Slashdot recently carried the story of how scientists are getting very close to creating artificial life forms. Panic and cite bad science fiction movies if you want to, but I see where an opportunity could be had, here.

If you think intellectual property is a hassle, wait until you see patented life forms coming to a farm near you! The next Bill Gates just might be somebody who makes a fortune in creating new and useful life forms.

Something that eats CO2, for starters. There, we solved global warming. Can everybody relax, now? In fact, create stuff that will biodegrade all of our garbage and waste and turn it loose. I’m tired of the panic attacks over plastic bags and industrial chemicals and nuclear waste and oil spills. Make something that eats it all and be done with it.

How about replacing some of the technology we use now with a living creature that could do a better job? Years of maneuvering the streets have shown me that humans can’t handle driving, period. And horses, mules, camels, and whatnot are too slow, too smelly, and unreliable. but a living car, or a car piloted by something alive, could solve it all. I’m prepared to look forward to a car with a biological brain before we get to a car with artificial intelligence. We can’t figure out what natural intelligence means yet, let alone approach AI. And after we get that far, let it grow wings…

Microtechnology? See, we keep shrinking the microchip smaller and smaller. We’re getting down to atoms, anyway. Why not make some living transistor substitute and have it help out with the design? Protein computing – after all, we already refer to “neural nets”.

But perhaps we should look forward to more down-to-Earth innovations first. A chicken with four drumsticks, stuff like that. Replace cell phones with enhanced parrots? They couldn’t be any more irritating than what we have already. Plus, you’d never lose it again, because it’s trained to follow you. Make the bird autistic so it would remember everything you say and you could keep your data on it. Now to make a call, you tell it everything you want to say and who it should repeat it to, then send it off and wait for the response…

And while we’re at it – a natural predator for all of our pests and vermin! Half of the reason we have such a huge problem with mosquitoes is that almost nothing eats them. make something whose chief diet is mosquitoes and turn it loose. If humans can hunt an animal into extinction, I’m sure some critter we invent can do likewise for mosquitoes, and while we’re at it, cockroaches, fleas, ticks, and rats.

Wild thinking, you say? But chances are looking good that we’ll have to start thinking about these things within our lifetimes. Look how information technology changed our culture; we had to deal with a whole new category of factors that we didn’t have just twenty years ago. Are we going to wait until we’re up to our ears in tribbles before we start figuring out how to manage our bio-engineering capacities as well?

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