793.00 Tree Structures

793.01 Among nature’s most efficientand therefore most beautifuldesigns are the structuring of the great trees. To examine the structural effectiveness of trees we can make an experiment. Take two suitcases, each weighing 50 pounds, one in each hand. Try to hold them out horizontally at arm’s length. It is easy for our arms to hang them vertically from our shoulders, but the more horizontally they are held, the more difficult. It is almost impossible to hold out 50 pounds horizontally. Yet look at a tree’s shoulders where the branches are attached. Look at the branch of a tree with the same girth as that of your shoulder when your arm is extended and flexed. Such a tree branch may weigh 500 poundsten times what you can hold out horizontally. Many larger-shouldered tree branches weighing five tons and more are held out horizontally. “Wing root” is an aeronautical engineering term for shoulderthat is, where the plane’s airframe fuselage joins the jet-pod-carrying aluminum wing. These air transport wing roots accomplish great load-bearing tasks with very low weight ratios. The way trees hold out five-ton branches while yielding in streamline and flexing gracefully without breaking in great winds is a design accomplishment unparalleled in aeronautical engineeringeven in the wing roots of jumbo jets and supersonic fighters. How can a tree do that? Biological structures cope hydraulically with all compressional loadings.

793.02 The paramount function of trees is to expose as much leafage as possible under varying wind conditions in order to impound Sun radiation. By a complex of relationships with other biologicals, this impoundment supports life on our planet, since few mammals can directly convert Sun energy into life support. Since the function of trees requires maximum leafage exposure, their progeny will prosper best when planted outside the shadow of the parent. Each tree seed is a beautiful flying machine designed to ride the wind until reaching propitious soil. Because few seeds will find propitious sites in this random distribution, the tree launches many thousands of seeds. The seeds contain the geometric design instructions for associating the locally available resources of air and water and the atomic chemistries of the locally available soil and rock in the environs of seed-landing.

793.03 Seeds contain coded programs for associating local atoms in triple-bonded crystal structures. Triple-bonded structures have high tensile capabilities, and when further interbonded they produce long, overlapping, fibrous sacs to be filled with local water and air derivatives. These close- packed, liquid-filled fibrous sacs compound first to produce the “wood” of the tree’s roots and trunk. What nature ships in the seeds are the DNA-RNA coded instructions on how to utilize the resources of the locally occurring water, gases, and chemical elements at the planting site. The high-tensile fiber sacs are filled with liquid sap developed from water brought in from the roots by osmosis. By one-way capillary valving the hydrogen and oxygen of the water combine with the carbon- and oxygen-laden gases of the atmosphere to produce the hydrocarbon crystal cells of the tree while at the same time giving off to the atmosphere oxygen atoms with which the growth of mammals will be respiratorially sustained.

793.04 Enormous amounts of water are continuously being elevated through the one-way, antigravity valving system. The tree feeds the rain-forming atmosphere by leaking atomized water out through its leaves while at the same time sucking in fresh water through its roots. The tree’s high-tensile fiber cell sacs are everywhere full of liquid. Liquids are noncompressible; they distribute their local stress loadings evenly in all directions to all the fiber cell sacs. The hydraulic compression function firmly fills out the predesigned overall high-tensile fiber shaping of the tree. In between the liquid molecules nature inserts tiny gaseous molecules that are highly compressible and absorb the tree’s high-shock loadings, such as from the gusts of hurricanes. The branches can wave wildly, but they rarely break off unless they are dehydra- tively dyingwhich means they are losing the integrity of their hydraulic, noncompressible load-distribution system. Sometimes in an ice storm the tree freezes so that the liquids cannot distribute their loads; then the branches break off and fall to the ground.

793.05 In trees the liquids distribute the loads and the gases absorb the shocks in an overall high-tension crystalline fiber network pre-designed by the DNA-RNA programming. The system transmits its hydraulic load-distribution impulses through each liquid-filled cell’s contacts with adjacent liquid-loaded sacs. Starting with one tetrahedral bud “shoot,” the tree grows as a series of concentric tetrahedral cones. Revolved tetrahedra generate cones. The constant reorienting of the direction from which, the Sun radiation is coming, the frequent shift in the wind direction, and the consequent drag forces on the tetra-tree produce a conic revolution effect on the tree growth. Each year a new cambium layer cone grows over the entire outside of the previous year’s tetra-cone. Each branch of the tree also starts as a tetrahedral shoulder cone sprouting out of the main tree cone.

793.06 This high-tension sac’s web design with its hydraulic compression coping and pneumatic shock absorbing is much the same structural system nature employs in the design of human beings. To be sure, with humans the liquid does not freeze under normal environmental conditions; nature creates a good-health temperature control of 98.6 degrees F. for all its humans. Instead of the larger tetra cone form, over which the tree builds from the roots outward into its successive live layers, nature introduced in the mobile mammals the skeleton around which all their hydraulically actuated muscles and cushioning cells are grown in crystalline patterns as scheduled by the DNA-RNA program and as thereafter automated by genetic coding.

793.07 When humans tried to make solid crystalline machinery and ship it from here to there over the ground, the objects could move only very slowly without being shattered. So pneumatic tires were put on the wheels so as to distribute the working loads throughout all the freely moving compressional molecules, which in turn distribute the workload energies over the whole uniformly tensioned surface of the high-tensile tire casing. The aeronautical engineers finally adopted nature’s biological structuring strategies to cope with 150 tons of fully loaded jumbo jets coming out of the sky to land at 150 miles per hourwith the music going and the people putting on their coats, paying no attention to the extraordinary engineering accomplishment. The plane’s tires are pneumatic. Rubber makes the first contact. Pneumatics take the shock load. Next the hydraulic struts distribute the shock loading evenly through metered orifices, and all the shock load energy is thereafter distributed as heat through the high conductivity aluminum walls of the hydraulic system. The heat is completely dispersed by the metal surfaces. Only in the landing gear of great airplanes have humans employed nature’s really beautiful structuring of crystalline tension in complement with hydraulic compression and pneumatic elasticity for shock absorption.