The Speculist

There appears to be little danger of the grey goo scenario, however. When the population density reaches 150,000,000 per milliliter of liquid, these guys cease reproduction and settle into their work converting sugar into alcohol.

These "machines" are yeast. The scientist who isolated them in his lab was Louis Pasteur in 1857.

And now you know…the rest of the [copyrighted schtick truncated - ed.]

It's a point that's been made before, most famously in the Drexler-Smalley debates, but it bears repeating. Single celled life is "the ultimate existence proof of the feasibility of a molecular assembler." This is not a metaphor. Life is nanotech, literally. Our future nanobots may bear a striking resemblance to yeasts and other single celled life.

For this reason it may prove difficult for future scientific historians to pinpoint the moment when people start using self-assembling nanobots. We can already genetically alter bacteria to eat oil spills. Most people would not consider this technology nanotech or these organisms nanobots. The question becomes: how much tweaking is required before we consider a formerly natural organism to be an artificial nanobot?

I've recently adopted the hobby of home winemaking. About a week ago I was sitting in my home office typing when I began to feel dizzy. When I stood up I almost fell down. It turned out that the yeast in a one-gallon batch of wine I had fermenting over in the corner was filling the room with CO2. Subsequently I've learned that professional winemakers are often killed by both direct CO2 suffocation and from passing out and drowning in vats.

I keep a fan going and a window cracked now. I wonder how many people I would have to stuff in this room to fill it with that much CO2. More than a few - the room is not airtight. It's cooled with central air and the door is always open. Such was the industry of a single gallon of yeast-filled must over just a couple of days.

These hard-working organisms are impressive.

Special thanks to winemaker Jack Keller for his info on yeast and for sharing his award winning wine recipes.