Sabrina Ho--no real forests on Earth

    I unfortunately can't recall  the source, but I read an interesting conspiracy theory that states that there are no actual forests on earth, in the sense that forests are not made of trees. Instead, what we refer to as trees are just saplings of what trees have the potential of being on earth. Mesas that we see on earth, therefore, are also not just natural landforms, but petrified ancient tree trunks. In this theory, the large trees spoken about were destroyed centuries ago, and take millions of years to regrow. Resulting, red wood trees are just the oldest and most grown of these ancient trees. The rocks we have today are also just remnants of plants and trees from the silicon era.

    While certainly a bold claim, and likely a theory that not many people truly believe in, it opens up a lot of conversation of hypotheticals. I think it can be tied back to the common theme that we, as humans, are not the grandest of living things within our ecosystem. With this theory, there is the hypothetical possibility that trees are so much grander than we could ever even imagine. It is not only a reminder of our relatively small role in nature and ecology, but also the idea that there are so many more living things that lived before us that we have no concept of. This connects to the idea that we cannot control nature and all that is around us, because we cannot ever truly grasp the complexity and depth of all living things within our ecosystem.