In Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Eric Drexler outlines what promises to be the technology of the 21^st century. In a nutshell, Drexler describes how the genetic “building blocks” of organic life (DNA and proteins) can be hijacked and used to create artificial nanomachineries - programmed molecules that have all the engineering capabilities of DNA. Only visible under electron microscopes, these machines will be so small that they could easily be transported in food or made airborne like pollen. DNA, writes Drexler, is the perfect prototype for the machines of the future - it has the ability to direct cellular machines called ribosomes and assemble the building-blocks of life, proteins, into an infinite array of possible shapes (from bacteria and fungi to complex multicellular ‘machines’ such as humans).  Armed with the secrets of DNA, nanotech engineers could use programmed ribosomes to build proteins and shape them into just about anything, including organic materials more durable than titanium.

“Just as today’s [mechanical] engineers build machinery as complex as player pianos and robot arms from ordinary motors, bearings, and moving parts, so tomorrow’s biochemists will be able to use protein molecules as motors, bearings, and moving parts to build tiny ‘robot’ arms which will themselves be able to handle individual molecules”, speculates Drexler.  In an intriguing passage, Drexler even describes in glowing detail how nanomachines could “grow” a space-ship engine in a vat.  Matured molecule by molecule from dissolved raw materials impregnated with a ‘seed’ (a programmed DNA molecule with stored engine plans) in a matter of hours, this engine could be self-healing and “change shape like muscle … remodelling its fundamental structure” to suit varying conditions.

As a heady combination of genetic and molecular engineering processes, nanotech has radical implications beyond even vat-grown spaceships. New limbs, organs or extra ‘memory space’ (i.e. neural networks) could be grown in-situ by merely injecting a live subject with a ‘seed’.  Mind-drugs synthesised from the convoluted shapes of DNA information that express flavours, smells, feeling, events in the human brain are another possibility that’s already being talked about on the pages of Time magazine.  The idea of ‘Quantum computers’ has also been doing the rounds for decades (with even a few ‘primitive’ prototypes currently under construction) – these machines will be ‘grown’ with nanotech and will, like DNA, use photons (light) and not electrons (electrical impulses) to process and transmit information.

Mutating radically under the influence of technology, there’s no limit to what could be achieved now that we have finally “opened the book of life and read the language of DNA” (to quote biologist Edward Wilson).  New information networks, surpassing today’s internet by a trillion-fold could be modelled on the sophisticated DNA-enabled bacterial and the mycelenial networks that already permeate every inch of topsoil on planet earth.  Bacterial DNA, in fact, makes the perfect information carrier. Capable of relaying more data than hundreds of supercomputers combined, bacterial DNA could be reassembled into complex metapheromonal packages that can be easily absorbed by the human body simply through touch, transmitting the most complex thoughts humanity can achieve directly to the neural cortex without the need for any external hardware. Humans, along with every single form of organic life on planet earth, are already fully ‘wired’ for this type of DNA exchange.

Will there even be a moment of doubt as biotechnologists and engineers ready themselves for a plunge back into the fluid networks and uncertainties of the treacherous genomic ocean? “I doubt it”, suggests evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. “Although I think that we desperately need to put our own attempts at nanotech and genetic ‘engineering’ on hold until we truly understand all the potential dangers involved.” Tech-guru and software pioneer Bill Joy concurs: “biological species almost never survive encounters with advanced competitors … superior nanobots (tiny, molecule-sized robots would surely affect humans as humans have affected countless ‘inferior’ species”.  Although humans have become accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, Joy seems to believe that perhaps we have become a little too complacent.

Our most compelling and promising twenty first century technologies, in his estimation, could pose a very different threat from the technologies that preceded them.  “Specifically, engineered organisms and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor”, explains Joy.  “They will be heuristic [adaptive and self-teaching] and capable of self-replication.  A bomb is blown up only once — but one nanobot can become many, and quickly get out of control”.