The Pando Edition
On clones that look like forests, Utah, and invisible infrastructures.
Todd Osborn (TO) is a United States Air Force Weapons Systems veteran. He is currently building a flight school.
Todd here. When you look at photos of Pando in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, your brain registers a nice woodland of aspens. But your eyes have been deceived. What looks like 40,000 individual trees is actually a single organism. A massive underground root system sending up genetically identical stems. It’s not a forest; it’s a clone. In normal tree-think, one trunk equals one tree. Pando behaves more like a server farm, with lots of visible hardware on the surface, all running off one shared, invisible infrastructure. The trunks you see are just temporary “ramets” that live for decades, while the root mass beneath has been hot-swapping them out for thousands of years. If a fire sweeps through, the system just routes around the damage and pushes up new nodes.
Why is this interesting?
Pando is a natural counterargument to how we define individuals. We like clean boundaries - things like one person, one car. Pando is a living thing that looks like a crowd. It’s the biological equivalent of a RAID array: you can lose individual drives (trunks), but as long as the controller (roots) holds up, the data survives. It’s also a reminder that our land management habits such as fire suppression and unchecked deer populations are stressing a system that was stable long before we showed up. Pando has been refactoring its own code for millennia, but we need to be aware that even a perfect redundant system has its breaking point. (TO)
This comparison to RAID arrays and server infrastructure is brilliant. The invisible root system as the controler that hot-swaps visible components captures how biological redundancy actually works way better than just calling it a 'big tree', dunno why more nature writing doesn't use these metaphors. Had a dad who worked in data centers for years and never thought about forests this way until now. Makes you wonder how many other natural systms we misread by focusing on what's above ground.
Interesting that the writer only understands a natural phenomenon by comparing it with a computer... when the natural biological system was in place millennia prior to the invention of computing systems. If I (of an older generation) were to compare the Aspen tree to something, I would start with the human brain (as the underground, invisible roots) and it's system of different types of nerves to organs throughout the body (which can be imagined as the above ground part.) There are reciprocal messages to and from the brain. There are also reciprocal messages that above ground trees (other than Aspen) transmit to their roots. So why wouldn't above ground Aspens also do that? And, in humans, stem cells can develop and/or be modified into tissues ("above ground") other than their origin tissue ("underground".) But all cells in one body contain the exact same DNA (roots.) So, perhaps computing systems may be understood by some of us through analysis of the Aspen tree rather than the other way around. I reject analyzing living, reciprocal, biological systems thru a inflexible data lens, although I understand that, unfortunately, that is the only way some people see the whole world.