K. Eric Drexler

But many people, including Ray Kurzweil, director at Google, have argued that such technology is less than 20 years away.

K. Eric Drexler, a PhD engineer from MIT, outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube that could perform 10 to the 21 operations per second.

And Robert Bradbury has conceptualized a hypothetical computing megastructure called a Matryoshka brain based on a planet-sized Dyson sphere that would have computing power on the order of 10 to the 42 operations per second.

Based on the highest number needed to simulate the brain, 10 to the 21, a total computing power of 10 to the 31 would be all that's needed to simulate the brains of every single person on Earth.

In 2018, there was a massive breakthrough.

A team of researchers at Oxford University, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, and Toby Ord, they looked at the Drake equation and decided to completely rebuild how we use it.

Their approach was brilliant.

They took those single overconfident point estimates and just threw them out entirely.

Listen and watch the run-through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

A subsequent book, Unbounding the Future, The Nanotechnology Revolution, which Drexler co-wrote, imagines some of the changes that might take place in a world where we had molecular-level assemblers.

Assemblers could make possible incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold by augmentation of the human immune system, essentially complete cleanup of the environment, incredibly inexpensive pocket supercomputers, in fact any product would be manufacturable by assemblers at a cost no greater than that of wood space flight more accessible than trans-oceanic travel today and restoration of extinct species i remember feeling good about nanotechnology after reading engines of creation as a technologist it gave me a sense of calm that is nanotechnology showed us that incredible progress was possible and indeed perhaps inevitable If nanotechnology was our future, then I didn't feel pressed to solve so many problems in the present.

I would get to Drexler's utopian future in due time.

I might as well enjoy life more in the here and now.

It didn't make sense, given his vision, to stay up all night, all the time.

Drexler's vision also led to a lot of good fun.

I would occasionally get to describe the wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it.

But the technology involved would produce, as a byproduct, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles.

In Engines of Creation, Eric Drexler proposed that we build an active nanotechnological shield, a form of immune system for the biosphere, to defend against dangerous replicators of all kinds that might escape from laboratories or otherwise be maliciously created.

But the shield he proposed would itself be extremely dangerous.

Nothing could prevent it from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself.