[Luis Dias]

Hadn't heard it before, mostly sure some of you probably had. Still I found it fascinating:

One possibility that Dyson does predict is the existence of ‘big trees’ – genetically modified plants designed to survive in space that would grow to enormous sizes, many kilometres across, with their roots ensconced within a nutrient-rich comet. The tree would be so huge that it would contain hollow, airtight spaces where people could live. Furthermore, the plants could grow their own greenhouses, “just as turtles grow shells and polar bears grow fur and polyps build coral reefs in tropical seas,” according to Dyson. They would produce their own oxygen supply from photosynthesis, like any other plant, while an array of lenses and mirrors could focus light from the distant Sun and stars into the greenhouse.

[The E]

That is indeed fantastically weird.

(I also think Simmons used this concept in Hyperion Cantos for the Ousters, and I recall reading a novel set in an oxygen-rich nebula around a white dwarf, although the particulars escape me)

[perihelion]

That sounds like The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring by Larry Niven.  But the star the Smoke Ring was in orbit around was a neutron star in that case, not a white dwarf.  Most of the light was provided by it's binary companion.

[The E]

That sounds like The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring by Larry Niven.  But the star the Smoke Ring was in orbit around was a neutron star in that case, not a white dwarf.  Most of the light was provided by it's binary companion.

Yes, those were the ones. As I said, the details escape me

[MP-Ryan]

I find some serious biological improbabilities with such a concept, but it IS interesting if extremely far-fetched.  The temperature extremes outside a protective atmosphere and the effect of a near-zero-gravity vacuum on complex cellular growth and differentiation are major hurdles.

Protective spheres grown from extremophile biofilms are probably more plausible.