> 1) "Ye cannae change the laws of physics". We're pretty sure that there isn't any molecule that you can flip around to have unicorns start popping out of thin air[0]. We have some bounds on the amount of damage one can do.

Sure, but every interaction is a hard fought lesson at the moment. If you naively chart it out we're going to be spending literally eons figuring this stuff out.

Now I realize that advances in a bunch of technologies means that we'll know way, way more than we do now in probably 20-30 years. Not just 50% more, not 500% more but probably a thousand times more.

But if there are a million molecules, there are on the order of n! permutations which give you a rough idea of the number of possible molecular interactions. Maybe instead of P(n,n) (which means that all molecules could react with all other molecules all at the same time for one reaction) you'd be talking about P(n,n-5) or so, but 10^6^5 is still 10^30 or a really, really big number. It'll overflow a 32 bit int, a 64 bit int and it uses up a substantial fraction of a 128 bit int.

People tend not to understand that biology isn't just a little squishy or weird, or "hard", the math makes the fact that we understand anything a tribute to human intelligence. It's not finding a needle in a haystack, it's finding a needle in a galaxy's worth of planets that are all covered in nothing but haystacks.