How far have silicon life forms come, compared to our own carbon-based selves?
Mother Nature engineers everything bottom up. She works at atomic, molecular, cellular and reproductive levels, with evolution taking a very slow hand in generation-by-generation change. Conversely, we start from bulk materials and work down towards the atoms and invoke massive change in a very short time, and by design we are far more disruptive than genetics. Only now we also have the ability to modify the bottom up approach, by building an atom at a time using nanotechnology and by adjusting the gene structure of biological entities and thereby the direction of evolution. Alarmists have painted a picture of our ultimate collapse brought about by interfering with what they consider to be God’s creation. I prefer a more optimistic view that can be explained as follows: If we were take a sheet of rubber and stretch it out across the entire area of a room and scatter a handful of very heavy ball bearings onto the sheet to produce a distribution of deep depressions, we can think of these
