Mat

Trees

Trees are one of the most amazing inventions on the planet. At our best, we have to spend hundreds of man years of effort to build something that will last for a few thousand. No one knows how to recreate anything like a tree as far as the ratio of useful output to input goes.

A tree has no intelligence that we recognize, and it lasts for millions of years. Not a specific tree, but the tree as an ideal does. And because trees are simple enough to be largely interchangeable, we might as well still have the same ones as we did millions of years ago. Trees have eternal life in that way.

We don’t look at ourselves like that because we are more complex, but that is only by a relative measure. The truth is, there are billions of people on the earth, so there are very likely a few that are almost entirely indistinguishable from each other at any given time. Over long enough time spans, the likelihood that an exact copy of you doing the exact same thing with the same people plus whatever slight variation you can imagine goes to one.