Nothing's Impossible: Google Tulip

Talk to your plants without looking crazy!  Happy April Fool's Day!

Today, I was introduced to Google's clever April Fool's Day joke on the R-Bioinformatic's Slack channel.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the fictional Google Home application dealt with translating plant signaling and communication to human-speak.  A combination of natural language processing, signal processing, and some good, old-fashioned biomedical engineering.  

The advertisement tapped into a long-forgotten dream.  A dream that exploited this inherent interconnectedness of the world.  That somehow, at the basal level, we are all able to understand each other.  I remember the awe I had as a junior in high school learning about the different ways that plants communicated with each other.  Whether it was via the small nodules on the roots or the hormones they released into the air, plants have this secret, untapped language we are only beginning to decipher.  

I remember doing research, being absorbed by the material I consumed.  On a day-to-day basis, I remembered understanding discrete portions of pathways, molecular structures, and miscellaneous bits of information.  However, it was only during times of respite that I could collect the puzzle pieces and synthesize new ideas.  Talking with plants always seemed like a distant possibility.

As I became more pragmatic, I started to forget these thought exercises I had.  These aspirations were fecund in my imagination, but in reality, no practical action can take place.  Talking with plants seems less realistic than going to Mars.  It seems strange, but today, I remembered these dreams I had.  I remembered when I was doing research to understand and know.  We work to decipher the silence, to find our place in the world.  That is what I thought about today.