Anyways, in my science fiction universe, I built it on the premise that biology is an engineering corpus, that biology is the ultimate final technology, and it eventually becomes like programming with Python, but many many orders of magnitude more complex. It is fun playing with ginkgo trees used for official structures; temperamental to work with but near infinite in age. Wall surfaces are grown of chitin. Most structures and furniture are grown from the Banyan tree. There is no industrial technology on the living level of the O’Neill cylinders. Culture has shifted to custodians of resources on stellar time scales. The complex human social hierarchy is shifted to skills, guilds, reputation, and accolades. The primary currency of exchange is a heat dissipation allowance. The lack of anonymity in exploiting natural resources, and the resultant heat, render accumulated wealth hierarchies obsolete.

I think my biggest gamble is that there are sufficient incompatibilities and complexity that prevent major modifications to most species. The biggest biological achievement is the synthesis of a deterministic biological computer based loosely on the human brain. That innovation marks the end of the stone age of silicon, several centuries before my stories take place. I play in the first expansion of life outside of the Sol system using generation ships and one way travel. Wild Earth is only inhabited by a few indigenous groups. Most humans live in CisLunar O’Neill cylinders.

All it takes is one m-type astroid. Any such differentiated planetesimal core contains more rare mineral wealth than all of what humans have accessed in the Holocene. If anyone gains access to this, to more wealth than all that Earth’s differentiated scarcity has ever given us through the few impact remnants on the planetary surface dross, then we have the catalyst that produces the infrastructure and we head to space in mass within a century. The need to create fully cyclical terrarium worlds without waste drives the research and push to explore biology. Each holdout technology without a biologic solution weighs more heavily as more and more are dropped.

I’ve been exploring how a volcanic traps like scenario builds up. I have also been working through ways to claim that those that modify their own genetics substantially have never managed to reproduce for more than 10 generations, and the problems that result are horrendous for the more generations that persist. Genetic modifications become the tin foil hat dogma tribalism fodder.

No aliens, no FTL travel. There are kilometers scale self replicating drones that handle the required resource acquisition, any necessary industrial processes, and enable maintenance of habitats on the scale of stellar lifetimes. Interstellar travel is a major gamble where around half do not succeed. Indeed, while the generation ship is built with many of the larger structural components of the first O’Neill cylinder to be constructed at the destination, the small population will collapse and become sterile unless they get the first cylinders spinning within a few generations. The hub of the main habitat is the generation ship, which is spun to a twelfth of standard gravity.

It is all possible because of the largest construction project in history, when most if Mercury is used to create the orbital structures of the forge around Sol. There, generation ships and drones are built around the antimatter fuel required for a one way journey to any stable, type g star within 7 parsecs, and with fuel enough to arrive and slow down on the other side. There is no coming back. It is part of a goal to colonize the galaxy within 220 million years at most; one galactic orbit of Sol. The main connections to the other systems is a large packaged news stream that is, and must be constantly sent to Sol, and the same is sent from all other systems. It is how rogue breakaway colonies are prevented. The big challenge and looming scare is what will happen when the first colony systems grow large enough to produce antimatter and expand. If any system goes silent in the story era, a poison pill of sorts is launched from Sol to disable their autonomous drones and effectively doom the colony. Antimatter fueled weapons are the nuclear option.

I am certainly no expert on any of the underlying subjects. It stems from being a fan of Asimov and realizing the myth of the machine gods is a fallacy that has existed in the cultural zeitgeist since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution. The machine gods myth is our Chaos, Ares, and Typhon that will seem equally nonsensical centuries from now. Fusion will eventually happen, but we are already past the phase resource use where industrial technology will deplete all economically accessible sources. ITER is already using a significant percentage of beryllium IIRC. All present industrial tech is impossible within thousands of years or less. The equivalent biological solutions will last stellar lifetimes.

Anyways, thanks if you made it through my ramblings this far. It is a fun to be a counter culture positive futurist, and conjure a better future history, even if only a dream.