Biotech

Like Drytech, Sytech, and Infotech, Biotech is one of the main pillars on which galactic technological civilization rests.

Biotech includes everything from simple agriculture and domestication through genetics and organ transplants to DIY gengineering, neogenics, biospherics, mature bionanotechnology and beyond. .

Historically (in terms of Old Earth civilization), drytech ushered in the industrial age, infotech led to the dramatic transformation from industrial society to an information society, and biotech led the transition away from information to biology by enabling not only true nanotech (originally and often still biologically based) but also the development of a self-sustaining interplanetary civilization not dependent on Earth. More subtly, biotech changed humanity's relationship with nature: instead of seeing nature and technology as opposite ends, they become a single field, and humans were no longer intruders (industrial and atomic age) or stewards (information age) of nature, but active evolutionary participants inventing new possibilities for the terragen ecosystem, and disseminating life and habitats through the universe.

Biotech is as creative as life itself. In the eight and a half millennia since the first crude attempts at gene-splicing on Old Earth, literally trillions of species of bioengineered organisms have been created, or have evolved from gengineered neogens. These range from the eternally young and cute Metaneko kitten to supercomputing bacteria to lickersucker domestic cleaners and grukovores acting as ecological maintenance machines. To say nothing of the billions of species of organisms designed or geneered simply for the sake of bringing a new species into the galaxy.

Biotech Scale

The following table presents a simplistic compilation of biotech at various scales
(read from bottom to top)