Technology: A-Life

Artificial life, or A-Life, engineering is the practice of designing and manufacturing life from inert materials in order to achieve a particular goal. It has been widely acclaimed for its many practical uses and has been deemed by many as "the most revolutionary technology of the late 21st / early 22nd century". The science has not been universally welcomed however; being criticized by others as "unnatural" and "risky".

Overview

A-Life engineering is based on the way microscopic ecosystems (say the gut flora) work together in order to achieve a macroscopic goal (digestion). The use of entire ecosystems allow for complex tasks on microscopic scale to be undertaken all the while self regulating the process through "overseer" organisms. Accomplishing similar tasks with inert machinery would often require large refineries or nanotechnology which has not been achieved yet.

Contrary to what many would believe, A-Life engineering as been more often compared to programming by experts than to bio-chemistry. The major part of an A-Life engineer's job is usually to design how different members of an ecosystem and the parts of these members will interact together rather than how they are actually made. These interactions can be written in a sort of pseudo-programming language and are then passed to quantum super computers that then generate the blueprints of the necessary proteins and specialized cells. While research to come up with more efficient organism designs and language architecture, these altogether represent only about 20% of the field's workforce.

Applications

The applications of A-Life technology are too numerous to cite all. The following as a non exhaustive list of the major applications.

• Medical Treatment: A-Life can be used to supplement the human body's immune system with organism that attack otherwise incurable diseases. The most well known of these is the so called "cancer vaccine" though that name is inaccurate.
• Living Plastic: One of the biggest breakthrough in material sciences came with the invention of living plastic. A polymer that hosts an A-Life ecosystem. This ecosystem is capable of producing the same plastic and does so whenever it detects a break in the polymer. The end result is a plastic that "heals" itself after breaks just like broken skin does. Many new compounds with the same ability have since been created, often being called living plastic when they are not plastic to begin with.
• Geo-engineering: This refers to the act of engineering an environment on the global scale. There are many instances of the impressive feat, the most famous of which are the green Sahara project, the reversing of atmospheric CO2 to near per-industrial levels and the creation of the Gaia seed, capable of transforming barren planets in decades.
• Bio Computers: Biological computers are the idea of using proteins, cells and other organic compounds to produce a Turing complete machine instead of transistors and other usual components. While bio-computers are always less efficient than their traditional counterparts, they do find some limited uses in certain fields. The clearest example of their applications is in neural implants where they allow to translate complex thoughts into instructions for a regular computer.