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Cells are basically the self replicating nanobots that sci fi sometimes has as an example of highly advanced technology, but naturally occurring.

"wow, cool. Let's see how people interact with these magical creatures"

They are mowed down faster than they can regrow and are replaced with asphalt. Oh.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology.

Yeah, this is a really really neat way of looking at nature that I sometimes thought about. Nature is pretty fucking darn technologically advanced

Went out on a limb for that one.

Imagine aliens that don't have anything like trees.

They'd be so fucking jealous.

Imagine being born on a world made of just mostly slimy grasslands, with bare rock and deserts and a shallow sea full of parasites. And the atmosphere is awful, so running a marathon would be like physically impossible. Actually, besides the dry parts, that kinda sounds like Florida... At least Florida has trees, though. Imagine how shit Florida would be without any trees at all.

Self-replicating, solar-powered machines with long life cycles that synthesise carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen, sturdy building materials and sometimes edible products, while providing shade, cooling and ground stabilisation.

With biodegradeable solar panels, even. And tasty 'fruit' sometimes, too.

They also look amazing, with a stunning variety of forms and foliage.

To make it more sci-fi: We have only found such thing in one planet in the whole galaxy, maybe universe.

Well, yeah, because we can't make that yet. If you describe anything in nature we can't make with technology as technology then it sounds like science fiction. That's just tautological!

Yup. To put it another way, we'd be hard-pressed to replicate all of that with our current non-tree-based technology track, at even a fraction of the same efficiency. Chlorophyll is basically a miracle-molecule that makes all that possible, and we have yet to engineer anything like it.

Don’t forget the symbiotic organic filament network used to transmit raw materials and information between units

I think this is a missed trope for solarpunkish scifi: manipulating plants to grow anything. Fabric for clothes growing as bark. Tomatoes with pracetamol in them. Flowers depositing certain minerals it picks up from the ground in them. Stuff like this.

Life in all its forms is pretty damn amazing. At work while I’m working on my computer shit I am fortunately able to look out the windows at the trees, the birds, the deer, and whatever else wanders by. And even at home we have a bunch of animals.

So much amazing stuff just gets ignored by so many people. That goes for pretty much the entire universe though, not just trees.

Is there a term for this kind of sci-fi esque reframing of what we'd otherwise think of as "normal" to highlight how ridiculously cool or weird something is?

Thinking along the lines of Body Ritual Among The Nacirema

I have to keep reminding myself that effectively our technology is just a loosely-based, extremely primitive, and extremely inefficient mimicry of shit that started happening on its own billions and billions of years ago across the entire universe and perfectly scales from microscopic to galactic levels.

Star Trek writers seeing this and making a new movie

You actually see this kind of shit in tech bro spheres where they describe some "new groundbreaking invention" using terms like this when it's something we already have, but they're version is shittier.

Adam Something on Youtube has a saddening amount of videos on this sort of shit.

Farfetch'd

They also have several copies of their genome for redundancy.

I had a huge Magnolia tree in my backyard. My backyard is not that big. But after I cut it down, the silence was deafening. It was very sad. The tree was too big for my small yard and it was dropping leaves like crazy. Every other day I had to go pick up like three trash cans of leaves.