Seeker

by Douglas E. Richards

But being able to perform this function at the elemental level was another thing entirely, requiring a microscopic machine that could carve up complex molecules to get to raw materials in their most basic state. And such a machine would not only need this capability, but also the wherewithal to reconfigure these materials precisely as needed. The level of engineering sophistication this would require was almost inconceivable. How could such a fabricator find the materials it needed so unerringly? How could it know how to build a copy of itself so precisely? Or how to build anything else, for that matter? How could it do this reproducibly, and with the extraordinary efficiency required? Such a capability was absurd. Ludicrous. Impossible. Except that this is exactly what biological machinery had managed to do on Earth for billions of years. When a human sperm and egg came together to form a single cell, this cell possessed the programming and technical capabilities needed to self-assemble an entire human, the perfect example of nanofabrication in practice. This single cell used raw materials found in its environment to quickly produce an identical cell, which then became four, which then became eight—eventually multiplying into the trillions. And each duplication event along the way required a cell to find the molecular constituents of its DNA and assemble a perfect copy, three-billion letters long, something it did with astonishing fidelity. Then, as if having a single cel...