[harmful_stereo]

Yeah, like owing "blood rent" to the descendants of proprietary works that pass their copyrighted material to their offspring. Or land rights, or special social privilege. Or the answer keys for professional and entrance examinations. Or classified data. Suddenly you have to have your genome sequenced to walk through the airport and documented status is conferred by blood.

I'm not being a luddite here on purpose, but over long time scales there's a tremendous potential for this kind of technology to push towards a kind of class differentiated society in the way most of us would despise.

Some technologies are leveling, like roads or mass transit or vaccines or industrially produced consumables. I don't see public institutions putting libraries in the seeds of apple trees as a civilizational fail safe, whether that's centrally planned economies or democracies. But maybe you could get an ethnostate like Israel to include the talmud in your cells or your microbiome when you settle on occupied land. Best case scenario with body horror is that it becomes like tattoos. I await the forthcoming Atwood book with that slightly alarmist slant.

[pm90]

We were supposed to have annihilated all of human life in a nuclear firestorm. But somehow we did manage to survive. Sure, the Great Firewall and China's potent surveillance system does alarm me greatly. But as long as the people who create these technologies also work in a society which places responsible limitations on their use, we might just be able to get to being an interplanetary species at some point.

Once humanity becomes capable of living and thriving in different planets/outer space without the mother planet is when things will start getting really interesting.

[hodgesrm]

I would not rule out nuclear catastrophe just yet. The technology has only been available for 75 years. So far most of the weapons have been in the hands of nations with stable command and control structures. That may not be the case in the next few decades.