I saw some
giant sequoias a few weeks ago. There aren't many of these 2000+ year old trees left. Growing more seems extremely difficult given all of the war, fire, and suffering that occurs on Earth during such a time period. With all our technology and sophistication we can send a
probe to Pluto, but it seems impossible to grow a tree into old age. It's so simple, yet so difficult.
Time is not something we can control. Or is it?
You can imagine launching baby trees into space and shooting them off towards the speed of light. Time would elapse faster for the tree than on earth due to special relativity. After a large orbit, the trees would return and be thousands of years older than when they left. Land them back on Earth, put them in the ground: problem solved.
It'd be a great way to age whisky as well. I wonder what kind of energy production breakthrough would make it possible.
Damn, my idea is totally not possible. I got the direction of time dilation mixed up. I'm feeling pretty dumb. Thanks to Tony for pointing out my mistake.
Well, since we're on the topic of humans trying to beat time anyways, I saw this paper from Sandia National Labs and it's extremely spooky: "
Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant". The fact that we're alive today as a species at all is remarkable.
