> Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
> This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I like to refer to it as nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, discovered on a planet that experienced a "grey goo" apocalypse. Every possible pore of its surface is now infested rogue units, in a constant arms-race of development. Some have even been yoked into titanic moving megastructures and inscrutable hive-minds.
Tangentially related: We like to imagine cyborg metal bodies, but we don't always appreciate all the features of our standard nanotech. From an old post:
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When it comes to the bio-engineering of the human limbs, just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate.
1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations
2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)
3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation
4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials
5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors
6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts
7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected
8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion
9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids
10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)
There's only so far your high tech nano-particle swarm can spread before resources become a serious limiting factor. If you're limiting yourself just to earth, certain resources that a swarm might need to reproduce will be scarce/energy intensive to extract and utilize (mining rare earths, fabricating highly advanced semiconductors, etc.). It's extraordinarily easy, however, to produce billions of cells nearly anywhere on earth because the cells that we have are especially adapted for ease of reproduction in these exact conditions.
This is how I now see biology, and more so with each reframing. Cells being squishy, floppy bags no longer counts as a point against them being "tech" or "robotic." That's deliberate engineering—a complex scaffold of nanotech ladders that continuously reform to emulate "squish" as a feature.
> This is biology. –Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I like to refer to it as nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, discovered on a planet that experienced a "grey goo" apocalypse. Every possible pore of its surface is now infested rogue units, in a constant arms-race of development. Some have even been yoked into titanic moving megastructures and inscrutable hive-minds.