Who can we blame for all this? Molecular manufacturing
enthusiasts trace the idea to 1959 and Nobel laureate Richard
Feynmann's famous lecture "There's Room at the Bottom". In it,
he suggested that it ought to be possible to rearrange atoms
"the way we want…all the way down." Far enough down, he said,
"all of our devices can be mass produced so that they are
absolutely perfect copies of one another." (This idea raises the
possibility of hardware-sharing wars far worse than today's
copyright battles.) "The principles of physics, as far as I can
see, do not speak against the possibility of manuvering things
atom by atom." The problem: our fingers are too big. The next
step wasn't until the early 1980s: Eric Drexler, in his popular
book Engines of Creation. Drexler posited the idea of general-
purpose molecular assemblers and also the problem of "grey goo"
which, Phoenix says ruefully, "is still haunting the industry".
If a really small manufacturing machine escaped and fed off the
biosphere, sucking up chemicals