(I’m not dead!)
This is just about the most amazing thing I’ve read all year. It’s a post at Cosmic Variance about Pando, the largest, and almost certainly the oldest multicellular, organism on Earth. Pando weighs over 6600 tons, occupies 107 acres, and is estimated to be 80,000 years old or more. Pando is, depending on how you look at it, either an entire forest of Quaking Aspen, or a single tree: all the trunks share an enormous root system and are genetically identical.
My mind, it is blown.
