Greenhousehive

Billion years in the future greenhousehives are the tallest “trees” growing on Earth. These beings are biomechanical composite organisms, made of machines and plants union. Machine component evolved from self-replicating nanorobots, hundreds of million years ago, created by mammalian civilization to serve as their slaves. Now feral, they live their own lives alongside biological inhabitants of Earth. They form colonies in a similar way to some insects and build colossal citadels using themselves as bricks. Inside greenhousehives, machines can sustain a lot cooler and more humid atmosphere than outside, so plants can grow very fast here, like in rainforests of ancient, more life-friendly Earth. Plants inside, descendants of orchids grow into thicket of soft vines and can be harvested by machine partner for glucose, fat and cellulose used by machines as fuel or raw materials. Each species of robot live together with specific species of plant and cannot acquire necessary glucose fuel without it. Plants also need machine partners as they are not adapted to hot, arid conditions of the outside world, where only slow growing succulents can survive on their own. Because of this cooperation, forests of future Earth are still vast, but instead of biological trees, which seemed familiar to vertebrates on Earth in distant past, now they are composed of several hundred meters tall, skyscraper-like structures made of metal, rock, plastic and glass.

The specimen in this picture is about the size of Burj Khalifa building, and, being thousand years old, is still not fully grown. The largest greenhousehives reach height of 1200 meters. They don’t have any upper growth limit, but individuals older than three thousand years become so large that they simply collapse under their own weight.


You can find more informations about these beings in this picture: fav.me/db57h6i

You can find other creature from the same future era here: fav.me/d8ykcqs fav.me/d9xxxh0 fav.me/d9s73cs
and also: fav.me/dbnkx9r fav.me/dbnkx03 fav.me/dbnkwh1 fav.me/dbnkve1

Quite untypical drawing style for me. Very big and quite crudely painted surface. I had it as uncolored sketch in my notebook for over a year, so it is time to upload it. Also it is my first finished "speculative botany" drawing.