• Question: Humans are made of different elements joined together. If you put together the elements can you make an artificial human????

    Asked by nuha to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark on 23 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 23 Nov 2011:

      The complexity to build a Human from the elements it is made from would be immense! If you had the time, computing power and ability then yes – but that is either very very futuristic or just Sci Fi.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 23 Nov 2011:

      Yeah, the problem is that the average human will have something like 2000000000000000000000000000 atoms in them. It would be really hard to get these all in the right arrangement.

      It’s really amazing that our bodies know how to grow themselves. If you think about writing down the instructions to arrange 2000000000000000000000000000 atoms in just the right order then they would be massive. You probably couldn’t store them on all of the computers in the world.

      But, amazingly enough, every cell in your body has the instructions right there in the DNA. It really is the most incredibly clever system, way more advanced than anything we’ve ever invented.

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 23 Nov 2011:

      Hi nuha,

      As an interesting point, if we could assume it was possible, and had a factory which could assemble atoms at a billion atoms per second, it would take about 63419583967 years to assemble a human 🙂

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