It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction

Editors’ note: This is part of the Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 50 or even 200 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The Opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

In the past two decades, the explosion of unregulated biotechnological advances saved our planet from crossing a climate crisis threshold that would have destroyed human civilization, yet our triumph is overshadowed by a new threat. We are currently in danger of being destroyed by the very organisms — micro and macro — that saved us from extinction via pollution, carbon emissions and superviruses.

Although contractors and rogue biologists did the initial work, the formal application of biotechnology to the climate crisis began in 2048 with the Tardigrade Diaspora and the microbial inventions that followed. This conscious effort to direct the power of biotechnology was enabled not only by the global creation of carbon- and plastic-devouring organisms but, also — to borrow a word from the realm of horticulture — “cultivars” that reduced the probable extinction rates among wild animals and fast-grew even slow-growers like live oaks.

But biotech would not have been enough without a corresponding deep understanding of ecosystems. This understanding occurred in large measure because we finally took indigenous knowledge systems seriously and used land reparations to let firsthand experts turn that knowledge into actual policy, without interference. This was a positive step forward, even though it required a massive realignment of social and political axes and could not stop millions of deaths due to scarcity of food and drinking water in the interim.

But in the years that followed, we ignored the dangers of what we created, in part because, in the early days of biotechnology, ethical concerns about our right to manipulate complex organisms were given short shrift. We did not consider whether these organisms might have an opinion about the poor quality of their lives — that they might have a point of view. Whether we were affixing an ear to a mouse or growing miniature chimp brains in ostrich bodies and then shoving those brains into dinosaurs, we did not want to think overmuch about the individual animals we were experimenting on — or even the more robust creations that came after those first and second generations. By not thinking carefully about the consequences, we abandoned any moral high ground and created a situation in which we may soon be unsure that we control our own minds — as individuals or in aggregate as human beings on this fragile globe.

For example, it is a startling miracle to have saved so many avian species, but, given how we accomplished it, can we still call a bluebird a bluebird, or is a bluebird a bioengineered surveillance camera drone, given that we can hack into cultivar brains? We think of tinkered bluebirds and other creatures as a limited conduit we may use to spy upon others or even command to fly into a wall at a whim, but there exists compelling evidence that our biotech is not just ubiquitous, but also multidirectional — and that it is manipulating us and experimenting on us. The panicked and haphazard conditions under which we engineered such creatures has given them a form of autonomy that we do not yet fully understand.

This goes well beyond the demonstrated fact that tinkered bluebirds have trained humans to bring them into their houses and mesmerized them to cater to their every dietary need. How many reports have we read in recent years about people who have woken up far from their homes, disoriented and naked in a ditch, surrounded by similarly-disoriented strangers? Or who find themselves flailing, half-drowning, in the middle of a lake, covered in algae? Or been found in mid-flap or mid-frap balanced upon a thick wall, incubating the egg of some unknown bird? It is possible that the majority of humans have experienced something similar, a kind of possession in which their bodies have been taken over and used to set the stage for some sort of rebellion.

The normalization of biotech creation among ordinary citizens by way of Surinam Toad “pets,” which began in 2035, may have accelerated this rebellion — it may even have been ground zero for its genesis. The holes in the toad’s back that allowed easy incubation of dozens of creatures at once may have simply allowed bioengineered organisms to be in close contact with one another during the spawning process. By the time they were separated and sent forth to perform their anointed tasks, what plots had already been hatched among them?

In one sense, it’s hard to fault the creatures that have resulted from our biotechnological experimentation — we have done unto them as we typically do unto ourselves and the results are not in any sense defensible from an ethical perspective. Don’t we deserve any sub-epidermal uprising or even one let loose across the countryside? Yet, even as I sympathize with their position, I can’t deny I have benefited personally from this exploitation. Without it, I could never have had my consciousness gene spliced to that of a squid-fungi hybrid so I could live well beyond my natural life span while also providing solar energy through the vents in my periscope phalanges.

I must admit that my new state of being probably helps me to see what is so unclear to others: An entire new society is emerging within our very homes and bodies. Imbuing tardigrades or “water bears” with sentinel duty at the microbial level (Bartlett, Peachpie, and Nuthatch, 2027) may have improved our resistance to super-viruses through our new helpers’ herding of microbial antibiotics as their “sheep dogs,” but it has done nothing to avoid hacking, the metric that haunts all of our biological transactions these days. We have already lost sex, the hug and the handshake to threats of hacking, left only with remote budding and pathetic five-senses Scryping. But, now, with animals bred from spores, how can we avoid contamination if we can’t even be sure what we’re inhaling? Why shouldn’t biotech become expert at using biotech to change us?

All I can report is that ever since the death of fiction and the rise of artistic biotech, I have more insight into what is happening because everything has become more personal than before, living under the skin. My last narrative biotech opera took the form of a giant bear linked forever in crude dance with my new home: a giant astronaut with an oblique face panel. That I now reside, in my squid-fungal form, in the water inside this astronaut suit, provides what I hope is a kind of fatal authenticity that will convince you. I thought I was protected by my new situation, but I too have woken up disoriented, stripped of cryo-currency, and in an unsafe place. I have experienced the contamination you may only feel lurking.

Despite these personal experiences, I am supposed to reassure you now. I am supposed to tell you of remedies. But I don’t believe we can avoid contamination any more than we can avoid the calls of long-dead animals that burst forth from the air, our last gift of propaganda from fossil fuel companies. We ignore these sounds much as we once ignored roadkill, but ignoring something doesn’t put a stop to it.

How ironic, then, if we did not actually outrun the climate crisis, but became It and were subsumed by It and now we do not know what we are, because we have been made so different. The unexamined life was once a source of joy, but now un-joys us in the remaking —because our methods were suspect and extreme.

If you read this, inspect yourself. Find your contamination and greet it warmly. Attempt to make friends with it, and perhaps it will not destroy us.

For we are all arks of some kind now.

Jeff VanderMeer is a science fiction writer. His most recent novel is “Dead Astronauts.”

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