InquiryLabs
Politics, Programming and Possibilities
Random Idea: Trees as Networks
Author: Duane Johnson8 Aug
I often have random ideas and usually let them pass by, either because “someone else must have thought of it already,” or I’m too rushed, or perhaps I feel a little embarrassed by being different and having weird ideas. And then there’s that thought at the back of the mind that lurks in every capitalist’s mind: “but if I keep it a secret, I can profit from it and prevent all those other people from getting rich from my ingenuity.” But no more—it’s time to start documenting these things. The world always needs good ideas, and good ideas just start with plain old ideas.
Today, my coworker Paul and I were talking about the fragility of the internet. If you’ve ever been a network administrator, you can probably sympathize with me if I say that making things work and stay working can be troublesome. But the internet as a whole is pretty good these days, considering that it’s a man-made invention.
But just a few weeks ago, a power outage in San Francisco caused an internet black-out for several popular social networking sites. The rumor was that some drunk employee arrived at work at a hosting company and started unplugging servers at random. It seems the rumor was unsubstantiated, but still, the possibility remains that someone could do such a thing. The main thing keeping the internet together is the intense interest that we as a global community have in keeping it together—especially companies that have money and want to make more.
What would happen if that common interest waned, however? What will our society be like 100 years from now, or 500? Will we still have an internet?
Maybe. But if we could make global communication a more natural state, imagine how that would protect this critical infrastructure. What if, for example, we could use trees to communicate data, in similar fashion to the forests of Narnia? I suppose we would have to genetically alter a tree and start planting it around the world. Alas, the ability to create such a thing is beyond most of us—but wouldn’t it be a remarkable gift to future civilizations to have a communication network built in, as a natural state of the earth?
3 Responses for "Random Idea: Trees as Networks"
Wonderful idea! This line of thinking reminds me of Freeman Dyson in his essay “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” (The Scientist As Rebel). I highly recommend it.
I think our long-term survival as a species will require genetic alteration (artificial evolution) both of our species and of others we depend on. The ethical implications of this are complex, of course.
My own thinking is that while it will soon be possible to eliminate most deleterious traits from the human genome, the creation of new DNA (such as networked trees) is probably beyond human capabilities.
I await the development of a self-evolving artificial intelligence — i.e., a machine intelligent enough to design even more complex artificial intelligence. Within a few short machine generations, networked trees — or the biological colonization of space envisioned by Dyson — could become a reality.
Actually, it’s the other way around. It’s probably easier create a form of networked tree than it is to eradicate all the “bugs” from our genome.
Nevertheless, in order to implement something this grandiose, you’d have to significantly hack the genome. In order to have anything approaching a decent transfer speed, the trees would need to manufacture their own nanotubes (carbon’s easier than metal anyway) and line their entire root structure with them.
Now that I think of it, you don’t want a tree, you want mushrooms. Mushrooms are actually enormous underground organisms that occasionally send out the little bells we call mushrooms. That kind of system already has the distributed network in place. All you would need to do was optimize it for data communications (ie. through nanotube lined roots).
Hackers really would really need to “hack” at plants to get into secure networks.
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