kingtycoon | The Plant Colossus (Reply)

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.