[Phoenix Pen Club] Titan

Phoenix Pen Club Ding Ding What I want to talk about is not the completely fictitious stories of Homer's epics or Attack on Titan. They are real on earth, and in the true sense...

>Phoenix Pen Club Ding Ding

What I want to talk about is not the completely fictional stories of Homer's epics or Attack on Titan. They are real and truly giants on Earth.

As the elder and leader of the Chilula tribe, Minnie Reeves would repeatedly mention these giants as a special gift to mankind in almost every gathering. When the Creator created all things, he wanted to leave a special gift to the children, so he mixed the elixir from all the trees with a drop of blood from everyone, and sang a special song, thus giving birth to these giants. "Destroy them, and you destroy the love of the gods. If you destroy something that the Creator cherishes so much, you are destroying mankind."

As for the Yurok tribe, these giants sacrificed themselves and stood there forever, becoming the last guardians of the holy land. Beneath their thick and rough skin lie ancient and everlasting spirits. They existed for countless millennia long before humans appeared; when humans emerged, they showed up and taught the infant-like humans how to survive on this land, leaving the remains of their dead to humans. From then on, human beings had houses and boats.

They are extremely tall giants, but also extremely fragile giants.

>Minni Reeves, this Indian elder has the same surname as the movie star Keanu Reeves. I only found her words and very unclear photos in a scanned old book. The book records that she was 102 years old at the time. Original book link: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/tmdl/records/region_1/2003/ref993.pdf

Tugboat Chilula, taken on July 2, 1960. The small tribe Chilula is almost extinct in name only today. If you search for the word "Chilula" on the Internet, you are more likely to find a naval tugboat named after Chilula, which was in service before World War II. The tugboat was decommissioned in 1944 and eventually disappeared from the world in 1997 when it was used as a test target by the Navy. Things named after history eventually become history.

>The wooden house of the Yurok tribe. The Yurok tribe collects wood from naturally fallen trees to build their houses. Their house looks very small from the outside, but the floor inside is actually about two meters below the ground, so if you really climb in, it is not small at all.

Children dressed in Yurok tribal costumes. The Yurok tribe still exists, and their traditional culture is an important local tourism project. There are many promotional photos about Yurok tribal costumes, but the helpless and curious eyes of the little girl in this one are undoubtedly impressive.

These giants are the North American red shirts.

Although the competition for the seat of the largest creature on earth often goes back and forth, it can be said that the level of the blue whale is far from enough. There are some special plants and fungi that have the characteristic of constantly replicating themselves but not separating from each other to form a huge individual. For example, the common banyan forests in Guangxi and Hawaii are just one giant banyan tree in a strict biological sense. Mr. Ba Jin's "Bird's Paradise" describes a single banyan tree that forms a forest, covering an area of ​​more than 20 acres. The current world record holder is a seagrass from Western Australia: in 2022, the Australian Marine Institute published an academic article that officially confirmed that the Posidonia seagrass covering more than 200 square kilometers on the coast of Western Australia is actually just a huge seagrass. If we do not consider this gigantism plan, which is definitely suspected of cheating, then there are roughly only three candidates left for the largest creature: Australian almond eucalyptus, North American redwoods, and giant sequoias also distributed in North America. If you consider weight and volume, the top spot will definitely be the absolutely heavyweight giant sequoia. However, if we follow a slightly superficial standard and simply consider the size and long legs, then this crown may eventually go to the sequoia.

The height of redwood trees can reach hundreds of meters. The tallest tree still alive is called "Hyperion", named after one of the Titans in Greek mythology. Her true location is not open to visitors for conservation reasons. In order to accurately measure, American botanist and climbing expert Stephen C. Sillett brought an extra-long ruler directly to the top of the tree in 2006, hung the ruler from the top of the tree, and finally came up with an accurate height of 115.55 meters (379.1 feet). The entire climb was photographed by National Geographic magazine and published in December 2012 under the title "Forest Giant." There is another height comparison picture that is often quoted, in which it can be clearly seen that at least three blue whales have to be connected head to tail to barely compete with the height of the redwoods.

Image source: https://arusharr.wixsite.com/national-parks/sequoia-trees

Don’t let the numbers confuse you – the heights in this comparison chart are in feet. Inside, you can see that the people are just a little bit smaller, and to the right of the sequoia is a giant sequoia that is shorter but has a significantly stockier build.

How can these giants grow so tall? Can they still grow taller? The answers to these questions are far from simple. Behind the questions you can find research articles on botany, materials mechanics, ecology, fluid mechanics and other interdisciplinary subjects. Many of them are published in high-level academic journals such as Nature or Physical Review. Generally speaking, the demand for light will drive plants to grow taller, but the materials of most herbaceous plants are not strong enough and they cannot grow too tall, otherwise they will be crushed under their own weight. In addition, these giants must live long enough to continue to satisfy their thirst for sunlight and altitude. The oldest known redwood is about 3,500 years old (a redwood named Muir Snag, which is now dead), and most redwoods are between 800 and 1,500 years old - which means they have plenty of time to break through the height limit. However, even with sufficient material strength and sufficient growth time, trees still cannot grow indefinitely, because what ultimately limits them is the transportation of water and nutrients. At the tops of these giant trees, the growth environment of the leaves has begun to approach that of an arid desert. According to fluid mechanics modeling analysis of water transport, the ultimate height of trees on Earth is about 400 feet (more than 120 meters), which is roughly consistent with the overall data of redwoods, indicating that the difficulty of "drinking water" should limit the height of these giants.

When the redwood giants were accompanied by Indian tribes, people's demand for redwood trees was small and benign. Even ignoring the mysterious and introspective reasons of gods and legends, the manpower invested in harvesting living redwoods using old-age tools is undoubtedly too huge, and it is obviously an act of making ends meet. The Indian tribes simply looked for giants that had died of natural causes and collapsed, and then made houses, furniture, utensils, and even canoes that could go out to sea. For thousands of years, the redwoods have been providing this to people for free and are well-deserved protectors of the Indian tribes.

Redwood boat of the Yurok Indian tribe on the Trinity River

Then all this was completely changed overnight by the arrival of Spanish colonists. While they were amazed by these ancient giants, they would also select the tallest and oldest trees and cut them down indiscriminately just to display these giant trees across Europe, and only take a few sections back to be spliced ​​for exhibition. Under the butcher's knife of the colonists, the redwood elves were unable to protect themselves, let alone the tribes living in the shade. In fact, a large number of Indian tribes were driven out and displaced, and even their women and children were massacred. The tragic scene that took place in North America at that time was undoubtedly the prototype of the movie "Avatar".

The subsequent increase in the immigrant population immediately increased the demand for various resources, including redwood wood. When the gold rush began in the West in 1850, countless people who went to pan for gold failed to find any gold, so they could only stay in the local area and become cheap labor force. Commercially profitable and with a large labor force, the century-long destruction of redwood forests by various logging companies officially began.

In the early days, felling giant trees was still a time-consuming and laborious task. However, with the influx of modern tools and even automated machinery, the cost of felling redwoods has become increasingly affordable. The railways that replaced horse-drawn carriages also made lumber transportation more convenient. Many railways actually ended directly at the lumberyard. For a time, timber harvesting became the largest industry in the American West. At that time, working in a logging company was considered a good and respectable career. Now, it is roughly equivalent to working as a coder at Amazon and Google. It is an open secret of many logging companies to forge title deeds and encroach on large amounts of public land for the purpose of logging. Although a handful of people were indeed caught, most illegal appropriations went unpunished and intensified. There is also constant competition among logging companies: for increasingly thin profits, logging companies are mining faster and faster. By the establishment of Sequoia National Park in 1968, the United States began to legislate comprehensive protection of sequoias and giant sequoias. More than 90% of the original sequoia forests (estimated to cover an area of ​​7,500 square kilometers) had been felled and destroyed completely and beyond recovery.

Taking photos with the fallen giants was a very popular thing at the time. Such photos can be found in many local museums and historical archives of various California universities. I collected a few random photos to end this essay, and most of the people in these photos are no longer alive.