Everyday Technology in the Zambarau Concord

Genetic Engineering

Despite genetic engineering technically being an ability that has been available to the Zambarau for billions of years (as they are a macrospecies capable of growing any plant or animal it wants, in theory), purely technological engineering was only developed alongside later terraforming projects, and didn't become as mainstream as it is today until quite a while later, despite still being a controversial subject.

Theory

The Zambarau Concord is still only capable of performing germline genetic engineering (in which pre-engineered genetic material is used to grow a new, genetically engineered organism). Scientists and QCs find it impossible to genetically engineer an already fully-grown organism - the organism just dies as its body no longer has the proper genetic material to function normally, not to mention the difficulty of having to change all of the genetic material throughout the organism's body - though the process of morphallaxis in some simple organisms seems promising (albeit currently only a hypothesis).

Usage

Today, genetic engineering has been used to improve and lengthen the lives of most of the population as genetic modifications have spread throughout the populance vis natural reproduction; records show that the average worker is taller, smarter, more athletic and has a much longer life expectancy than several centuries ago. However, more extreme genetic engineering has caused whole seperate species of intelligent life to break off; though most still bear a recognisable similarity to their race of origin, meaning the Concord still has its six main races, which are then spilt into different lines (the Zambarau found this an excellent opportunity to include the word 'datum' in everyday terminology again - for example, the original line of Astatines are referred to as 'Datum-line Astatines,' as opposed to, for example, Hope-line Astatines; Astatines engineered for the Sceen environment).

With the advent of the Neural Interface, people could at least use neural interface technology to control a different body (which is usually a specially grown 'vegetable' like a Clone), despite the fact that the ability to directly engineer a fully grown organism remains elusive.

Neural Interface

History

The neural interface is a technology that evolved slowly over time out of much simpler technologies; it has similarly slipped in gradually in its adoption. The earliest agreed-upon example of what could be thought of as a neural interface are electroencephalographs (EEGs) used by the Astatines many years before they made contact with the Zambarau (though some argue that techniques that have used by skilled Kakranukh would count as a primitive 'neural interface'). Astatine EEGs simply measured the electrical signals produced by the brain and were often used to determine weather patients were 'clinically dead,' though some quacks would often claim that they could use EEGs to "read people's minds." It is known that independantly of this, the Sceen later began to study the brain in detail using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). 

When the Sceen and the Astatines made contact (through the Zambarau) some began to seriously consider the idea of using the brain to control computers. There was already a common trick that some Astatine medical professionals liked to show off with in which they trained themselves to produce certain, crude, outputs on EEG machines (by endlessly checking the readout by thinking different thoughts). A few had even gone as far as to plug the readouts into a computer programmed to interpret different readouts as different hieroglyphs of the Astatine alphabet, allowing them to very slowly carve out simple sentences by 'thinking' a hieroglyph at a time. Now the Astatines took this a step further, implanting simple, tiny transponders into people's nervous systems. This allowed a greater degree of accuracy and control than was possible with EEGs, and with only a short amount of time for practice (in which their nervous systems adapted) test subjects were breaking records set by the showpeople and EEG operators of the past. If test subjects wanted to do a new thing or work with a different operating system, they would just plug these simple 'neural interfaces' into a computer before spending some time to practice sending different signals until controlling the computer was second nature to them.

Meanwhile, the Sceen were taking a different approach, seeing if they could use their MRI scanners to work out what people were thinking. This involved the arduous task of putting volunteers into the scanners, telling them to think different things, then loading the scan data into quantum computers, which would then approximate the patterns that showed up in the scans to create a database of different thoughts. This became a common hobby for many Sceen scientists (as the procedure was actually very simple) and continued for many decades. As MRI machines became more accurate and the QCs became more intuitive (with the help of simulated intelligence alogrithms) the Sceen were able to more and more accurately predict the thoughts relating to different scans and naturally began to build databases for the other races as well (as their neural networks would operate in different ways). The results of these exhaustive studies eventually started to be used in fields from medical practice to law enforcement.

Near the end of the Pre-Obsolescence Era Sceen and Astatine technologies were finally combined to produce the neural interface that is known today. By combining the Astatine transponder system (along with the techniques used to allow the nervous system to quickly adapt to the new output) with highly intuitive Sceen computer programs based on their studies of neural networks, almost anybody could now learn to control a variety of systems using a neural interface within a day.

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