Genetic engineering

[Rynn]

This reminds me of the idea of a 'geneweaver' that I was kicking around some years back.

Basically we presume that at some point fairly early in the setting, Terragens made a number of breakthroughs in understanding how all those thousands of genes interact and developed programs that could model the process with a very high degree of reliability. The resulting tool is a device that you input your desired traits or end result lifeform into and it figures out the combination of genes (natural and perhaps eventually artificial) that are needed to produce it. It also models the resultant lifeform virtually through some huge number of iterations and makes adjustments as needed if these turn up any issues or long term problems or the like.

I should see about picking that article up again at some point.

I'm sure such a thing does exist in the OA universe but I'd suggest kicking it back from the Early timeline. In the early timeline they will have a bunch of advances and will have good models, techniques and technologies to create desired organisms but an organism/bodymod compiler is hugely advanced. Nascent forms of these could exist in the early timeline and be limited to trying to juggle a few well known mods (i.e. what if I wanted both boosted musculature and cold-adapt metabolism?) rather than taking a generalist request and modelling an organism from scratch.

Geneweavers would be a great piece of software to have with the municipal computronium of the mid-late timeline set a few cubic meters and a few thousand vots playing with it and you could eventually end up with a fully detailed neogen biosphere for your personal hab.