What is his monetary incentive to do this?
It’s planning to make up for the losses with infinite scale. You know, AI style.
Minecraft tree irl
Cyclic tree spotted. Computer scientists in shambles.
Less codependent than some of the relationships I’ve been in
Isn’t this fatal for the left tree (and as a result possibly for the right one as well)?
I’m no tree expert but I’m reasonably sure trees are fairly shit at dealing with large “wounds”. Infections can now enter the core of the tree and insects can eat away at the nutrient-rich interior which isn’t very ideal.
This is done with very young trees and doesn’t leave one tree with an open “flesh wound” so I’m not sure how well this compares.
Mandatory “this is just a flesh wound”
When you reach out and make connections, you can survive even when the earth falls out from beneath you. :3
When you’re an island you can sink under the waves and be mysterious like Atlantis.
Not out of pure charity, the rootless tree now provides the other trees roots with sugars and energy in exchange.
Effectively making it one tree just with weird branches.
Could be a limb from itself that just happens to graft itself to itself.
This could very well be it. I highly doubt two separate trees merged and cellular connections formed to meld into one tree. It would be like two organisms forming a super organism. Combining. When has anyone seen that ever?
You can graft a cutting of one tree species onto another, and both will grow normally. People do that to get trees with two different colors of flowers, or to grow multiple types of fruit on the same tree. Plants are weird.
This actually happens all the time in nature - it’s called inosculation or natural grafting, where trees of the same species (and sometimes different species) can fuse their vascular systems together and litterally become connected organisms sharing nutrients and water through their merged tissues.
You can combine apple and pear trees into one or put a tomato plant on top of a potato. This definitely isn’t uncommon.
And also in nature different species often work together in some kind of super organism. Just think of our gut bacteria, orchids growing on trees, symbiosis between mushrooms and trees etc.
Trees do that all the time. Usually within a single species but in some cases with other species.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life-of-trees has lots of info about this.
sorta the basis for all eukaryotic life
People do it with fruit trees all the time. As the other commenter said, it’s called grafting.
A weapon to surpass metal gear…
The Internet keeping my brain alive.
I feel personally attacked
Still dead inside but something is keeping me technically alive
