Notes - Superconvergence

Jamie Metzl | January 27, 2026

Chapter 1: The Nature of Change

The Dawn of Synthetic Life

The first experience of human-created synthetic life began in 2019 when scientists replaced 18,000 DNA fragments of an E. coli bacterium with versions produced by a DNA synthesizer. This device essentially functions as an inkjet printer for genetic code, piecing together adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). While this feat replicated nature's design, subsequent efforts at Cambridge and Harvard incorporated new amino acids never seen in nature, creating "genetic firewalls". These modifications make engineered cells unrecognizable to natural viruses or other "natural" cells, potentially allowing the safe application of modified organisms outside of controlled laboratories without the risk of genetic information flow into existing ecosystems. Beyond bacteria, researchers are now developing synthetic versions of baker’s yeast, which could revolutionize the production of medicines, industrial raw materials, and cell-cultivated meat in bioreactors.

Tinkering vs. Engineering

Despite the term "genetic engineering," humans are not building life from scratch but are tinkering at the edges of systems created by four billion years of evolution. Humanity lacks the creative power to build a novel biological system from the ground up; instead, the process involves harnessing and recasting evolved natural systems to redirect their function. This process is an extension of 10,000 years of domestication and breeding, now accelerated by the active manipulation of genetic code.

The Origins and Persistence of Life

The raw materials for life—core elements common to the universe—assembled on Earth approximately four billion years ago. Leading hypotheses suggest life may have sparked at thermal vents on the ocean floor or was delivered via asteroids. Samples from the Ryugu and Bennu asteroids confirmed the presence of organic compounds, amino acids, and water in space debris, suggesting the building blocks of life are common thut the cosmos. To survive, life required a replicable, self-executing instruction set, or code. Evolution operates through random mutation, which provides the diversity necessary for a species to survive an unknowable future. For example, the traits that made the Tyrannosaurus rex dominant became its greatest liability after an asteroid strike, while the small, shrew-like ancestors of humans survived by hiding and reproducing quickly.

The Mathematics of Human Innovation

Humanity's success stems from the power of cumulative cultural evolution, which has driven biological evolution. While our individual brain capacity has not changed radically in tens of thousands of years, our accrued knowledge and connectivity have amplified our power exponentially. A simple model for innovation rate is: (total number of people) × (average level of education) × (exposure to networks) × (capacity of available tools). Today, with 8 billion people and an 85 percent literacy rate, 6.8 billion individuals can participatn the world of shared knowledge—a thousand-fold increase since the year 1 CE. This connectivity creates a compounding effect where ideas and technologies beget more advanced versions of themselves.

Superconvergence and Exponential Change

We are currently experiencing a "superconvergence" where revolutions in genetics, biotechnology, and AI inspire and accelerate one another in a historically unprecedented loop. While technology progress often feels slow, it follows a "punctuated equilibrium" where sudden reshuffling occurs. Moore's Law, which observed that computer chip capacity doubles every two years, serves as a clichéd but accurate example of this exponential progress. Anything that can be digitized—including biology—can be accelerated by this power of exponentials. This creates a "J curve" where small increases in the early stages eventually lead to massive, mind-blowing transformations.

Decoding the Biological Language

The field of genetics was born from the convergence of Charles Darwiory of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s predictable rules of heredity. The 1953 discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick (aided by Rosalind Franklin) began the race to unpack the language of life. Sequencing costs have dropped ten million-fold; a human genome that cost 2.7 billion dollars to sequence in 2003 can now be done for as little as 100 dollars in a few hours. Modern "shotgun sequencing" and "long-read sequencing" now allow scientists to read entire ecosystems of microbes and unbroken chains of DNA simultaneously.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has transitioned from "symbolic AI," based on human-prescribed rules, to machine learning, where algorithms figure out rules through trial and error. DeepMind's AlphaZero demonstrated this jump by learning to defeat the world’s best human Go players after only three days of playing against itself. Biology is fundamentally an information processing system, and AI is the perfect language to describe its com, emergent patterns.

Solving the Protein Folding Problem

Proteins are the microscopic machines of life, and their function is determined by their physical structure. In 2020, DeepMind’s AlphaFold essentially solved the "protein folding problem," predicting the structures of nearly every protein known to science—approximately 214 million. This breakthrough reallocated millions of years of human research time, allowing scientists to skip the excruciatingly slow process of X-ray crystallography. Researchers are now "hallucinating" protein structures—designing novel proteins never seen in nature to bind to specific viruses or destroy cancer cells.

Large Language Models and Democratized Coding

The release of Generative AI systems like GPT-3 and ChatGPT showcased the power of "Transformer AI," which weights the probability of tokens following one another. These models have developed the ability to write computer code from natural language prompts. This democratizes programming, raising the prospectbillion people turning abstract ideas into coded reality—233 times the number of expert programmers alive today.

The Future of Intelligence and Computing

We are now entering the age oquantum computing, which uses subatomic particles to process data in multiple states simultaneously, potentially making it exponentially faster than classical binary computing. These tools will be critical for simulating nature, which is inherently quantum mechanical rather than binary. While AI systems may reach "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) in terms of performing human tasks better than humans, machine intelligence will likely remain distinct from embodied human intelligence, which is inextricable from our animal instincts and physical evolution. Progress in these fields is inevitable because the know-how is decentralized and competitive pressures are too great to stop the train.

Chapter 2: From Precision to Predictive Healthcare

The mRNA Revolution: Vaccines as Software

The development of mRNA vaccines represents a fundamental shift in medicine, moving from using inactivated viruses to hijacking cellular machinery with synthetic instructions. Unlike traditional vaccines that take years to develop, the Moderna vaccine was designed in just two days using digital genome sequences and computer algorithms without a single wet-lab experiment. This "plug and play" platform allows for rapid variant-specific boosters and is now being applied to treat cancer, HIV, malaria, and Alzheimer’s. Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines use AI to identify unique proteins in a patient's tumor, inducing the body’s own immune cells to attack the cancer. Practical applications even extend to potentially giving humans "special abilities" like reducing lactose intolerance or limiting radiation damage for space travel.

From Generalized "Sick Care" to Precision Medicine

Current healthcare is largely "generalized medicine," based on population averages; for example, Tylenol is safe for most but fatal to a small fraction of people who only discover the risk after taking it. Precision medicine aims to find the best treatment for each individual patient by monitoring biology at a molecular level. This requires integrating massive datasets, including personal history, biometric information, and sequenced whole genomes. While the first human genome sequence cost $2.7 billion and took 13 years, it can now be done for $100 in a few hours. This collapse in cost has led to the creation of massive biological databases, such as Genomics England, which aims to make whole genome sequencing a routine part of care.

AI as the Essential Medical Copilot

AI is transforming diagnostics, particularly in fields like radiology and oncology, where machines can detect patterns invisible to the human eye. In one study, AI identified skin cancers as effectively as twenty-one board-certified dermatologists. Importantly, AI does not always replace humans but enhances them; AI-supported radiologists are 20 percent more accurate at identifying breast cancers than those working alone. Practical applications include:

Real-time Surgery: AI can analyze brain tumor samples in under ninety seconds, allowing surgeons to make critical decisions while the patient is still on the table.
Predictive Voice Analysis: Systems can now detect the early stages of Parkinson’s disease through voice patterns alone.
Global Reach: Low-cost AI monitors in places like Uganda allow local providers to identify pediatric rheumatic heart disease, which can then be treated cheaply with penicillin if caught early.

Whole Genome Sequencing of Newborns

A major transition is underway toward sequencing every newborn to identify treatable genetic conditions before symptoms appear. Programs like Project Baby Bear in California saved millions of dollars by speeding up diagnoses for critically ill infants in intensive care. Beyond sick infants, population-wide screening could identify risks for conditions like autism or early-onset Alzheimer’s. A study in China found that 97 percent of screened newborns showed an increased risk associated with at least one common medication, highlighting the immediate practical utility of this data.

Pharmacogenomics and Systems Biology

Pharmacogenomics predicts which drugs will work best for specific individuals, addressing the reality that many top-selling drugs only significantly help 4 to 25 percent of the people who take them. The ultimate goal is predictive healthcare, which shifts the focus from responding to symptoms (sick care) to working proactively to optimize health from conception to death. This involves "multiomic" analysis, looking at genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, and the microbiome (the 39 trillion microbial cells in our bodies) to understand the full human ecosystem.

Gene Therapy and Regenerative Medicine

Gene therapy seeks to cure diseases by fixing mutated genes or priming the immune system to attack diseased cells. Key breakthroughs include:

CAR-T Therapy: Genetically enhancing a patient’s T-cells to give them cancer-fighting superpowers, which has cleared "incurable" leukemia in teenagers.
CRISPR Cures: Patients with sickle cell disease have been effectively treated by CRISPR-editing their bone marrow cells to produce fetal hemoglobin.
3D Bio-printing: Scientists have successfully 3D printed a human ear from a patient's own cartilage cells and implanted it.
Xenotransplantation: Genetically modified pig organs are being developed for human transplant to address the global shortage of donor organs.

Practical Warnings and Ethical Risks

The transition to a predictive health system carries significant warnings:

Authoritarian Risks: Such systems could become an "authoritarian’s dream," leading to violations of privacy, loss of agency, and genetic discrimination.
Insurance Misalignment: Current financial incentives in places like the U.S. discourage preventive investment because patients switch insurers frequently.
Digital Twins: While "digital twins" (virtual models of individuals) allow for testing treatments safely, they also raise concerns about how such intimate data might be abused.
The Inevitability of Mistakes: Historical debacles, like the 1999 Gelsinger gene therapy death, serve as reminders that rushing forward without adequate safeguards can cost lives and stall progress.

Chapter 3: Hackriculture

The Radical Nature of Farming

Agriculture is fundamentally a form of radical biotechnology that has existed for over 10,000 years. Domesticated plants are not "natural" in the sense of evolving separately from human manipulation, as evidenced by the transformation of wild Balsas teosinte grass into modern corn. This selective breeding process, conducted over millennia, resulted in thousands of genetic differences that created a plant ten times larger with fifty times more kernels than its wild ancestor. Today, 88 percent of corn in the United States is genetically modified (GMO), often by inserting genes from soil bacteria like Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) to provide insect resistance. This specific modification has led to a 90 percent reduction in pesticide use by American farmers. Other modifications allow crops to tolerate potent herbicides like glyphosate, which increases productivity by killing weeds without harming the crop itself.

The Green Revolution and Industrialization

The twentieth century saw a transition from labor-intensive farms to specialized, mechanized industrial agriculture. This shift, characterized by the use of synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and high-yield crop varieties, nearly tripled agricultural productivity. Norman Borlaug and his colleagues pioneered the Green Revolution by crossbreeding wheat varieties to create short, stocky, high-yield wheat that could be grown twice a year. These innovations were exported globally, helping countries like India become self-sufficient in cereal production within a decade. In Asia, cereal production doubled between the 1970s and 1990s, and yields more than tripled in East Asia, massively reducing poverty and malnutrition.

The Looming Crisis of Scale

Current industrial agricultural practices are hitting environmental limits that threaten future sustainability. Agriculture and the land use required to support it account for approximately 25 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. Synthetic fertilizers, produced via the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch method, consume 2 percent of the global energy supply and contribute 1.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Half of all arable land on Earth is already allocated to agriculture, and meeting future food demands by 2050 could require an additional 2.5 billion acres if current practices remain unchanged. Climate change is also erasing productivity gains, with sub-Saharan Africa expected to see crop yields decline by 17 percent by 2050.

Molecular Agriculture and Targeted Breeding

The era of molecular agriculture utilizes genome sequencing and AI to supercharge traditional crossbreeding through marker-assisted breeding. This process allows breeders to scan the sequenced genomes of seeds to identify desired genetic patterns, shortening breeding cycles from decades to just a few years. For instance, a rice variety able to survive being submerged underwater for two weeks was developed in less than three years using this method. The C4 Rice Project is an even more ambitious effort attempting to turn C3 crops like rice and wheat into C4 plants, which could increase photosynthetic efficiency by 50 percent and double water use efficiency. Additionally, Chinese scientists have found that adding a copy of the OsDREB1C gene to rice can boost yields by over two-thirds in some test fields while shortening growth duration.

Biofortification and Disease Resistance

Genome editing can address systemic dietary deficiencies, such as vitamin A deficiency, which causes hundreds of thousands of child deaths and blindness annually. Golden Rice was engineered to produce beta-carotene by inserting genes from daffodils into rice, providing a full daily vitamin A dose in just one cup. Beyond nutrition, biotechnology can save industries from extinction, as seen with the Hawaiian papaya. Scientists successfully engineered the papaya to produce a viral protein coat that prevents the papaya ringspot virus from docking on and infecting the plant. Similar efforts are underway to protect citrus trees from huanglongbing (HLB) disease and cacao plants from climate-induced water shortages and pests.

Engineering the Plant Microbiome

A new frontier of precision agriculture focuses on the complex ecosystem of microbes living within and around plants. Shotgun sequencing allows scientists to analyze the genetic identities of millions of soil microorganisms to understand their role in plant health. This knowledge enables "top-down" approaches, where microbial communities are stressed to find survivors that can help crops withstand heat or drought. "Bottom-up" strategies involve creating synthetic microbial communities (SynComs) or biofertilizers that can reduce dependence on chemical fertilizers. Some soil bacteria have been engineered to help cereal crops fix nitrogen like legumes, which could significantly decrease carbon emissions associated with fertilizer use.

Public Perception and Regulatory Warning

A significant gap exists between scientific consensus and public perception regarding GMO safety. While comprehensive reviews by organizations like the World Health Organization and the US National Academies have found no evidence that transgenic crops are less safe than conventional ones, only 27 percent of US adults believe they are safe to eat. Public rejection, particularly in Europe, has led to stringent regulations that prioritize the process of modification over the safety of the outcome. This has had global repercussions, discouraging developing nations from adopting beneficial technologies like Golden Rice due to export concerns. In contrast, China is moving toward large-scale GMO adoption to feed its 1.4 billion people and dominate global innovation high grounds.

Chapter 4: Newnimals

The Legacy of Domestication

Domesticated cattle were first bred in the Fertile Crescent over ten thousand years ago, and this process fundamentally changed both the animals and the human species. These animals provided the muscle to till fields, served as currency for trade, and acted as a calorie bank that enabled humans to transition from nomadic lifestyles to permanent settlements. This shift sparked the specialization of work, the growth of cities, and the acceleration of technological change that defines modern human history. It is a profound irony that modern technologies, such as the iPhone, would likely not exist without the ancient foundation provided by domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens.

The Industrialization of Animal Agriculture

During the twentieth century, animal agriculture shifted from traditional "Old McDonald" farms to specialized, mechanized industrial systems. While 41 percent of the American workforce was employed in agriculture in 1900, today that number is a mere 1.7 percent due to massive increases in productivity fueled by mechanization and synthetic inputs. Intensive "factory farming" seeks to maximize output while minimizing costs, often by confining animals to small spaces and accelerating their growth. This industrial model now accounts for approximately 70 percent of all meat consumed globally.

The Ecological and Biological Cost

The human species currently slaughters roughly 73 billion land animals annually, a number that is rising rapidly as developing nations grow wealthier. While meat consumption provided the energy necessary for the evolution of the large human brain, the scale of current production is devastating biodiversity. Today, wild animals make up only 4 percent of the world’s mammalian biomass, while humans and their livestock account for the remaining 96 percent. Furthermore, animal agriculture utilizes nearly 40 percent of all habitable land and a fifth of the world’s freshwater, making it a primary driver of deforestation and desertification.

Warnings of Antibiotic Resistance and Pandemics

One of the most dangerous aspects of industrial farming is the massive reliance on antibiotics to prevent disease in crowded conditions and to promote faster growth. Approximately two-thirds of all antibiotics sold in the United States are administered to livestock, a practice that supercharges the evolution of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs". The World Health Organization predicts that antibiotic resistance could lead to 10 million additional human deaths per year by 2050. Additionally, the constant encroachment of agriculture into wild spaces increases the risk of zoonotic viral spillovers, which could trigger future global pandemics.

The Plunder of the Oceans

Industrial fishing has quadrupled the mass extracted from the sea since 1960, pushing over a third of global fish stocks beyond sustainable limits. Destructive practices like bottom trawling release a billion metric tons of stored carbon from marine sediments every year—a climate footprint similar to the entire global aviation industry. A significant insight into ocean health is the role of whales as biological engineers; their waste provides the iron necessary for microalgae to thrive, which in turn feeds the krill that support the entire marine food chain and sequester carbon. Protecting 30 percent of the oceans as nature preserves could safeguard endangered species while actually increasing global fishing yields.

Genetic Engineering as a Solution

As universal vegetarianism remains an unlikely near-term prospect, the tools of the genetics revolution are being used to make animal farming more efficient and less destructive.

Salmon: The AquaAdvantage salmon, the first genetically engineered animal approved for consumption, grows twice as fast as traditional salmon while requiring 20 percent less feed.
Pigs: Researchers have engineered pigs to have larger muscles, less body fat, and even "brown fat" to survive colder climates. Scientists are also creating pigs resistant to devastating viruses like African swine fever by knocking out specific cell receptors.
Cattle: The "Cosmo" bull was engineered to increase the likelihood of male offspring, who are 15 percent more efficient at converting feed to meat. Other cattle, such as the PRLR-SLICK variety, are edited to have short hair and slick skin, allowing them to thrive on a warming planet.

Xenotransplantation and Practical Applications

Beyond food, animal biotechnology offers a life-saving solution to the human organ transplant shortage through xenotransplantation. Pig genomes are being edited to remove sugars that trigger human immune rejection and to deactivate internal viruses. In recent experimental trials, modified pig kidneys and hearts have been successfully transplanted into human patients, functioning for weeks or even months. Future possibilities include "blastocyst complementation," where human organs might be grown inside animals like pigs or sheep using a patient's own induced stem cells.

The Moral and Technical Dilemma

The decision to hack animal genetics is like the nursery rhyme of the old lady who swallowed a fly; each intervention is a response to a previous human-created problem. While these "Newnimals" offer significant economic and environmental benefits, they represent a radical transformation of nature that carries the risk of unforeseen genetic impairments. Ultimately, the challenge for the species is not whether to use these godlike powers, but how to do so wisely in a world that is already defined by human technology.

Chapter 5: Nonimals

The Cruelty of Nature and Human Dominance

Nature is essentially a state of war, defined by a constant cycle of killing or being killed, from insects on a leaf to the microscopic battles of viruses and bacteria. Human dominance over this food chain has made the world more livable for our species than at any other time in history, yet this very dominance is now becoming an existential vulnerability. Our industrial-scale capabilities allowed us to quadruple our population in a century, but extending current agricultural practices to support a projected 10.4 billion humans will drive catastrophic climate change, deforestation, and mass extinctions. Because we are unlikely to adopt universal vegetarianism, we require "Goldilocks solutions" that provide the animal products we desire without the destructive side effects of industrial farming.

The Industrialization of the Hamburger

The history of the hamburger traces back to Turkic Tatars and German immigrants, but it was fully transformed by the Industrial Revolution's drive for efficiency. Fast-food chains like McDonald’s capitalized on assembly-line manufacturing and factory farming to sell billions of burgers annually. However, this model treats animals as industrial outputs rather than sentient beings, leading to extreme cruelty, such as chickens crammed into cages the size of a sheet of paper and pigs immobilized in narrow crates.

Plant-Based Miracles and Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology offers a way to re-create the meat experience without the cow. Using high-level science derived from human health research, companies have developed plant-based meats that replicate the sensory experience of beef.

The Role of Heme: The most critical ingredient in the Impossible Burger is heme, a molecule that carries oxygen in animals and gives meat its red color and metallic taste. Scientists identified a plant version, leghemoglobin, in soybean roots and engineered the genetic instructions for it into yeast cells to produce it at scale via fermentation.
Replicating Scent and Texture: To mimic the smell of cooking beef, researchers used gas chromatography mass spectrometry to identify individual flavor compounds and then replicated them with plant-derived ingredients.
Environmental Benefits: This approach uses 75 percent less water, generates 87 percent less greenhouse gases, and requires 95 percent less land than traditional beef production.
Health and Consumer Warnings: While these products eliminate antibiotics and hormones, they are often highly processed, contain high levels of salt, and currently offer less protein complexity than traditional meat.

Cultivated Meat: Growing Tissue Without the Animal

The "holy grail" of meat substitution is cultivated meat, which is real animal tissue grown from stem cells rather than in a living creature.

Stem Cell Technology: Innovators in this field often come from regenerative medicine, applying the same techniques used to grow human blood vessels or organs. The process involves taking a small biopsy from a living animal, isolating myosatellite stem cells, and inducing them to differentiate into muscle fibers.
Cost Reductions: The first lab-grown burger in 2013 cost approximately $325,000 to produce; by 2022, the price of a cultivated patty had dropped to around $10.
Non-Obvious Applications: Beyond beef, companies are growing cultivated chicken, tuna, shrimp, and even "exotic" products like woolly mammoth meatballs or high-end Wagyu beef and sturgeon caviar.

Technical Hurdles: Bioreactors and the Serum Problem

Taking cultivated meat to global scale requires overcoming significant biological and economic obstacles.

The Serum Conflict: Traditionally, these cells were grown using fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is extracted from the blood of cow fetuses. Relying on a product of the slaughterhouse industry undermines the ethical and economic viability of cultivated meat.
Synthetic Alternatives: Companies are now developing animal-free growth media using algae-based proteins, tobacco plants, or synthetic RNA to provide instructions for cell growth.
Bioreactor Limitations: Cells in large industrial bioreactors can "drown" in their own waste, requiring new designs that mimic the waste-flushing capacity of an animal’s circulatory system.

The Reimagined Cattle Farm

The rise of cultivated meat does not necessarily mean the end of cattle farming, but rather its radical transformation.

Farmers as Biopsy Providers: In a future bioeconomy, farmers could maintain small, healthy, free-roaming herds to provide the stem cell cultures needed for bioreactors.
Economic Incentives: Cattle breeders could be incentivized to focus on animal well-being and genetic diversity, retaining a fractional "copyright" on the products grown from their animals’ cells.
The Slaughter Math: If the cultivated meat dream is fully realized, a tiny number of cattle—potentially as few as 2,800—could provide enough stem cells to meet the world’s projected meat needs for 2050.

Ecological and Planetary Gains

Shifting away from industrial animal agriculture through a mix of plant-based and cultivated products offers transformative environmental benefits.

Land Use: Reducing global cattle populations by half would free up approximately 2 billion acres of agricultural land—an area larger than the Amazon rainforest—for rewilding and reforestation.
Water Conservation: A 50 percent reduction in global cattle could conserve 1.5 trillion cubic meters of water, roughly equivalent to the volume of Lake Ontario.
Climate Impact: Because cattle farming is responsible for nearly 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, this shift could cut those emissions in half and significantly reduce the threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The Rewilding Tipping Point: Reducing grazing livestock by just 20 percent could cut global deforestation by half by 2050.

Warnings of the Hype Cycle

While the potential is astronomical, progress is not linear. Plant-based meat sales have fluctuated due to consumer perceptions of it being "fake" or "overly processed," and cultivated meat still faces massive challenges in reaching price parity with traditional meat. Successful adoption will require these products to be demonstrably better, cheaper, and safer than their traditional counterparts. Failing to manage this transition could lead to "winters of discontent" where valuable time and potential are lost.

Chapter 6: It’s the Bioeconomy, Stupid

The Paradox of Industrialization

While modern societies often bemoan the unintended consequences of industrialization, few people would choose to live without its immense benefits. A return to a pre-industrial lifestyle for eight billion humans would be catastrophic, as feeding such a population through hunting and foraging would decimate remaining wild spaces and forests, leading to massive climate change and resource wars. The Industrial Revolution, which began in 18th-century Britain, was powered by inventions like the steam engine and new processes for mass production. This transition propelled the world into a period of historically unprecedented economic growth, improved healthcare, and rising living standards. However, these triumphs came at the cost of brutal exploitation, colonial oppression, and a rate of greenhouse gas emissions that now threatens to make the planet uninhabitable. The challenge is not to slow industrialization but to speed it up while making it more sustainable and capable of serving 10 billion people.

Fossil Fuels as Transformed Life

Fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas are essentially ancient biological remains—plants, algae, and plankton—that were pressurized and heated over millions of years into hydrocarbons. Humans have used these resources for millennia, but the invention of the steam engine and refined crude oil brought their use to a planetary scale. Between 1800 and today, fossil fuel consumption grew from nearly nothing to over 140,000 terawatt-hours, providing the energy that ended much of human slavery and drove global productivity. Unfortunately, burning these fuels for energy accounts for approximately 91 percent of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. While the Earth has survived extreme temperature shifts in its 4.5-billion-year history, current rapid warming threatens the specific conditions to which humans and existing species have evolved.

The Rise of Next-Generation Biofuels

Biofuels offer one path away from fossil fuel reliance, though early efforts like corn-based ethanol struggled due to fluctuating oil prices and competition with food supplies. A new era of molecular biofuels is emerging, utilizing the tools of the genetics and biotechnology revolutions to turn microorganisms into microbial fuel factories. Researchers are engineering E. coli bacteria to synthesize ethanol and manipulating yeast to produce hydrogen without generating carbon dioxide as a byproduct. New enzymes, such as CelA, help break down non-edible plant biomass into simple sugars that can be fermented into fuel. The aviation industry is a major driver of this change; for instance, the European Commission proposed that 60 percent of jet fuel be sustainably sourced by 2050.

Reimagining Plastics through Biotechnology

The modern plastics industry began in 1907 with Bakelite, a petroleum byproduct marketed as a savior of nature because it replaced ivory in products like billiard balls. Today, we produce 400 million tons of plastic annually, a figure expected to double by 2050. Only 10 percent of plastic waste is recycled, while the rest pollutes landfills and oceans, breaking down into microplastics that impair the reproductive and cognitive functions of aquatic life. Bioplastics derived from renewable sources like seaweed or wood cellulose offer a solution. Startup companies are now using the massive "seaweed blobs" in the Gulf of Mexico as feedstock to create plastics that can biodegrade in water in as little as five hours. Scientists have even engineered soil bacteria to break down lignin, a discarded plant polymer, into hydrocarbons for bioplastics.

Living Building Materials

Cement and concrete are the most used building materials in the world, but their production is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 10 percent of industrial water use. Biocement offers a low-heat alternative by utilizing bacteria that produce calcium-rich mineral deposits to "glue" sand together into hard bricks at room temperature. This technology can create self-healing concrete that repairs its own cracks when activated by moisture and CO2. Practical applications are already being explored by the US military to stabilize loose soil for runways in days rather than weeks. In the future, humans may grow structures using scaffolds of coral-like material hardened by engineered microbes.

Spider Silk and High-Performance Biomaterials

Spider silk is considered the strongest biological polymer on Earth, being three times stronger than Kevlar and capable of stretching 500 percent. Because spiders are cannibalistic and difficult to farm, scientists are inserting spider genes into E. coli, silkworms, and even goat mammary glands to produce silk proteins. This "nature co-design" allows for the creation of bulletproof vests, parachutes, and optical fibers. In medicine, spider silk is being explored for bone regeneration scaffolds and as a medium for the slow release of antibiotics inside the human body.

DNA Data Storage and the Silicon Limit

Global data creation is growing four times faster than the world economy, reaching an estimated 120 trillion gigabytes in 2023. Storing this data in traditional silicon centers uses massive amounts of energy and water, and the world is facing a projected shortage of wafer-grade silicon. DNA data storage is a million times denser than silicon and can last for millions of years. A refrigerator-sized box of DNA could conceivably store all the world’s current data. Researchers have already successfully encoded films and computer operating systems into DNA and retrieved them using AI algorithms. Beyond storage, biocomputing is emerging, with brain cells in silicon chips learning to play games like Pong, hinting at a future of energy-efficient biological processors.

Building a Circular Bioeconomy

The traditional industrial model is linear: digging resources up, using them, and discarding them. A circular bioeconomy uses sustainably sourced biological materials—such as waste and cultivated cells—to grow food, textiles, and energy while minimizing extraction from nature. Estimates suggest the global bioeconomy could be worth over $11 trillion by 2030, with up to 60 percent of physical inputs to the global economy potentially produced biologically. Leading nations, including China and the United States, have issued high-level strategies to dominate this sector, viewing it as a multi-trillion-dollar general-purpose sector that will transform health, agriculture, and national security.

Chapter 7: What Could Go Wrong?

The Optical Metaphor of Scale

Understanding the risks of human-engineered biology requires a perspective that shifts between the molecular and the universal. At the smallest scale, a virus like SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA strand of 30,000 genetic bases primed to hijack human cells. Zooming out reveals the virus’s origins—likely in horseshoe bats—and its initial jump to humans, which may have occurred in the wild, in an animal market, or through a research-related accident in a city like Wuhan. Further perspective shows the political structures that allowed the virus to spread: cultures of secrecy that prevented enforcement of wildlife trade bans and incentivized scientists to take risks for national competitiveness. At the broadest scale, we see a world of eight billion humans increasingly undefended against rapidly advancing and democratizing scientific knowledge.

The ultimate threat is not a single virus but a mismatch between global problems and our fragmented ability to address them. While humans can build a better world by getting many things right, they could destroy it by getting only a few major things wrong.

Synthetic Biology and the Lab Origin Risk

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the danger of science itself potentially causing a global crisis. While natural spillovers from animals to humans have a long history, such as the plague of Justinian or the 1918 Spanish flu, the modern era adds a new variable: the virology laboratory.

Historically, research-related incidents have caused numerous outbreaks:

1977: A virulent flu outbreak in China, killing 700,000 people, was eventually traced to a flawed vaccine trial.
1978: A photographer in the UK died from smallpox after accidental exposure in a medical school lab.
2004: The SARS-1 virus escaped from the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing twice.
2019: A vaccine factory in Lanzhou, China, accidentally aerosolized Brucella bacteria, infecting over 10,000 people.

The specific case of SARS-CoV-2 points to a "gin joint" coincidence: the outbreak occurred in a city with the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses, where scientists were actively proposing to engineer SARS-like viruses by inserting novel furin cleavage sites to see if they could better infect human cells.

Proliferation and Safety of Global Laboratories

Efforts to democratize health capacity have led to a rapid proliferation of high-containment laboratories. As of March 2023, there are 69 Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) labs in 27 countries, and thousands of BSL-3 labs handling dangerous pathogens. However, only a quarter of BSL-4 labs rank highly on biosafety and biosecurity standards.

The democratization of capability means more people have the tools to engineer viruses. It is estimated that 30,000 people currently have the capacity to genome-edit a virus, a number that will grow as tools like AI scientific "copilots" become ubiquitous.

AI and the Dual-Use Dilemma

The tools making wonderful biological advances possible are the same tools that can be used for destruction—a "wicked problem" where the same technology has both beneficial and malicious applications.

Toxin Design: In 2022, Swiss researchers used a drug-discovery AI to design molecules similar to the VX nerve agent; in six hours, the system produced 40,000 options, including many previously unknown plausible toxins.
Protein Engineering: New AI models can propose novel protein designs for gene therapy, but they could also be asked to design undetectable bioweapons.

Reconstituting Extinct and Chimeric Viruses

The step from reading a genetic file to creating a living virus is shrinking. Researchers have already successfully:

Assembled the polio virus from DNA fragments (2002).
Re-created the 1918 Spanish flu virus from its sequence (2005).
Synthesized the horsepox virus (a close relative of smallpox) in six months for 100,000 dollars using mail-order DNA.

Beyond reconstitution, "chimeric viruses" can be built like Legos, combining the replication of one virus with the stability of another. Scientists have already demonstrated that "serial passage"—passing a virus through generations of an animal (like ferrets)—can force a bird flu virus to evolve the ability to spread through the air between mammals.

The Risks of Gene Drives

Gene drives allow humans to "cook the books of genetic inheritance". By using CRISPR to ensure a specific trait is passed to 100% of offspring, scientists can rapidly alter or even crash a population.

Malaria Eradication: Engineering Anopheles mosquitoes to be sterile could save millions of lives.
Ecological Warnings: Previous attempts to introduce species for pest control (like the cane toad in Australia or mongooses in Hawaii) often led to unforeseen ecosystem collapses.

Unleashing a self-replicating gene drive into the wild is potentially irreversible. A drive released in one locality could easily spread globally via trade routes, and there is currently no global framework for obtaining consent from the entire human population for such a systemic intervention.

Heritable Human Genome Editing

The birth of the first CRISPR babies in China was an immoral experiment, but heritable editing will eventually be sought for legitimate reasons. Parents carrying deadly mutations—such as those for cystic fibrosis or SLC2A10 artery disease—argue that it is hard to reconcile philosophical objections with the real suffering of a child.

However, the "slippery slope" is a major concern:

Enhancement vs. Therapy: The line between a genetic cure and an enhancement (like helping red blood cells carry more oxygen) is often transparent.
Eugenics and Nazi History: Human engineering has a dark past. Early 20th-century eugenics in Britain and the US led to sterilization laws, which Nazi ideologues later used as justification for industrial-scale murder.
Loss of Diversity: Random mutation is an essential feature of survival. Genetic patterns seen as disabilities today could be the keys to survival in a future environment, such as living in space.

The Mismatch in Timeframes

There is a profound mismatch between the speed of scientific progress and our ability to assess its safety.

The 175-Year Window: To know if a technology like In Vitro Gametogenesis (IVG)—creating eggs from stem cells—is safe for humans, researchers would need to track three full generations of offspring to observe long-term stability.

Because the complexity of our biology remains constant while our tools advance exponentially, we are racing toward a future we cannot fully predict or control without a radical upgrade in how we manage our collective power.

Chapter 8: Castles in the Air

The Challenge of Imagining the Future

Building "castles in the air"—visions of a better future—is essential, but these visions must be supported by practical foundations to prevent technological triumphs from leading to disaster. Human progress is what makes various futures possible, yet only cherished values can ensure that powerful technologies like genetics and AI are applied toward positive ends. To illustrate the difficulty of this task, one might imagine an eighteenth-century farmer being told that the steam engine would eventually lead to the International Space Station or generative AI; for most, the technology would only be seen as a way to plow a field slightly faster. Similarly, the current revolution in human-engineered intelligence and biology is a quantum leap that will change every aspect of life, yet many people view these tools through a narrow lens. Without proactive planning, society remains dangerously reactive, increasing the odds of synthetic biology-induced pandemics or ecosystem collapses.

Lessons from Scientific Self-Regulation

The 1975 Asilomar conference serves as a primary model for scientific self-regulation. At that time, 140 experts gathered to establish rules for recombinant DNA before any practical applications like GMOs or gene therapies even existed. While Asilomar was successful in creating a culture of transparency and preventing early accidents, it was also a failure because it did not sufficiently engage the general public. This lack of inclusive dialogue allowed anti-GMO campaigns to later seize the narrative, hindering potentially beneficial technologies. In 2015, a similar meeting in Napa Valley addressed human genome editing, calling for broad societal discussion, but the subsequent birth of the "CRISPR babies" in China in 2018 proved that science was still outpacing global guardrails.

The Mismatch in Global Governance

A fundamental "mismatch" exists between the exponential advancement of technology and the linear, glacial pace of governance. The current international order, rooted in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, is based on the sovereignty of individual nation-states, which are programmed to prioritize narrow national interests over the collective good of the species. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the World Health Organization (WHO) was unable to enforce transparency or coordinate a truly global response because it is controlled and underfunded by states. Similarly, climate change agreements have shifted from binding targets to voluntary, lowest-common-denominator plans that are insufficient to solve the core problem.

The AI Moratorium and the Arms Race

In early 2023, tech leaders called for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing profound risks to civilization. However, the hyper-competitive nature of the modern world makes such a moratorium nearly impossible to realize. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta are locked in a race for market dominance, while nations like the United States and China view AI as a critical component of national power. If a country unilaterally stops developing AI-powered autonomous weapons, it faces the risk of military defeat by an adversary that chooses to press forward. This creates a "wicked problem" where the tools needed for survival (like AI or biotech) are the same tools that could facilitate a global catastrophe.

A New Framework: The Pyramid of a Safer Future

To navigate these risks, a new global operating system must be built layer by layer.

Individual Knowledge and Rights: The foundation starts with empowered individuals who educate themselves and demand accountability from leaders.
Public Education and Engagement: Meaningful, multidirectional dialogue is required to build trust and legitimacy in scientific progress.
Values Articulation: Society must explicitly value biological and human diversity as a prerequisite for resilience.
National and Broad-Scale Governance: Countries should appoint coordinators for common global challenges to mirror international efforts and prevent "governance black holes".
World Order Upgrade: The concept of "international" relations must evolve into "interdependent" relations, recognizing that the fate of every person is tied to the health of the planet.

Visions of Hope and Dystopian Warnings

The potential outcomes of these technologies are starkly divided:

The Positive Vision: Includes a shift to predictive healthcare that stops diseases before they start, gene drives that safely eradicate malaria, and the reforestation of massive tracts of land thanks to cell-cultivated meat and sustainable agriculture.
The Dystopian Vision: Includes dehumanized healthcare, the use of genetic technologies for discriminatory eugenics, the weaponization of synthetic pathogens, and an AI-driven arms race that eventually outcomputes and replaces humanity.

The Mismatch of Time and Knowledge

A non-obvious point regarding safety is the discrepancy between technological speed and biological assessment. For instance, to truly know if in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) is safe for humans, researchers would ideally need to track the outcomes across three full generations, a process that could take 175 years. We currently have the power to make systemic changes to the human genome and global ecosystems, but we lack the time or the complete understanding to predict the long-term consequences of those changes.

Practical Applications and Institutional Reform

Solving these issues requires a "Global Interdependence Summit" to articulate principles that can guide a global systems upgrade. A new international body, operating with depoliticized autonomy, should be established to coordinate national responses to existential threats, grade countries on their levels of preparedness, and ensure that life-saving biotechnologies are shared equitably. The ultimate goal is to move from a world of disparate, roving nomads to a global species with a consciousness and politics that match our godlike creative and destructive powers.