I was shut in an airtight glass cabin.Here, what I inhale is my own exhaled air, but the air is still fresh under the blowing of the fan.A system of conduits, cables, plants, and swamp microbes recycles my urine and feces, reducing it to water and food for me to eat.Seriously, the food tastes good and the water is good too. Last night, it snowed outside.The glass cabin was still warm, humid and comfortable.This morning the thick inner windows were covered with condensation.Plants are everywhere in the cabin.Large tracts of banana leaves surround me, and the bright yellow-green color warms the heart.The slender green bean vines are twined and covered all the walls.About half of the plants in the house are edible, and every single meal of mine comes from them.

This hut is actually an experimental module for living in space.The recycling of the atmosphere around me is entirely dependent on the plants, the soil in which they are rooted, and the humming plumbing that weaves through the leaves.Neither these green plants nor those cumbersome machines alone are enough to guarantee my survival in this space.Rather, it is the combination of sunlight-fed creatures and oil-powered machinery that keeps me alive.In this hut, living things and man-made things have merged into a stable system whose purpose is to feed higher complexities—for now, me. As the millennium draws to a close, what happened in this glass hut is playing out on a massive scale on Earth—only less clearly.The natural kingdom born by nature and the artificial kingdom built by human beings are becoming one.Machines are becoming biological; living things are being engineered.

This trend is validating certain old metaphors - comparing machines to living things and living things to machines.Those tropes are as old as the first machines.Today, those ancient metaphors are no longer just poetic reveries, they are becoming reality-a positive and beneficial reality. The marriage of the man-made and the natural is the subject of this book.Technicians have summed up the logical laws between life forms and machines, and applied them one by one to build extremely complex systems; like magicians, they are summoning novel devices in which creations and life forms coexist.To some extent, it is the limitations of existing technology that force the marriage of life and machinery to provide us with beneficial assistance.As the world of our own creation has become too complex, we have had to turn to the natural world to learn how to manage it.This means that the more mechanized the environment we end up creating, the more biological it may need to be if everything is to work properly.Our future is technological, but that doesn't mean the world of the future will necessarily be gray and cold and steel.On the contrary, the future guided by our technology is directed towards a new biological civilization.