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Technology based on inorganic and/or inanimate materials
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Hylotech - "earth" or "matter" technology - means working with inanimate materials (whether organic or inorganic). This includes wood, stone, ceramics, bronze, iron, and steel, plastics and composites. In the case of more advanced hylotech drexlerian assemblers are used. These give tremndous power and precision, but lack the reliability and innate novelty of biotech assemblers.
Technological stages
The following table is intended as an approximate and tentative framework for the various grades of technological advancement in hylo-tech, from non-technological races and species to femtotech. (read from bottom to top)
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Technological level
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Developments
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Plancktech entities - building material irrelevant
planck scale - unified field, hyperspace and T.O.E.
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Femtotech entities - quantum scale - working with subatomic probability
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Picotech entities - atomic precision manipulators used at sub-atomic / quantum scale
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Hylo-nanotech (Mechanical)
Drexlerian assemblers - atomic precision, at first low reliability, but this improved to medium as the technology was developed (nevertheless many societies still use earlier or more primitive low-reliability assemvblers) - low novelty except in the case of self-evolving nanotech AIs
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Silicon technology
Solid-state printed circutry (moderately reliable but only limited capacity, very expensive infrastructure) - also Quantum Computing - incredibly powerful but quite fragile due to easily destabilised quantum states.
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Industrial revolution, Heavy Industries, brute machinery - very robust, very simple, absolutley no novelty - "dumb" technology
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the wheel, masonry, pre-industrialised metallurgy, keystone arch,
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Stone and wood, pottery
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some use of natural surroundings - (ant and termite colonies, beaver dams, etc)
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