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THERE is a long-standing myth that nature is the opposite of technology. Yet now we know that our industrial machines didn’t conquer the wilderness; instead, they caused a climate change catastrophe that might one day wipe us out. Knowing this will dramatically change the way our future technologies look, as well as how we interact with them.

Consider the plant tattoo. Last year, a group at Iowa State University revealed flexible water sensors made of graphene that could be taped onto plants. When attached to the undersides of leaves, the devices look like tattoos. They are used to measure how healthy and hydrated crops are, but they could also be adapted for environmental monitoring. Corn fields could become drought prediction systems.

Researchers at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment are taking this idea further. Earlier this year, this partnership between Northumbria and Newcastle universities received a grant of £8 million to incorporate sustainable, biological materials into buildings. They will be exploring the idea of walls made from living, self-repairing cells and plumbing systems seeded with microbes that convert waste into fuel. The ventilation systems in these buildings might even include plants with graphene tattoos that monitor air quality.

Meanwhile, in medicine, people are using light to manipulate the behaviour of cells in the burgeoning field of optogenetics. Carefully aimed beams of light can activate medicines circulating in the body, or change the behaviour of synapses in the brain.

As we cope with environmental and health needs, the realm of nature is becoming nearly indistinguishable from the realm of technology: plants are sensors; light is a form of medicine. Our future won’t be anything like the Apple Store version of tomorrow, with its clean white lines and antiseptic designs. Instead, it will be dirty and full of bacteria. And that will be cutting edge.

How do we prepare ourselves for a future where advanced machines look like a sunny day on the farm? I think we need better stories about what is really coming next. That is why I sometimes write science fiction instead of reporting the facts.

In my new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, a cast of heroic geologists struggles to understand a piece of technology that is so advanced that it looks exactly like slabs of rock. You see, they have discovered that time machines are embedded in ancient shield rock formations that were part of Earth’s crust more than half a billion years ago.

Of course, my characters know they weren’t the first to stumble across these wormholes that open when you pound rock against rock in five locations across the planet. People have been smacking rocks together for a long time, so it is pretty likely that Palaeolithic people were jumping into the time machines long before science was invented. And then there are the written records from classical antiquity about magical portals that can be opened by drumming on the ground.

It is only in the age of science that my geologists finally figure out that humans have been mucking around with the timeline forever, by banging on an ancient machine interface that opens wormholes to the past.

For these geologists, time travel is like metallurgy. There is a long history of people making iron, but a relatively short history of people understanding why iron comes from heating and blending different kinds of shiny nuggets they mined from rocks.

At last, science has progressed far enough for the geologists to comprehend how advanced the time machines are. They are a part of nature, built into Earth by someone or something that left them behind for reasons we can only hope to understand one day.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll has assured me that time travel will never exist, which is kind of a bummer. Science fiction is fiction, after all. But it is also a way for us to imagine a radically different future. Nature won’t be erased by machines. Instead, it will absorb them.