[HN Gopher] A Wiser Sympathy: Theorizing plant intelligence in t...
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       A Wiser Sympathy: Theorizing plant intelligence in the nineteenth
       century
        
       Author : Petiver
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2023-02-15 23:16 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
        
       | carapace wrote:
       | I've been gardening a lot this last couple of years now and,
       | yeah, plants have intelligence. Indeed, as science is starting to
       | understand, the soil itself functions as a kind of organism with
       | intelligence.
       | 
       | The work of Michael Levin and co. especially is shining a
       | scientific light on the thinking capabilities of all cells.
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)
       | 
       | Wolfram points out that computation is actually easy and ambient.
       | (It's one of the main themes of his tome.) We should expect
       | intelligence to be ambient in evolved systems, and it is.
       | 
       | From this POV humans are the "waldoes" (
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldoes ) of the intelligent
       | ecosystem. We allow life to defeat entropy with much greater
       | efficiency. We also permit the possibility of evading the end of
       | the carbonate-silicate cycle.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
       | 
       | > 500-600 million [years]
       | 
       | > The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the
       | carbonate-silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering
       | of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as
       | carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks
       | harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once
       | the oceans evaporate completely. With less volcanism to recycle
       | carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin
       | to fall.[76] By this time, carbon dioxide levels will fall to the
       | point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All
       | plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis ([?]99 percent of present-
       | day species) will die.[77] The extinction of C3 plant life is
       | likely to be a long-term decline rather than a sharp drop. It is
       | likely that plant groups will die one by one well before the
       | critical carbon dioxide level is reached. The first plants to
       | disappear will be C3 herbaceous plants, followed by deciduous
       | forests, evergreen broad-leaf forests and finally evergreen
       | conifers.[70]
       | 
       | It gets worse from there! We have less than a gigayear!
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-17 23:02 UTC)