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The largest living thing
If you are asked, “What is the biggest living thing on Earth?” you would likely say, “The blue whale.” Weighing in at 150 tons and the size of four double-decker buses lined up, it’s an enormous behemoth—an emperor of the seas. But the emperor has been recently dethroned. Because it is no longer recognized as the biggest organism on Earth—Pando is.
Pando is a male quaking aspen tree and its 47,000 genetically identical clones, all sharing a common root system in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. It covers 107 acres, weighs 6,615 tons in total, and is at least 10,000 years old. Aspen propagate through sexual reproduction when conditions are unfavourable—the seeds can move, but the trees can’t. However, if the conditions remain favourable, they just keep on growing asexually in the same place by cloning. The ice sheet never reached Utah in the last Ice Age so Pando could be almost a million years old.
But Pando is only the biggest by weight. When it comes to size, a giant honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) was found in Oregon’s Blue Mountains in 1998 which spread across 2,384 acres. That is four square miles, or 1,665 football fields. It is estimated to be 2,400 years old. A honey fungus passes electrical signals through its underground network of hyphae at a rate of four impulses a second—firing just like an animal’s sensory neurones. You can view junctions between hyphae as “decision gates” like a transistor. A honey fungus covering just 40 acres would have a trillion such processing units, according to Professor Lund of Oregon University. That’s about 100 times more “processing power” than the main CPU chip in an iPhone. So, the giant Oregon honey fungus begins to look a little like a vegetative internet.
And then, in June 2022, scientists discovered a sea grass meadow stemming from a single hybrid plant. This meadow of Poseidon’s ribbon weed (Posidonia australis) is more than 180 km long and covers an area the size of Washington DC. The clone arose some 4,500 years ago and has been growing ever since. It is the latest discovery to claim the title of “Earth’s Largest Organism.”
These examples are pertinent to the concept of systemic risk in the cyber realm in two ways. First, they got so big because they are clones (i.e. genetically identical) and so resemble, say, all the computers running Windows 10 around the world. That means, at least theoretically, a single virus could take out the whole network. The second link is the unexpectedness of the discoveries.
Systemic risk is “that risk that cannot be mitigated through diversification.” You believe your eggs are in separate baskets only to discover that they are all in one much bigger basket. So, systemic risk is rooted in the notion of surprise, broadening the scope of the horizon. We can only wonder what surprising thing will be discovered next to be the largest living thing on Earth.
