Old? You think you're old?
September 5, 2010 4:18 AM   Subscribe

 
Websites that have autoplay videos with *loud* introductions should be thrown into a volcano.
posted by eriko at 4:40 AM on September 5, 2010 [6 favorites]


Were you unaware of what to expect when you follow a link to a ted.com page?
posted by Hildegarde at 5:38 AM on September 5, 2010 [4 favorites]


Just be glad you're not the grad student that cut down the oldest known non-clonal tree for research purposes.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:38 AM on September 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


...that cut down the oldest known non-clonal tree for research purposes...

It seems that ecological vandalism has replaced streaking as the student humour of choice.
posted by malusmoriendumest at 6:14 AM on September 5, 2010


Were you unaware of what to expect when you follow a link to a ted.com page?

Yes, actually, I was. It may seem surprising, but I don't visit every site on the net, and I don't recall them doing that last time.

Please note time of my last posting. Normally, it would just be annoying, but I have a house guest.
posted by eriko at 6:23 AM on September 5, 2010 [3 favorites]


Autoplay or not, that video was fascinating. I'm kind of puzzled about things like the brain coral; sure the colony that exists in that place has done so for 2,000+ years, but the polyps that are living now aren't 2,000+ years old. Of course, either way it's still amazing. By the way I have friends over so I'll be posting comments for the next few hours.
posted by Elmore at 6:39 AM on September 5, 2010


I'd like to believe that these organisms that have been alive for thousands of years don't really care much about the things we people say or do on a daily basis. From the point of view of a tree or a fungus that has been alive for 2000 years all of our discussions must seem pretty trivial and pointless, which explains why so few of these beings have paid five bucks for a Metafilter membership.
posted by twoleftfeet at 6:46 AM on September 5, 2010 [3 favorites]


Mefi's own.
posted by gubo at 6:57 AM on September 5, 2010 [2 favorites]


Just be glad you're not the grad student that cut down the oldest known non-clonal tree for research purposes.

It's not easy being a tree.
posted by TedW at 7:22 AM on September 5, 2010


This stretches the meaning of "lifespan" beyond any useful measure. If you want to step outside of the bounds of human experience then you cannot continue to use the words that describe human experience. What a useless presentation.
posted by eeeeeez at 7:44 AM on September 5, 2010


previously
posted by zsazsa at 7:56 AM on September 5, 2010


Yeah, a lot of these things are "clonal" communities, which I assume means that the individual trees or whatever propagate asexually. I think when I read "lifespan," I expect some sort of discrete living thing that just happens to be very long-lasting. A bunch of cyanobacteria or a mushroom ring in the forest don't fit the concept very well. Maybe if the photo series included a discussion of what "age" means in the context of any given specimen, it would be much more informative.
posted by Nomyte at 8:45 AM on September 5, 2010


Some are hundreds of thousands of years old and still going. Rachel Sussman explains.

I was a bit dissapointed in this post. I suppose because the framing made it sound as if Rachel Sussman was a biologist or something who was going to explain some of the mechanisms that make old things old.

She's a photographer though and this is an art project. There's nothing wrong with that and I still think this is very cool but I had questions such as those Nomyte has which I guess will remain unanswered.
posted by vacapinta at 9:20 AM on September 5, 2010


Can anyone point me at the research that established the age of those siberian actinobacteria? I've had a look, but only found abstracts of papers ($48 for 24 hours of access!) that seemingly talk about the age of the ice in which they were found.

While I don't have a problem with the colonies having that sort of age, that's not the same as individual bacteria living that long - and even in humans, the life expectancy of an individual cell is very much shorter than that of us as a whole, and our life expectancy is less than that of our own colonies. The village I grew up in is in Domesday, so is at least a thousand years old - and probably much older, given its geography and the way these things work.

And it's certainly not clonal!
posted by Devonian at 12:28 PM on September 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


2000 years? Tens of thousands of years? Upstarts and rogues! Gaia is 4.5 billion years old!
posted by crunchland at 1:22 PM on September 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


The post from her blog (which should have been part of the FPP, as it explains some of these things without having to mess with TED's video player) which explains the actinobacteria is here.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:11 PM on September 5, 2010


Old trees are really amazing. I was hiking this weekend and saw a Douglas Fir with a diameter of about fifteen feet. Maybe twenty. About sixty feet up, there was this horizontal ledge of trunk, from which sprouted another vertical trunk that was itself as big as any other nearby tree growing from the ground. The main tree was so huge that another tree could grow up from one of its ledges.

I was very sad to think that the whole area had once had trees of that size before it was logged. In that entire park, there was one old growth tree like that. We saw numerous sawed-off trunks surrounded by a ring of very small trees. Maybe because it was dark, seeing six small trees in a circle around an empty space made me feel like we were looking at a ghost forest.

My hiking partner mentioned an old-growth logging proposal that's making its way through the courts and offhandedly said "I can't believe logging old growth isn't considered a crime yet." He didn't say it with environmental bitterness or anything. But it did feel true, seeing how amazingly beautiful those trees are and knowing how few are left.

Ever since I've gotten back, I've been online trying to find a good backpacking hike here in California through some of the remaining old growth redwoods. Something about being under enormous trees just feels so profound. The good news is that a lot of land in California is now protected, so in a few hundred years, more of the trees will be huge again, knock on wood. :)
posted by salvia at 8:24 PM on September 5, 2010


Recent radiolab episode on the bristlecone pines episode.
posted by lahersedor at 6:18 AM on September 6, 2010


Mefi's own.

She joined to comment in the previous oldest living things in the world thread, where I linked to a couple of her blog posts.

"... a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?" -- Damn you 1966 Ronald Reagan! If you've seen one redwood, you've yet to see the majesty of an old growth forest. Thank goodness for national parks.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:26 AM on September 7, 2010


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