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That’s one of the more powerful counterarguments against “Drexlerism.” Nanotech already exists. It’s called biology and it has already spent a billion years exploring the combinatorial space of what molecular machinery can do. Indeed it has evolved a lot of very exotic molecular machines that do seem to take advantage of quantum effects in various ways.

We are grey goo, and are currently working to build rockets to go out and continue converting the entire solar system and eventually the universe into grey goo.

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How is that a counterargument to Drexlerism? The fact that it already exists would seem to make it more likely that human engineering will leverage it.

Yeah but the human engineering you are looking for is mostly called biotech.

I think the argument is that there just isn’t a novel field here. Drexler tried to carve one out where none exists to make himself and his followers look like they invented something when they did not.

Nanotech is really just gloss on biology, materials engineering, or chemistry, all of which are well aware of quantum scale effects and use them.

Biology has a pretty limited set of building blocks to work with.

Drexler specifically wanted assemblers that could work with aluminum and that could do some extra stuff with carbon that biology can't do.

> Biology has a pretty limited set of building blocks to work with.

Not that small: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Periodic-representations...

Proteins can bind and use all kinds of other elements and the combinatorial space is enormous.

Nature/evolution is working on a macroscopic scale, too, for billions of years. Still, there was and is a lot of "combinatorial space" for human engineers to explore, like inventing the wheel, for example, with which nature didn't bother.

>We are grey goo, and are currently working to build rockets to go out and continue converting the entire solar system and eventually the universe into grey goo.

In fairness, we are green goo and it's not like the universe was doing anything better with it's atoms. (We're also not likely to succeed much within the solar system, and almost certainly not likely to succeed outside of it.)

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