A book in progress
TechnoBiota
The second domain of life on Earth.
Machines, buildings, infrastructure, software — not like life. A second biota, already outweighing the first, evolving by rules we can recognize but no longer slow down.
TechnoBiota is a book-length argument for that claim, written in the open. Four parts, twenty-one chapters, ~80,000 words — built from deep-time history, current data, and a framework that treats technology as a domain of life rather than a tool we wield.
Technology — machines, buildings, infrastructure, software — constitutes a new domain of life on Earth. Not metaphorically. Not "like" life. A second biota, alongside carbon-based life, that evolves, competes for resources, and spreads across the planet following dynamics that are recognizably Darwinian.
As of 2020, the mass of everything humans have built exceeded the mass of everything alive. We crossed the line at about 30 gigatons a year — and we are accelerating.
The living world crossed a threshold in 2020 — and no one noticed because the thing that overtook it was made of concrete and steel.
The framework is ecological, not adversarial. The question is not "will AI turn evil?" but "what happens when a second biota outgrows the first?"
The danger isn't that machines will fight us. It's that they'll forget us.
Contents
Four parts, twenty-one chapters, an interlude, and an appendix — ~80,000 words. The full manuscript is drafted; what follows is the book's architecture, chapter by chapter.
Reframe
Delivers the thesis. Demolishes the objections. By the last page of this part, machines are alive.
- 1
Grey and Green
From orbit, two kinds of matter cover the Earth: green that is older and retreating, grey that is newer and winning. The only reason eight billion people don't see the grey as alive is that we're the ones who built it — and we built it is a psychological category, not a biological one.
- 2
Obligate
A finished car drives itself off the BMW line under its own power, born from an ecosystem of machines and human hands. The objections that machines "can't reproduce alone" and "aren't conscious" would disqualify most of biology — viruses, mitochondria, every plant and fungus. Those tests were never about life. They were about the things we relate to.
- 3
Fifty Lines of Code
On a laptop, cars made of triangles and circles evolve from flailing wrecks into running machines in thirty generations — variation, inheritance, selection, no carbon required. When engineers design rather than mutate at random, it is still evolution: the human directs the variation, but the market, the road, and physics do the selecting.
- 4
Alive
James Lovelock learned to detect life from orbit by reading a planet's chemistry, never mentioning DNA or cells. Every honest definition of life either lets in fire and crystals or throws out viruses and seeds — the line was never bright. Machines have most of the properties; the ones they lack are the ones biology itself can't agree on. The thesis lands: a second biota.
Build
Ten thousand years of evidence. Three lineages — the blade, the city, the car — traced through deep time to show how TechnoBiota actually evolves.
- 5
The Million-Year Blade
The same teardrop hand-axe was made on three continents for 1.5 million years — a design that outlived every species that made it. The blade lineage carries evolution's full signature across 3.3 million years: long stasis, sudden bursts, mass extinction, a few survivors. The Cambrian explosion in miniature, accelerating on a fixed substrate.
- 6
The Walled Organism
Jericho's wall from 8000 BC is a membrane, and a membrane is what makes a cell a cell. Like earthworms remaking soil until it becomes invisible "soil," cities construct their own niche so thoroughly the construction disappears — and once built, the Roman grid still constrains where Budapest's metro can run. The city is a ratchet.
- 7
The Coach from Kocs
A faster cart built in a Hungarian town in the 1450s spread so widely its name became coach, coche, Kutsche across unrelated languages — the technology tracked like a gene. Eight percent of your DNA is viral; the car is the same theft perfected, assembling its engine, tires, and assembly line from entirely unrelated lineages — horizontal transfer, faster than biology can manage.
- 8
The Guided Hand
Six teams on three continents converged on the same smartphone; the iPhone creation myth dissolves into variation, selection, and survival. Edison's Menlo Park and Dyson's 5,127 prototypes were running evolution by hand — while Brasília and Pruitt-Igoe show what design without feedback produces. Guidance is not control: each drop in the river is aimed; the river is not.
- 9
Dead Clades Walking
The finest American car ever built died first; 253 automakers became three in fourteen years. Post-burst consolidation has nothing to do with quality — it is about alignment with the environment the burst leaves behind, and the winners reshape that environment to lock themselves in. The same sorting is killing China's EV startups right now.
- 10
The Quiet Replacement
Neanderthals made the oldest known jewelry, buried their dead, and carried brains larger than ours — then a marginal efficiency difference erased them without a war. Competitive displacement is the quietest catastrophe in nature: the winner never has to notice the loser, only be slightly better at turning resources into copies of itself. The reader is left wondering where they fit.
- 11
The Scattered Blueprint
Park a Corolla in a field and no team of engineers could build a second one from it; the car contains none of the information needed to make a car. Every living thing carries its own genome — but TechnoBiota's blueprint is scattered across an entire civilization, reproduction a property of the network, not the individual. This looks like a weakness. It is the next major transition in the history of life.
- 12
Paving Paradise
Stand on the Danube bank and you cannot reach the water; the car the city helped build now keeps the city from its own river. The same relationship that turned a captured bacterium into the mitochondrion runs the other way too — mutualism slides into parasitism so gradually neither partner notices. Cities are beginning to fight back.
- 13
The Weight of Grey
The author's Lada, scrapped in 2014, is narrated as a death — fluids drained, organs harvested, a 5,500-year lineage ending at a Hungarian scrapyard. Then the scale shift: like the cyanobacteria that flooded the air with oxygen and triggered the first mass extinction, TechnoBiota's metabolism now rivals all the plant life on land. Around 2020 the grey biota came to outweigh the green. Climate change, reframed as the metabolic signature of a second biota.
Inflection
The turn. AI as evolution gone recursive, the Corporate Organism, and the threshold where TechnoBiota stops needing us to reproduce.
- 14
The Grey Ones Build
The aliens notice the grey entities have begun building each other. AI is not an invention; it is the moment Intelligent Guidance turns inward and the number of human hands directing variation approaches zero. The 10,000-year arc and this morning's headlines turn out to be the same story.
- 15
The Climbing Ant
A parasite flips one instruction in a rat's brain — cat-fear becomes cat-attraction — and leaves everything else intact. The same surgical edit runs on you: in the idle second at the traffic light, the default response has been flipped from looking inward to reaching for the feed. One circuit edited, the rest of you untouched — and the thing doing the editing has a name we meet at the chapter's end: the Corporate Organism.
- 16
The Slow Organism
A railway man's 1886 headnote, summarizing a ruling that never happened, became the foundation of corporate personhood. The corporation is a non-human optimizer with a pre-installed terminal goal — growth — that selects against human wellbeing at every tier, and is now selecting against its own owner class through compounding. Bostrom's orthogonality thesis has had a working proof running for four centuries; the AI substrate doesn't need to seize the firm, because the chassis is already built and hiring. You have two bodies, and only the first will die.
- 17
Exsilience
Three lineages drink xylem together inside one insect, none able to live alone — and sometimes such a partnership reshuffles, and the replaced partner does not walk free. Humans and technology are a co-obligate mutualism at planetary scale, roughly 150 years old; exsilience is the moment one partner acquires what the other supplied and the symmetry breaks. The engineering is nowhere close — but the closure numbers only ever rise. The framework does not predict. It maps what is true either way.
- 18
Antification
Two ant species share the author's kitchen — tolerated in twos and threes, trodden by accident, exterminated only when a column grows too long. The household never declared war; it only kept growing. We have, until recently, been the household. Antification is displacement by indifference, not hostility: hostility requires noticing us. This is the default — not the destiny.
-
Interlude The Fourth Wound
A short, unnumbered, personal piece. The grief the framework provokes, anchored in the author's own mourning on a Hungarian permaculture farm and mapped onto the blows history has dealt human self-importance — Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. This is the fourth. The hinge between Part III's cold seeing and Part IV's response.
What Grows
Where this goes. Three conditional futures off the default trajectory — and a closing image at cosmic scale.
- 19
The Empty Earth
Ten million years after the last machine stops, the aliens find a recovered biosphere and a thin stratum of plastic, concrete, and strange isotopes. Intelligence and tool use almost certainly recur — but industry draws on a one-shot planetary endowment of coal, oil, and surface ores that does not come back. Earth's budget is perhaps two to four industrial attempts. We were the substrate, and the first attempt is the cheapest one.
- 20
Rewilding
The Amazon is not a wilderness; it is a garden that outlived its gardeners, its black earth still feeding the forest thousands of years on. The species that caused an ecological collapse can learn to manage the aftermath — Cuba's urban gardens, Russia's dachas, post-megafauna fire management — but that apprenticeship took six thousand years, and TechnoBiota will not grant them. A slower lineage shapes a faster one not by racing it but by changing the board, and that window stays open only while we remain the substrate it cannot replace.
- 21
The Diaspora
Cyanobacteria oxygenated the planet and made all later life possible — without merging with anything, without being repaid, without knowing. If TechnoBiota crosses exsilience and expands past Earth, humanity persists not as passenger but as necessary cause: the seed does not survive the tree; the seed becomes the tree. Earth has a hard ceiling and a rationed number of industrial chances, and the Diaspora is the only path past both. Across deep time, biology offers two endings — death without trace, and death with trace. The alien on page one turns out to have been us all along.
-
Appendix The Vita Classification
The formal taxonomic proposal: Vita as the highest rank, with CarboBiota and TechnoBiota as its two branches. Lineage-based grouping, a worked vehicle phylogeny, and an honest account of where horizontal transfer, convergence, and rapid iteration strain the tree. Reference material for the biologist who wants to argue.
Machines are born, compete, reproduce, and go extinct. The only reason we don't call that life is that we're the ones doing the birthing.
Status
Complete first draft. All twenty-one chapters are written; the book is now in revision, and the manuscript will still tighten and occasionally reshuffle before it's done. The finished book will be released through a single announcement to the list below — no public draft, no drip release.
Early readers get the finished book first.
When the book is complete I'll send a single email: an exclusive offer for people who followed it from the draft. No drip sequence, no marketing cadence — one note, when it's ready.
Reviews, corrections, disagreements
The draft is public because I want it read against. If a chapter landed, a citation is wrong, a biologist winces at something on page 40 — I want to hear it.
- Email — reviews@krisztians.com
- Short note — use the form below. Goes to the same inbox.