Our Biotech Future, apparently

Freeman Dyson (smart chap) got a little carried away while talking about Woese's work a while back. In this new article, "Our Biotech Future" he expands this theme and much else, tying it somewhat tenuously to anti-reductionism and more successfully to an extrapolation of Open Source Biology. There's some great stuff in this essay, though I still don't buy the Darwinian Interlude idea. There's lots of fun ideas though:

The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous.

Now that would be cool! I also like how he wants to reclaim "Green":

The adjective "green" has been appropriated and abused by various political movements, especially in Europe, so I need to explain clearly what I have in mind when I speak of green and gray. Green technology is based on biology, gray technology on physics and chemistry.

Some of his thinking could be captured in simple images like the one Dr. Frank Ochmann of BMW showed at the TED 2007 conference (described by David Pogue):

[A] timeline of human history, in the middle of which was a narrow, tall spike showing our relatively brief fossil-fuel-burning period. The blank area to the left was labeled, "First solar civilization," and the one to its right, "Second solar civilization."

For Dyson, two Green civilizations are separated by a short, dirty Gray one from the 16th to 21s centuries BCE, and two periods when Life spent fruitfully exchanging genetic information to the mutualistic benefit of all separated by a mere three billion years of selfish genes. Is this long-view way of looking at our current state as a temporary blip a new meme on the block?