We are living through the next great evolution of ecosystem complexity and it is the era in which metallic and mineral materials become incorporated as structural and electrical components of biological systems.
Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.
Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.
As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.
At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.
Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.
But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).
The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.
If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.
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