Science Quote by K. Eric Drexler

Drexler’s sentence has the calm, slightly stunned cadence of someone describing a personal epiphany while quietly smuggling in a revolution. The key move is his framing: “eventually” and “virtually” temper the claim just enough to sound like sober forecasting, not sci-fi evangelism. Yet the core idea - molecular machines that “arrange atoms” into “any pattern” - is a polite way of saying manufacturing becomes programmable at the level of matter itself. The understatement is the point. If you state that plainly, you sound like you’re selling a utopia; if you tuck it into a chain of “consequences,” you invite the reader to do the unsettling arithmetic.

The specific intent is to justify why nanotechnology isn’t merely a new tool but a new phase of capability, like computation was for information. He’s not pitching one invention; he’s arguing for an entire landscape of downstream effects. That open-endedness (“an awful lot”) functions rhetorically as a warning label: the consequences are too numerous to responsibly enumerate in a single breath, which is also a way of conceding uncertainty without surrendering urgency.

Context matters: Drexler emerged in the late Cold War/early personal-computing era, when big technological narratives oscillated between liberation and catastrophe. His subtext echoes that mood. If you can build anything, scarcity, supply chains, and even military balance shift. The sentence’s restraint masks the real provocation: governance and ethics will lag behind fabrication, and the world will be remade by whoever learns to write the “code” of matter first.