The Brutal and Brief Life of the Pear
Say the soonest a pear can rot or be eaten is the first day it’s a pear. That’s quite sad actually. Some plodding bumpy caterpillar loafs along. An impeccably timed bit, at the very instant the cells in the protopear shove off the yoke of prepearedness. Crunch! A pear ye hardly knew, born t=0, left t=0+delta.
Say another pear from the same tree falls after it fully ripened on the tree, landing in a shady soften, spot of welcoming, not-too-wet earth . The pear’s skin fully intact, out of site of hungry eyes. Leaving time, the rain and the wind to expose the skin to microbes and kick off the process of rotting, slowly over time. t=the longest a pear has been a pear.
And in between you would all the glorious and violent lives of pears in between.
If you have the data to chart all this out for one tree and all its pears, my guess would be that it would be a bell curve with spikes from predominant factors.
Predominant factors could be certain insects in that certain events that have a taste for that certain pear with a certain time and a certain ripeness. They could entail activities of microbes specific to the region, weather patterns, specific to the tree’s placement, specific to the specific amount of sunlight that filters through the specifically chosen placements of that pear tree’s specifically leaves.
Now having that data, and data like it for all the trees, might provide unique tree fingerprint.
What happens when we expand this dataset, this hypothetical dataset, into the dimension of time. The data set now to represent all the trees and all the regions in all the world in all the seasons in all the years. What happens then?
Let’s say we took one tree place in overtime. We make an animation so playing it shows the next day if we watched a certain event would dramatically take for instance, the rise of agriculture humans picking pears in human plant planting pear trees, and humans storing pears and humans cooking Paris leave never rot. That might appear meteoric on this animation. Other events smoothly shift right towards longer average pear life, as a herd of deer a pushed south due to some ice age or another.
And what about certain microbes that evolve? Or animals that move into the area? What happens when pears evolve defensive compounds and prevent themselves from being eaten? Violent sharp bumps of pear-death? Smoothing out slowly into a peace-time bliss?
I wonder if this data could be used as some sort of carbon fruit dating. The brutal and thrilling lives of pears capturing the historical epics in which the tree lived.