Let’s talk about maple trees. Off topic? Nope. I want to talk about the digital form of a maple tree, such as a photo or a simulation, vs. the real, natural tree you could go find outside. I want to talk about what we gain and what we lose when we have a digital representation of something.
What we gain:
1. Immunity: A digital tree is completely immune to pests, pesticides, rot, fire, pollution, and more. It’s not a real, physical tree, so these real, physical problems aren’t threats. Sure you could simulate them, but there’s no real tree in danger.
2. Manipulation of Time: We can use a simulation to grow a tiny sprout to a whole tree or forest in minutes. This is impossible in nature, since maple trees take years to grow to maturity, and decades to be fully grown. We can use technology to simulate growth and plan around it for urban development or logging. Not to mention climate analysis.
3. Manipulation of Change: Similar to agricultural or genetic modeling, we could use technology or simulations to model random changes or desirable changes to a maple tree for industry success (a more syrupy maple tree perhaps). We can change environmental variables in a simulation to see what would happen under x, y, or z circumstances without sacrificing important trees.
What we lose:
1. Natural Benefits: There are of course natural benefits to real trees. The big one being they are one of the big three photosynthesizers alongside marine algae and cyanobacteria. They create the oxygen in the atmosphere we breathe, and they are vital to forest ecology and the survival of thousands of animal, plant, bacterial, and fungal species.
2. Materials: While excess logging is destructive and horrible, we DO use wood for many things. Trees are a replenishable resource, so we can use it in moderation just fine. But we cannot make real wood we can use out of a picture or model of a maple tree. Nor can we make maple syrup.
3. Entropy and Scale: As good as our simualtions are, we cannot truly capture and represent the nature of nature. Entropy is the naturally occuring randomness of existence, and we can see it in trees. No two leaves are alike, bark patterns and shapes are all unique, the genetic code of the tree itself is unique. The amount fo data we would need to truly represent the full randomness of a tree or a forest would be immense. So our simulations or a 3D model of a tree will reuse leaves, a texture for the bark, and it does not have genes. The sheer volume of “natural” data is astounding.