Science Quote by K. Eric Drexler

Drexler is quietly trying to snap his audience out of the comforting myth that technological progress is a neatly narrated staircase. The line is a wager: once nanotechnology becomes real engineering rather than speculative possibility, its trajectory will be determined less by the origin story and more by the instrument panel available at liftoff. It’s a futurist’s version of “path dependence” with the emphasis flipped. History matters, but mostly as a way of stocking the workshop.

The intent is pragmatic and a little provocative. By downplaying “the steps that got us there,” Drexler is pushing back against gatekeeping narratives: the idea that only certain lineages of research, certain institutions, or certain incremental milestones confer legitimacy. Nanotech, he suggests, will be a phase change. When the field “gets under way,” the decisive factor won’t be whether it emerged from chemistry, materials science, or molecular biology, but whether we can build, measure, simulate, and control at the relevant scales.

Subtext: stop arguing about the romance of the breakthrough and start investing in capabilities. Better microscopes, better atomically precise fabrication, better computational models, better metrology, better training. It’s also a warning about governance. If outcomes depend on “the tools we have then and our ability to use them,” responsibility shifts to whoever controls those tools and sets the norms for their use. In the Drexler universe, nanotechnology is not destiny; it’s leverage.

Context matters because Drexler wrote amid both hype and backlash, when “nanotech” was either a utopian panacea or a grey-goo punchline. This sentence is an attempt to reframe the debate: less prophecy, more preparedness.