Broken Metaphors

I mean, much of the progress of humanity has hinged on the artifice of harnessing nature's engines of creation: cultivation and selective hybridization of any number of plants and animals; hitching biochemical rides on various yeasts, bacteria and fungi to convert ordinary organic compounds (milk, fruit juices, grains) into extraordinary ones (Roquefort, penicillin, beer, Chateau Margaux 1978). And all of those were just happy accidents, coy redirections of existing organisms' agendas, painstaking, time-intensive efforts to hotwire the millenia-consuming processes of natural selection.

And now we have the means and methods to be far more direct in the way we harness those engines of creation: the fermentation of a huge matrix of garbage, agricultural and industrial byproducts into any of another matrix of wildly useful drugs, foods and fuels; custom sequenced proteins to crush whole classes of human ailments; even more to tune, tweak, and optimize even the most healthy among us; to bring whole new kinds of leisure and delight to the human endeavor.

Put it this way: sequenced protein plus cellular reproduction resulted in an awesome explosion of entropy reversal on this little planet. It gave rise to the most complicated object in the visible universe: us (and our brains). Up to this point in history, humanity has been able to harness that power only indirectly -- as a cyclist might draft in the slipstream of some larger object, like a car. I believe we're right on the edge of a time when we don't have to draft that car anymore. We can attach a cable to it. Or jump right in. Except that it's more like a train. Or a Boeing 777. My metaphors break down. But you know what I mean.