Power to Our Environment

I was in the car with my dad, and he was talking about the Internet of Things. He pointed to a tree and said “Imagine what it would be like to have that tree try to contact it’s caretaker through the internet. Imagine what it would be like to receive a message from your building saying it had a leak in the lower basement. How weird and novel would that be?”

And what he said opened the floodgates to new ideas. Basically what he said led me to think about things like, “What if everything was smarter? What if our environment was smarter? What if it could respond and ask for help in dire situations? What if the environment could express its wants and needs?”

Imagine equipping the world’s trees with the internet and some basic AI and sensory devices so that it could monitor its own health, and make decisions based on its situation, and it could communicate through the internet with its other fellow trees. Share information, spread new data, and ask for help to its neighboring trees for some more water. A global network of smart trees. They’d be able to cooperate and maximize their oxygen production, basically becoming super trees.

Let’s not stop with trees. Basically we could make our environment smarter, more capable, and more effective, by giving them tools to think, coordinate, and cooperate with one another.

We’d be giving the environment and all the other species suffering under our reign the means to rebel against human tyranny. How awesome is that?