[rutherblood]

I think you might be overestimating. What is state of art biological engineering based upon? Current life processes, at best such technologies are "hacks" built on top of life on earth -- standing on the shoulder of giants. As far as I have heard we haven't yet managed to build or even know the entirety of the biological stack.

[walleeee]

Yes. We can point to processes and relationships at various organizational scales and levels of abstraction (e.g., physical principles, chemical gradients, genes, hormones, morphological growth, phenotypes, ecosystems) but knowledge remains fragmented and we do not understand how everything comes together. Synthetic biology is a misnomer, imo; biological engineering is a much better term. Human-engineered machines and living systems are currently worlds apart in terms of causal complexity.

This isn't to say we shouldn't pursue it, just that we ought to realize how primitive our tools still are. We're fiddling with things we don't understand. We might as well try to do it consciously now, since centuries of unconscious intervention have put us in a bit of a bad place, existentially speaking.