system.
A human brain has ~100 billion neurons (too lazy to check, don’t roast me), so it‘ll still have, so 250 times too few units to compare to a human brain.
But you wanted a computer, not a brain.
Every tree of the root net could have a lot of mini-processors. Let’s assume there are… 26 per root. Now, how many roots does the average tree have? No fucking clue. Apparently, duckduck go is incapable of answering simple questions about trees.
But I did stumble upon a tangent answer. Trees apparently have a lot more smaller roots, other than the large ones which I meant above.
We can imagine a scenario where some trees get specialised to grow more rootnet friendly roots, and they can perhaps have a 10,000 connections with the fungi. And if every tree connects to the nearest few, let’s say 10, that’s 10,000-10*10=9,900 connections over for computation. Per tree. So you’ll have 400,000,000*9,900=3.96E12. That’ll be 396E10, or 3,96 trillion. That’s enough to run 39 humans. And since a large part of the brain is in fact some way for processing sensory information, you can probably have some more. Especially if you just want assistant AI’s. I don’t know that much about analog computing, but Veritasium has some cool videos about it.
I did this on a whim, so there’s probably a lot more you can think of, and a lot of faults in my calculations.
Anyway, thanks for reading.
Why was I able to write that but not work on my novel :(
