I find this evocative of Eric Drexler’s idea of a molecular assembler but it is really moving atoms around that are weakly attracted to a surface as opposed to covalently bonded. It is like the experiment where the people at IBM spelled out IBM with Xenon atoms except these people had automation to do it.
I would say 30 years after he wrote Nanosystems there hasn’t been any progress on the tip of the assembler. I still use that book as a model though for how to talk about advanced automatic manufacturing systems. The example of life shows it is possible to construct linear structures with three different systems that can fold up in pretty arbitrary ways, but maybe you can’t make diamond that way.
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.
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.
Yes, the tensile strength is like steel but lighter. (And if you ever get gored by a rhino horn you aren't going to shrug and say "hey it's just protein.") But it's a long way from the limit of strength.
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.
