As we embark upon yet another trip around our star, wondering when/if the NY Times plans a followup to their reporting on the Nimitz/Tic Tac incident, wondering if Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy will ever produce anything indisputably unique, we might also try to step back and contemplate the daunting complexity of what we may be confronting in our efforts to comprehend the peculiar and unending events unfolding in our atmosphere. Because one theory gaining a lot of momentum lately suggests that maybe what’s happening isn’t extraterrestrial at all, that maybe the roots of these unidentified aerial phenomena are a lot closer to home than initially surmised, if no less puzzling. That’s another discussion altogether. Either way, no matter where the evidence leads, the highest hurdle we may have to clear is the ability of our species to move beyond the conceits of our anthropocentric definitions of intelligence and consciousness.

One can argue that we’ve been using the wrong behaviors – our own – when it comes to assigning motivations to any alien intelligence. The existing scenarios are clichéd and unimaginative: The Others want to save us from ourselves, if only we knew how to listen. They’re here to undermine our perverse sense of order. They intend to keep us in blinders, or under quarantine, until we figure out how to clean up our mess. We’re a genetic experiment designed to rescue the gods from boredom. Or maybe we’re just fish in an aquarium, worth taking a look at in a passive tranquil innocuous zen kinda way but not worth getting the fingers all wet and smelly.

“When looking at any plant, we must always remember that we are observing something built on a completely different model from that of an animal — a template so different that, by comparison, all the alien life forms in sci-fi movies are but lighthearted fantasies dreamed up by children” — Stefano Mancuso CREDIT: consciouslifestylemag.com

Or how about this: What if the first species to figure out how to bend space and time was able to do so because it was unencumbered by ego, tribalism, and pedigree? What if the right environmental conditions allowed swarm intelligence – self-organized social networks like ants and bees with, let’s say, a mere 500,000-year evolutionary head start on us – to become masters of advanced technology? After all, despite our profligate domination of Earth, scientists will tell you that humanity’s social constructs are abnormal.

“Not only are oligarchies rare,” states Stefano Mancuso, “but imagined hierarchies and the so-called law of the jungle is trite nonsense. What is more relevant is that similar structures do not work well. In nature, large distributed organizations without control centers are always the most efficient … Decisions made by large numbers of individuals are almost always better than those adopted by a few. In some cases, the ability of groups to solve complex problems is astounding. The idea that democracy is an institution against nature therefore remains just one of the more seductive lies invented by man to justify his (unnatural) thirst for individual power.”

Mancuso is worth listening to because he’s not a political scientist or even an entomologist. This guy is a botanist. From Italy’s University of Florence, he runs the 14-year old International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, a term that drives many of his peers nuts. He has joined with the European Space Agency in conducting botanical experiments aboard the International Space Station, as well as the Endeavour space shuttle. He has monitored root systems as they accommodate microgravity and fluctuating terrestrial environments alike. “A good example of organisms capable of collectively investigating unknown spaces, and therefore excellent models and sources of direct inspiration,” Mancuso offers by way of comparison, “is social insects.” But social insects, he argues, are no match for the more efficient sort of swarm intelligence exhibited by plants.

In the 2018 translation of his book The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, Mancuso asks us to contemplate a novel and ancient sentience, one with which we last shared a common ancestor 600 million years ago. Taking full advantage of inexhaustible solar energy, these life forms eschewed conventional mobility, central nervous systems, organs and brains and – through mimicry, a communal network of chemical signaling, and the rejection of “vertical control” – proceeded to colonize a planet by providing 80 percent of its biomass.

“The vertebrate brain,” he writes, “is an ‘accident,’ evolved only in a very small number of living things – animals – while the vast majority of life, represented by plant organisms (with) intelligence, the ability to learn, understand, and react successfully to new or trying situations has developed without a dedicated organ.

“Plant evolution has led to the development of a distributed intelligence – that is, a simple, practical system that enables them to find effective responses to the challenges of the environment in which they live. It is a remarkable achievement … To counteract the problems associated with predation, plants have … develop(ed) solutions so different from those animals that they have become the very epitome of diversity (indeed, plant species are so diverse that they might as well be aliens).”

Mancuso reminds us that Earth’s flora, which influence everything from architecture to robotics, pushed humans, way back in 1896, to develop time-lapse photography in order to document and understand their movements. He also recounts a more recent breakthrough, requiring the development of a camera capable of recording 1,000 frames per second. The target was a plant called the Erodium, known for its explosive dispersal of seeds that hook into the soil and drill deeper. The results — slowed down to reveal scatter patterns — were delivered to the ESA, and “a future probe for space exploration inspired by the Erodium is a real possibility,” writes Mancuso.

Mancuso’s reflections on intelligence, memory and problem-solving are challenging but well worth the effort. Nobody’s saying we need to armor up for encounters with Triffids (yet). But if we’re trying to understand what UFOs are and why they’re here, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants assures us that cracking that nut could be far more complicated than anyone imagined.