I've been gardening a lot this last couple of years now and, yeah, plants have intelligence. Indeed, as science is starting to understand, the soil itself functions as a kind of organism with intelligence.
Wolfram points out that computation is actually easy and ambient. (It's one of the main themes of his tome.) We should expect intelligence to be ambient in evolved systems, and it is.
From this POV humans are the "waldoes" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldoes ) of the intelligent ecosystem. We allow life to defeat entropy with much greater efficiency. We also permit the possibility of evading the end of the carbonate–silicate cycle.
> The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once the oceans evaporate completely. With less volcanism to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall.[76] By this time, carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (≈99 percent of present-day species) will die.[77] The extinction of C3 plant life is likely to be a long-term decline rather than a sharp drop. It is likely that plant groups will die one by one well before the critical carbon dioxide level is reached. The first plants to disappear will be C3 herbaceous plants, followed by deciduous forests, evergreen broad-leaf forests and finally evergreen conifers.[70]
It gets worse from there! We have less than a gigayear!
The work of Michael Levin and co. especially is shining a scientific light on the thinking capabilities of all cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)
Wolfram points out that computation is actually easy and ambient. (It's one of the main themes of his tome.) We should expect intelligence to be ambient in evolved systems, and it is.
From this POV humans are the "waldoes" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldoes ) of the intelligent ecosystem. We allow life to defeat entropy with much greater efficiency. We also permit the possibility of evading the end of the carbonate–silicate cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
> 500–600 million [years]
> The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once the oceans evaporate completely. With less volcanism to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall.[76] By this time, carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (≈99 percent of present-day species) will die.[77] The extinction of C3 plant life is likely to be a long-term decline rather than a sharp drop. It is likely that plant groups will die one by one well before the critical carbon dioxide level is reached. The first plants to disappear will be C3 herbaceous plants, followed by deciduous forests, evergreen broad-leaf forests and finally evergreen conifers.[70]
It gets worse from there! We have less than a gigayear!