Learning that trees use mycelium like their own internet to communicate about where resources are was my first real..."oh man, I feel small" moment. Even crazier to think about when the scale of the network starts to get quantified.
Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
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Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#42I read to the part where they used machine learning to get the results and lost all faith in this being accurate at all.
Are they trying to say its ChatGPT?
Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#43Say you have a filament that's 1 µm in diameter, and 1 meter long. You want to fill up a 1m^3 (1m W x 1m H x 1m L) space with these, how many of these can you place in such a space? Over a trillion! And thus, the combined km length of these will also be over a billion km. At such small scales things can become very long when summed up.
Everytime I see people talking about the length of their coastlines ... Look at how long this edge of my fractal is, Ma!
I understand the infinite coastline concept in theory but in practice would you even want to measure a coastline that way? Even if your goal was “perfect” precision, coastlines are variable. You’d have to take an average across tides and that would require zooming out enough to get a normal sounding answer.
Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#44100×10^12 km is about 10.6 light years. There are about 16 other stars closer to the sun than that. It's a bit like a human body containing blood vessels with total length greater than twice the Earth's circumference.
Imagine if a 3year old has only one single blood vessel: The single blood vessel grows by approximately 88 kilometers per day since conception. Here is the quick calculation using that timeline: •Total Days: ~1,365 days (270 days in the womb + 1,095 days of life up to age 3). •Total Length: ~120,000 kilometers. That breaks down to an astonishing 3.7 kilometers of growth every single hour. Typical adult walking speed:…
Thanks for a horror script idea, I will send it to A24.
Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#45Fun facts, fungi are genetically more similar to humans and chimpanzees than they are to plants [1],[2].
[1] Fungi and humans: closer than you think:
https://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/abstract/S0168-9525(01)...
[2] Three reasons fungi are not plants:
https://asm.org/articles/2021/january/three-reasons-fungi-ar...
Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#46Say you have a filament that's 1 µm in diameter, and 1 meter long. You want to fill up a 1m^3 (1m W x 1m H x 1m L) space with these, how many of these can you place in such a space? Over a trillion! And thus, the combined km length of these will also be over a billion km. At such small scales things can become very long when summed up.
How would this compare with packing the volume with DNA ?
550,000 km/mm^3,
or 180 m^3 for the whole 100 quadrillion km thing.
Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#47Re: Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
#48100×10^12 km is about 10.6 light years. There are about 16 other stars closer to the sun than that. It's a bit like a human body containing blood vessels with total length greater than twice the Earth's circumference.
So it could be sentient but it's pace of thinking might be absolutely glacial.
Everything that is alive is sentient. No organism can survive without collecting data from their environment and responding to this info.