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Depending on whether you believe in creationism, you are a living testament to what’s possible for molecular self assembly.

• hirundo 4y ago
  The steel man version of creationism is that the laws of nature behind self-assembly are divinely designed, rather than that a god directly connects each atomic bond. I'd guess it's also the more common version.
  • miohtama 4y ago
    God opened Vim and set 26 constants https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-many-fundamental-constants-does-it-take-to-explain-the-universe-e00abd83d4c9 https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-many-fundamental-c...
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Sounds like God uses one-letter variable names...
      • avmich 4y ago
        This is the modern version of God, which also uses Latin alphabet, not some Linear A or cuneiform.
      • melony 4y ago
        The Lord wrote in Lisp code. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.en.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.en.html
    • tsukikage 4y ago
      ...15 gliders, apparently. https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patterns-in-15-gliders/ https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patter...
  • escape_goat 4y ago
    Under conditions of omniscience and omnipotence the difference is meaningless of course but I suspect you're right.
• the__alchemist 4y ago
  This is one of the more compelling arguments to this. It at least certainly puts it into the bounds of possible. God did it, so there's a way that doesn't violate the laws of nature. I think this touches on my main beef with a specificity of Drexler's argument: He's written that biological systems are akin to a bit of a chaotic soup of machinery, while the APM systems he proposes are neat, organized; more like a factory. This begs the questions of #1: why nature hasn't built something like his APM factories, and #2: Why shouldn't we persue something more like biology vice his version of current-tech-but-smaller APM. Drexler uses Biology as an example of APM being feasible, but his vision is distinct from biology's.
  • abecedarius 4y ago
    Those are the obvious first questions, yeah. I don't think #1 is very puzzling: can you expect a gradual continuous evolution from wiggly machines in solution, which communicate primarily by diffusion, and which must be robust to genetic variation, to a factory in hard vacuum? The path must be not just possible, but fitness-enhancing in each neighborhood (on the scale of the steps evolution took historically). In our history there was some evolution in this direction: introduction of compartments, active transport, complexes which cut out most of the diffusion step between related enzymes. But the compartments and the complexes are not qualitatively different. It seems a harder question why life stuck with protein/bone/enamel instead of discovering lighter and stronger densely-linked carbon structural materials. Maybe because bone is continually incrementally torn down and rebuilt? Re #2. I think anyone would agree that biology-style nanomachinery is interesting and promising. But factory-style opens up a whole new level of possibilities with orders of magnitude greater performance on multiple measures. People can pursue both! Flapping-wing flight had both scientific interest and potential applications in more-agile flying machines; that doesn't mean fixed-wing wasn't a much more strategic direction in the years around 1900.
    • BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Spider silk is a keratin protein that is plenty light and strong...