T
Trent
Guest
Lots of creative, intelligent people, including some damn good SF writers, have foreseen all sorts of uses for biotech. Well, a while ago I got a piece of biotech that I'd bet no one ever saw coming: Biotech junkmail.
Think I'm kidding? Think again! A while back I got a piece of mail from (ugh) earthlink trying to sucker me into coming back because I'd dropped them like a load long ago for some damn good reasons. The mail contained a sheet of slightly thick card with little bumps in it, and instructions to tear it up and bury it a few inches in the ground if I wanted some flowers.
Yep, apparently they'd shelled some flower seeds without rendering the seeds themselves inviable, then sealed them between a couple sheets of paper, possibly treated with some type of water activated plant food. (Or maybe not.)
Well, I don't like earthlink, but it felt a little odd to have these potential living things handed to me, and what the hell? The flower seeds had never done me any wrong so despite not wanting to touch earthlink with someone else's hands I followed the instructions on the sheet and planted it.
A few pinkish flowers with yellow cores eventually sprouted.
OK, high tech, cutting edge genetic engineering? No. A crude, low tech form of biotech? I'd say so. Ergo, biotech junk mail.
Who saw that one coming? The possibilities of biotech mail...let's think a minute.
Maybe we get "garden in an envelope" that has a folded up sheet of various seeds, possibly engineered in some way. Unfold the sheet, tear put the pictures of the flowers you want, dig holes with a table spoon and pretty soon you've got flowers coming up. The flowers might be genetically engineered with a 'terminator gene" to limit their growth, so if you want a full bush and not just one single blooming stalk send 19.95 to...
Then, of course, there are other uses. You get a letter from the UPOA, United potheads of Americe that goes like "Yo, dude! Check out this picture of a killer weed! Want to have a real one like it? Man, just take the picture, and like, wad it up into a ball, then put the ball in like water for a minute, and then, like, get a flower pot with some dirt in it (Like, get the flower pot and the dirt, like, before you wad up the sheet and put it in water for a minute.) put it in the flower pot with some like dirt over it, and like water it like every couple days and keep it where it, like, gets some light every day and in like a couple months you'll have a real live plant just like this one. It grows killer buds, man! Ya gotta try it!"
Of course there's a nasty side here, like some nefarious cretin engineering a plant that produces toxic pollen or something like that and disguising it as an innocent "Plant this lovely picture to beautify your neighborhood." mass mailing.
It occurred to me that a variant on the "bury the sheet in pieces" idea would be to put one, or just a few seeds, in the middle of a sheet treated with plant food and fertilizer, and make it so when it was wadded up and soaked it would form a ball of enriched growth medium to maximize the seeds chances of success.
A lot of plot ideas here, from a little piece of biotech junk mail. Just who is sending these out? This flower is beautiful, but no one can identify it. There's something going on here...
In traveller, things could even go wrong by accident without evil intent. Suppose a load of this sort of thing was meant to be shipped to one planet but, due to some glitch, ended up arriving on another planet and got mailed out. Suppose the resulting flower had some unforeseeable effect on the unintended planet's ecosystem? "What do you mean, the redbees are all dead because some virulent pollen killed them all? Without redbees how do our crops get fertilized? My god, this could be a disaster! All because of some damn junk mail getting shipped to us by mistake!"
Or, was it a mistake?:devil:
Think I'm kidding? Think again! A while back I got a piece of mail from (ugh) earthlink trying to sucker me into coming back because I'd dropped them like a load long ago for some damn good reasons. The mail contained a sheet of slightly thick card with little bumps in it, and instructions to tear it up and bury it a few inches in the ground if I wanted some flowers.
Yep, apparently they'd shelled some flower seeds without rendering the seeds themselves inviable, then sealed them between a couple sheets of paper, possibly treated with some type of water activated plant food. (Or maybe not.)
Well, I don't like earthlink, but it felt a little odd to have these potential living things handed to me, and what the hell? The flower seeds had never done me any wrong so despite not wanting to touch earthlink with someone else's hands I followed the instructions on the sheet and planted it.
A few pinkish flowers with yellow cores eventually sprouted.
OK, high tech, cutting edge genetic engineering? No. A crude, low tech form of biotech? I'd say so. Ergo, biotech junk mail.
Who saw that one coming? The possibilities of biotech mail...let's think a minute.
Maybe we get "garden in an envelope" that has a folded up sheet of various seeds, possibly engineered in some way. Unfold the sheet, tear put the pictures of the flowers you want, dig holes with a table spoon and pretty soon you've got flowers coming up. The flowers might be genetically engineered with a 'terminator gene" to limit their growth, so if you want a full bush and not just one single blooming stalk send 19.95 to...
Then, of course, there are other uses. You get a letter from the UPOA, United potheads of Americe that goes like "Yo, dude! Check out this picture of a killer weed! Want to have a real one like it? Man, just take the picture, and like, wad it up into a ball, then put the ball in like water for a minute, and then, like, get a flower pot with some dirt in it (Like, get the flower pot and the dirt, like, before you wad up the sheet and put it in water for a minute.) put it in the flower pot with some like dirt over it, and like water it like every couple days and keep it where it, like, gets some light every day and in like a couple months you'll have a real live plant just like this one. It grows killer buds, man! Ya gotta try it!"
Of course there's a nasty side here, like some nefarious cretin engineering a plant that produces toxic pollen or something like that and disguising it as an innocent "Plant this lovely picture to beautify your neighborhood." mass mailing.
It occurred to me that a variant on the "bury the sheet in pieces" idea would be to put one, or just a few seeds, in the middle of a sheet treated with plant food and fertilizer, and make it so when it was wadded up and soaked it would form a ball of enriched growth medium to maximize the seeds chances of success.
A lot of plot ideas here, from a little piece of biotech junk mail. Just who is sending these out? This flower is beautiful, but no one can identify it. There's something going on here...
In traveller, things could even go wrong by accident without evil intent. Suppose a load of this sort of thing was meant to be shipped to one planet but, due to some glitch, ended up arriving on another planet and got mailed out. Suppose the resulting flower had some unforeseeable effect on the unintended planet's ecosystem? "What do you mean, the redbees are all dead because some virulent pollen killed them all? Without redbees how do our crops get fertilized? My god, this could be a disaster! All because of some damn junk mail getting shipped to us by mistake!"
Or, was it a mistake?:devil:
(no dude, not that kind, put away the papers man... )
but eh, it started honest and it's late. Well only a quarter to pun in the morning so I guess I'm actually early :smirk: Yeah, I'll stop now.
