Conclusion: Intelligent Trees and Alien Trees

Trees can teach us to recognize sentience and agency, and perhaps intelligence, when these qualities appear in forms that are not human (and not even mammalian). Moreover, vegetal life is more closely related to us than extraterrestrial life may be, and it should therefore be easier for us to perceive vegetal sentience and intelligence. Encounters with mysterious extraterrestrial entities in horror or science fiction demonstrate that we who cannot perceive vegetal sentience are ill-equipped to interpret alien motivations.