Science Quote by K. Eric Drexler

Drexler is doing a quiet piece of rhetorical judo: he takes something that sounds impossibly futuristic and drags it down into the realm of the ordinary. “Basic parts” and “start-up molecules” are deliberately unglamorous phrases. They read like inventory, not sci-fi. That’s the point. By insisting these inputs “can be supplied in abundance” and needn’t come from “some elaborate process,” he’s preempting the most common dismissal of radical technologies: sure, it works on paper, but the prerequisites are too rare, too expensive, too pure, too magical.

The line carries the worldview of molecular nanotechnology’s early evangelists: progress isn’t blocked by physics-as-drama, but by engineering logistics. If the feedstock is cheap and plentiful, then the argument shifts from “Can we?” to “How fast can we scale?” and “Who controls the pipeline?” That’s the subtext lurking behind “simpler.” Simpler for whom: researchers prototyping in a lab, manufacturers imagining supply chains, or regulators trying to govern something that’s no longer constrained by scarce materials?

Context matters: Drexler’s work has long been defined by pushing against the intuition that sophisticated outputs require equally sophisticated inputs. This sentence is a persuasion tactic as much as a technical claim. It frames complexity as emergent and modular - a machine built from common stuff - which makes the idea feel not just plausible, but inevitable. Once you accept abundance at the bottom, the future stops looking like alchemy and starts looking like industry.