The Plant Colossus

[kingtycoon]

So in answer of a question that only I was asking - here's the orchid I found.

True fact I found an orchid. The story is just, not much of a story - I was walking home and there was a cooler sitting across the street from a playground and it said - Free Orchids on it - see:



Is it really an orchid? Fuck I don't know man... I'm okay with plants, I planted it in one of the coffee cans I keep around for planting seedlings and I'll try real hard to keep it well & growing. Still, I don't know what it is, my plant identifcation skills are kind of shabby and are closely allied with trees - of which I have a journeyman's knowledge. But I can grow things, sometimes. It might be hard here - my apartment gets terrible light - it's a nice feature in the summer- it's very cool here, shaded, but so far I've not got much to grow, and I'm good, like I said, at growing plants. Turns out - who knew?

I really like growing plants, I really would like to be a farmer - of a kind. I can't get enough of how sunlight and water just alchemize to create so much substance, so much mass. You shoulda seen my cucumber plants, or heck my tomatoes - I'm pretty good with plants.

And I started thinking of it - you know, automata - remember? From the other day? Automata - we get hung up on the mechanical man, the robot as industrial mechanism. I feel like that's a limiting and needless categorization. What about the plant man? I mean - the roots, a tuber? What if you trained them to grow, in a way - a specific way through some kind of an armature - so that the roots would prosper under-ground and form up the limbs, the external form of the creature. The roots I say, because they grow quicker. So the roots grow up around the armature - you don't want plants for the moving parts, of course - the cell-wall makes plants too tough, intractable for movement - but you've got insects no? Chitin, exoskeleton - so you grow a tough weedy exoskeleton and inside is the motive force. You might think that the xylem and phloem could do the job but you're up against the cell wall again - you can't make a myomeric band out of them to provide any kind of give/take muscular action. But you could use them to maybe create a capillary action to feed reserviors of water - here you get into a bleed of water into internal bladders - these drive the beast - slowly, sure, but steadily. Drip, drip, drip, into a reservoir, and then another and there's a slow gait forming, moving the thing ahead, changing it's relationship with gravity - back to the capillary action drip drip into the other reservoir and soon it's moving - slow and steady. All the water gives it weight. Maybe the leaves, if they're big enough - they can generate a sail effect - in aid of locomotion. Now you've got a plant that moves, in a fashion.

It'd take more than a coffee can of dirt, it'd take a lot of thinking -but there you go. I conceptualized the plant automaton. A whole new kind of robot. From there you're trying to graft in other species - maybe a succulent of some kind, a cactus, to be the reservoir and then you're looking at the flycatchers - their sudden movements- can you graft in that trigger mechanism? Maybe into a joint? Plants take grafts weirdly and inconstantly, but you can breed them, if you're clever and careful and patient.

Anyhow, I was thinking about kinds of artificial life and came up with one because of thinking. So now that's been considered.

Comments

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

I too have a bit of a green thumb. Maybe I should get another plant for my desk today. No, my chance was yesterday, I missed it because I chose arcade games instead.

China Mieville has cactus men. So the question I have is: ents? Because, maybe it is because I'm a Silmarillion guy, but ents & dwarves are the "artificial" races, made by the Valar, not Eru. So they sort of are tree robots, if you tilt your head at it.

Re:

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

China Mieville has my animosity too.

I'm not really bringing this up in the sense of a different fantasy race - twigblights or mandragora you understand - but in terms of actual mad-science. Mad botany. That a madman could do, with a big enough greenhouse.

Re:

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

To me it sounds like xenobiology is more what I'm saying.

[rasa.livejournal.com]

I don't sleep well lately, and as such, I hear the early early morning news broadcast that starts at 4:30 am. The traffic woman was so fucking excited that it rained today because it gave her something to talk about at 4:30 am when no one in Rhode Island is commuting to work. But when they cut to her, there was no sound. See, some ways back, in order to save money, the station let a lot of the behind the scenes people go, and a lot of the early morning station stuff runs on automation. Automaton made me think of this. So the automation didn't automate correctly and there was no audio for her segment. Frank Coletta, a man who calls them "those dastardly computers" got a little famous not too long ago because he spoke out against automation and firing people to have machines do their jobs, and he did it again this morning when the automation did not work.

That is an orchid. I only know because I dated someone for a very long time who was "into" orchids. I have a black thumb, except for one spider plant that is from beginnings older than both of us.