I think it’s interesting how a lot of people think of plants as basically living objects since they’re rooted to one spot* and don’t appear to have a central nervous system or a brain*, and most importantly they aren’t animals--that is, they’re on an entirely different evolutionary branch from us in the domain of life. But a lot of people do think it’s possible for intelligent alien life to exist.
Any life existing on another planet would be further removed from us than bacteria. The chances of intelligent alien life existing at the same time as us, after the number of completely chance happenings that have occurred on our planet to make the sheer diversity of life (and thus eventual intelligence) even possible, is quite literally astronomical. The advent of life hasn’t even occurred more than once on our planet that we know of. Every single living thing here that we are aware of is related. But suggest our distant relatives, the plant kingdom, may have more in common with the animal kingdom than we give them credit for and a lot of people will scoff or simply say “they don’t have brains” and completely shut themselves off from even the possibility.
But a number of sea animals don’t have brains either, some of them mobile, including starfish, sea urchins, clams, oysters, sea cucumbers, lancelets, and jellyfish. At least not as we understand brains, as a gelatinous mass in our heads with electrical signals.
Plant root systems do have electrical signals though. There’s evidence that at least some of them communicate with one another in the sense of warning. There’s evidence many of them are less competitive with members of their own species (crown shyness in trees for example). Some plants seem to show a preference for their own siblings, avoiding root competition even if planted closely together. And some trees seem to directly feed their own offspring and will pass more nutrients to them than to others of their species. Some trees seem to go so far as to intentionally starve their young of sunlight, making them dependent on the parent, to keep them from growing too quickly. Slow growth when young means a dense core that’s hard to snap and hard to bore into. Some trees even seem to help heal one another through infection and injury with this continuous passing of nutrients through their roots
Some plants also exhibit learning behaviours. For example, the impatient hop plant that keeps trying to make shoots in early spring, only for them to die with each frost until late May, will make their shoots later, smaller, and tougher the following spring. A tree that tries to take too much water in draught and causes itself to crack won’t do so again. Ever.
They also aren’t as immobile as we suppose. Vines should make that obvious, but I don’t just mean above ground. I’ve had at least three different species come up in different areas from where I planted them due to “creeping rhizomes”. These snake their way through the soil till they find an area they like better and will allow the part in the area they didn’t like to die back. The activity of these rhizomes, unlike the top part of the plant, doesn’t stop in the winter. In addition to finding places they like better, the more aggressive ones will seek to spread. What they can’t out compete in the summer, they can certainly try to do in the winter, so that when the warm months come again they can push up their shoots anywhere and everywhere (constant battle with my sunflowers on that: I swear they’ve gone under the sidewalk as there are some suspicious shoots on the other side that I don’t think are my asters).
Anyway, you’re not going to teach a plant tricks or develop a mutual emotional bond with it. All I’m saying is I wish people would at least give them as much regard as they’d give a starfish or a bivalve.
