Technology Type / Material Base
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Technology Type / Material Base |
Terragen technology can be broadly and generally divided into four primary types, depending on the material basis or building blocks that it uses. These are:
Although a given terragen technology may be primarily non-biotic, organic, or informational, it is not possible to divide tech into pure types or categories based on material base. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, each category merges into the next: utility fog for example is intermediate between hylo and info tech; and many forms of nano and cybernetic technology may equally be considered inanimate/inorganic and alive/organic.
And secondly, because the same technology can incorporate both inorganic and organic components, relying and depending equally on each. Not only cyborgs but even many hyperturings and archailects like this, using bionano nodes and living moon and jupiter brains of near-infinite complexity
Ultimately technology converges in a single omega, and even nootech and apotheonics depends on the culmination of info-, bio-, sy-, and dry-tech.
Some philosophers even add a further category, psitech, based on the interaction between subjectivity/consciousness and the other forms of tech, as well as siddhi amplification via picotech, femtotech and hypofemtotech processes. The impossibility of reproducing these phenomena in a way that can be measured and falsified leads some to reject them; they belong more properly among the esoterics. Likewise, memetics has been called idea-engineering, and it has been plausibly argued that it is also a technology that manipulates nature (in this case the collectivity of ideas). More critical philosophers point out that it is difficult to justify memetics as a whole as technology as such, except in a poetic sense, e.g. "the technology of persuasion". Often memetics is something that is itself alive in the world of ideas, although memetic engineering can plausibly be considered a branch of technology, probably of infotech rather than a new category.
However one defines technology, no-one can deny that it is the terragen expertise in this area that has given our civilization mastery of the galaxy. Some kalyptics claim that there are even dramatically more advanced technological civilizations beyond the periphery, but if so they have yet to be discovered, even by the Argus Array. Those rare ultratech xenosophont civilizations that are known, such as the Meistersingers, are different from terragens in technology, but (apparently) no more superior. And even the most astonishing clarketech alien artifacts are no more spectacular than the clarketechs created by terragen archai.
drytech - technology based on inanimate matter and mechanistic principles
biotech - based on or modification of organic processes
sytech - tech that uses both organic and inanimate principles
infotech - software, virtuality and information tech
spacetime engineering - exotic matter, artificial wormholes, and so on
