Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Let’s consider all the things a plant knows how to do.

A seed knows when to germinate…if the conditions are right, if it is too dry, too wet, too hot, too cold. A seed knows if it is close enough to the surface of the soil, or if it is too deep. Some seeds even need exposure to light, others need exposure to fire. A seed knows when to wait. A seed knows when to go.

Immediately after sprouting, the seedling knows which way is up, and which way is down. The new roots make fast friends with mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria, which help the plant access minerals and elements locked away out of reach in the soil.

The seedling pushes through the soil, meeting it’s life-long power source…photons, fired from the sun 149,600,000 kilometres away. The plant deploys its mechanism to capture photons: a net, with a Magnesium in the centre, surrounded by four Nitrogens, strung together in a structure of dozens of Carbons and Hydrogens. The captured photons are converted to chemical energy in the form of electrons.

Some of this energy finds its way to a cluster of Manganese and Calcium. When the cluster absorbs enough energy, it becomes unstable. When it is unstable, it can react with two molecules of water, releasing four electrons, four Hydrogen ions, and a waste product…two Oxygen molecules, O_2.

Some of the energy is used to transform Carbon Dioxide and Water into sugar. With the carbon chains of sugar, plants can construct tissues, build structures, develop more relationships with bacteria and fungi, and improve its ability to gather more energy and more resources. There’s a lot of building left to do!

Hormones and signalling molecules let a plant know if it is damaged and in need of repair, if it has fallen over and needs to send roots from its stem, or if it is the right time of year to build flowers and reproductive structures, to send a colourful flare to insects and moths and birds to gather pollen. If the plant is successful, it may call up favours from the soil underworld to produce seeds or fruit.

Plants are incredible organisms that respond to the world around them by processing sunlight and plug themselves into the complex microbiological world under the soil. Plants are engineers, changing their immediate environment, the atmosphere, and the make-up of the soil around them. Plants supercharge the ability for other things to live around them, to borrow their sugar, to breathe the air, or to consume them and spread their seeds.

The efficient molecular innovations that plants evolved are sublime and incredible. They can produce their own food and their own energy, and survive by using only what is available to them. Our entire planet is built on invisible molecular interactions and the transfer of electrons and potential chemical energies derived from sunlight.

Life itself is intelligence. It is often portrayed in an anthropocentric sense that consciousness is intelligence. But we are not aware of the enzymes in our stomachs breaking down the sugar-chain cellulose fibres made from sunlight, we do not consider how Oxygen binds to an Iron in our blood and for what reason it is important. We think instead of what we must accomplish today, not that our neurons transmit electrical information to our protein fibre muscles in order to move, that a series of tiny canals inside our ears allow us to balance, or that our brains miraculously store all the information required to make sure we keep moving and breathing.

Our lives and the life of all things on our planet are dictated by the molecular. Plants are some of the most ingenious engineers ever known on Earth. Anything that has built solutions to generate its own energy from what is invisibly falling all around us gets my award for the most intelligent life.

Graham

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