A while back I posted an item about the book The Secret Life of Plants (by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird) tying it to the idea found in the 1951 sci-fi movie, The Thing from Another World: the being that came to Earth in a flying saucer was an kind of intelligent, advanced vegetable.
The December 23/30 New Yorker magazine has a piece The Intelligent Plant by Michael Pollan [Page 92 ff.] that details the current studies about what appears to be intelligent behavior by plants, noting that The Secret Life of Plants was considered New Age hooey pretty much but contained ideas that are now being taken seriously by botanists and plant scientists:
“…plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance.” [Page 92]
“Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables … that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response … electrical and chemical signaling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals.” [Page 92]
“… plants exhibit intelligence … an intrinsic ability to process information from both abiotic and biotic stimuli that allows optimal decisions about future activities in a given environment.” [Page 92]
“It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keeps us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success." [Page 94]
The article provides a number of experiments which have shown what appears to be thought processes, telepathy among plants, and plant networks that mimic what goes on in human brains via neurons.
That some plant scientists are aghast at the idea of Plant Neurobiology is solidly presented but offset by detailed procedures that can only be seen, by objective observers, as some kind of thinking or intelligence in plants..
Pollan writes that Darwin was obsessed with plants and in his 1880 book The Power of Movement in Plants “was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and ‘brain’ on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.” [Page 95]
With plants, Pollan writes, “there is some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.” [Page 98]
And “ … if we decide that [consciousness] as the state of being awake and aware of one’s environment … then plants may qualify as conscious beings …” [Page 101]
And for our UFO purposes here, “If we could begin to understand plants on their own terms … it would be like being in contact with an alien culture.” [Page 104]
“If you want to explore other planets, the best thing is to send plantoids.” [Page 105, italics mine]
The article is extensive and much more explicit and interesting than my self-serving synopsis here indicates, and you will be edified by seeking it out (online or in the magazine itself).
My point is that we might do well to consider The Thing scenario as one possibility for UFO occupants (extraterrestrial visitors); that is, they are vegetables with sentience (intelligence) seeking the Earth’s waters to sustain their civilization and/or culture, elsewhere in the universe where water has become a lost but necessary commodity.
The idea is not as far-fetched as one might think, once they read the New Yorker piece.
RR
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