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The Connected Ideas Project

Exploring how tech, policy, people, and ideas are connected. A special love for AI and biotechnology, but a lot of thinking about how emerging technologies like fusion, AI, quantum, and more are impacting our lives. With some sci-fi thrown in.
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Science FictionNational SecurityBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

Classified Transmission : NBCO Operational Network | Node 19 | Biosentinel Correspondence Clearance : Nova Five Author : Agent Delta-Rook Subject : Field Report: Midwestern Deployment of Modular Biofabrication Unit She stood in the dark, the smell of corn husks and carbon steel mixing in the early morning fog.

National SecurityBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

The United States has no shortage of good ideas. Biotech breakthroughs are still born here. They still spin out of our national labs, our university incubators, our startup accelerators, and the brains of some truly ridiculous graduate students with wild hair and whiteboards covered in dreams. But too often, those good ideas don’t go anywhere. They stall in a regulatory maze. They fail to raise capital. They never scale.

Science FictionPublic PolicyBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

“State Fourteen is down. Switching contingency feedstock to Vermont and Utah.” I blinked twice to clear the haptic overlay from my vision, watching as a pale blue arc lit up across the Appalachian corridor. Fermentation input lines were rerouting in real-time, wheat husk to algal base to sugarcane waste, just another day in the life of a national biotech grid under siege. It wasn’t a cyberattack. It wasn’t sabotage. It was something worse.

Public PolicyBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

I used to think the future arrived with a bang. A gleaming city skyline, a countdown clock, maybe even a voice-over narration about progress. But the truth is, it came quietly - on a warm spring morning in Iowa, when I was late to my first real job, staring at a cornfield that wasn’t quite… corn. They called it Glycine Max Aegis - Aegis beans for short.

National SecurityBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

Two years. Hundreds of meetings. Thousands of hours. More drafts than I want to count. And now, it’s here. The final report of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) is officially out in the world. It’s 180+ pages of action-oriented, bipartisan, bicameral national security-focused biotech strategy.

Artificial IntelligencePublic PolicyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Authors Varun Patel, Joshua Kim

The Invisible Hands It wasn’t the speed that surprised me—it was how natural it felt. For years, regulatory submissions had been a slow and painstaking process. Teams of specialists labored over every sentence, every data table, every response to agency questions.

National SecurityBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

The first time I stepped into a biofoundry, I realized we were living through a moment that most people hadn’t yet noticed. It wasn’t a cleanroom full of microchips, it was a factory of living cells, designed and optimized to manufacture the future. Biotech had moved beyond the lab, beyond medicine, and into the very infrastructure of global power. This isn’t speculation. It’s happening.

Science FictionPublic PolicyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

I wasn’t supposed to be there. The Ministry of Futures didn’t take visitors. It didn’t have a public website or a budget line in the global defense reports. Officially, it did not exist. And yet, here I was, sitting in a room four hundred meters underground, staring at a quantum server that was rewriting the laws of civilization in real-time. The man standing beside me - sharp suit, eyes like wet glass - placed a small tablet in my hands. “Dr.

Science FictionPublic PolicyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

I still remember the moment it hit me. It was past midnight in a near-empty office, and I was huddled over a draft policy memo on biotech. My task was to outline guidelines for biotech-enabled military systems that didn’t even exist yet. I found myself scribbling notes about self-driving labs, “rogue” machine biohackers, and fail-safe mechanisms, essentially spinning a story about a hypothetical future.

Artificial IntelligenceBiotechnologyOther Engineering and Technologies
Published
Author Alexander Titus

It started like every other outbreak had, silently, invisibly, spreading before anyone realized it was already too late. Except this time, it wasn’t too late. For the first time in human history, we saw it coming. I stood inside The Helix, the nerve center of the Global Biosecurity Command (GBC), watching as the latest AI-generated pathogen forecast flickered across the glass wall.