What happens when the tree dies? While some trees have lived for a very long time, my impression is that 100 years is a very long time for a tree, and if a bridge takes "decades" to build, then 100 years might not be relatively that long.
A typical modern bridge might take 5 years to build 7-8km and will last as long as people care to use and maintain it.
A 20 metres living bridge will takes at least 2-30 years (less wouldn't count as decades, plural) and would live for how long?
Above pessimism aside, I would love to cross the river thames on a living bridge!
100 years is the blink of an eye for a tree. Trees will astound you if you learn more about them. Many species can live for tens of thousands of years; beneath the surface, some apparent "groves" are in fact interconnected appendages of a single living organism which can survive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Being generous and for easy math, let's say the tree lives 100,000 years.
100 years is 1/1000th of the lifetime, .001.
Generally the blink of an eye is in reference to human time scales. Again, let's be generous and say a blink takes an entire second, and a human lives 72 years. 1 / (72 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60) = .0000000004
Many orders of magnitude off from the blink of an eye.
A typical modern bridge might take 5 years to build 7-8km and will last as long as people care to use and maintain it.
A 20 metres living bridge will takes at least 2-30 years (less wouldn't count as decades, plural) and would live for how long?
Above pessimism aside, I would love to cross the river thames on a living bridge!