BM23002 Chapter 1 The Made and the Born

Quotations

“The realm of the born – all that is nature – and the realm of the made - all that is humanly constructed – are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered.” Page 2.

“For the world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.” Page 2.

“We now see that no logic except bio-logic can assemble a thinking device, or even a workable system of any magnitude.” Page 2.

“Although many philosophers in the past have suspected one could abstract the laws of life and apply them elsewhere, it wasn’t until the complexity of computers and human –made systems became as complicated as living things, that it was possible to prove this.” Page 3.

“Milk cows and carrots, therefore, are human inventions as much as steam engines and gunpowder are. But milk cows and carrots are more indicative of the kind of inventions humans will make in the future: products that are grown rather than manufactured.” Page 3.

“Generic engineering is precisely what cattle breeders do when they select better strains of Holsteins, only bioengineers employ more precise and powerful control.” Page 3.

“As we look at human efforts to create complex mechanical things, again and again we return to nature for directions.” Page 4.

“Ours may always be a flashy type of creativity, but there is something to be said for slow, wide creativity of many dim parts working ceaselessly.” Page 5.

Synopsis

The story was conceived whilst inside an airtight glass module designed to allow me to survive in space alongside both living things and manufactured things which looked to provide a parallel environment to me living on Earth itself.

The trend will be for the technological man made world to both receive its directions and design from nature but for the technologies to be more like biological systems. It acknowledges where we are technologically is way behind what nature has achieved biologically. So we need to look to biological design to move forward our technological design.