This is Dr. Adrian Bowyer, who alongside his team of engineers at the University of Bath in England, is working on a project called the RepRap; an open source 3-D printer - a self-replicating machine that will one day be able to print out all of its own parts.

It has been hailed as “the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment.” Well, maybe. I interviewed Bowyer for the book, and his thoughts on the future of capitalism and society after 3-D printers become widespread are profound. He wonders if the RepRap has the potential to “make a dent in the entire concept of money.”

Perhaps even scarier than the concept of this machine is the recent announcement from RepRap that they will achieve self-replication sometime this year.

Nano philosophers foresee that one day (some estimate around 2010) it will be possible to create a nano assembler: a man made molecule, that is `programmed' to create certain things out of raw materials. A nano assembler would for instance pick up plain carbon atoms and rearrange them into the molecular structure of a diamond. Or it would make water out of the atomic parts of plain air. Or a cheese sandwich out of dust. Or water into wine, you name it.

This notion is not as weird as it sounds. Our DNA- and RNA-molecules do it all the time! They pick up the raw materials from our food, and turn them into complex molecules. DNA and RNA are nano assemblers that manufacture whole organisms, with arms and legs, and fingers that can type the word `nanotechnology'.

So, if a nano factory can be programmed to create a cheese sandwich out of atoms, why wouldn't it be able to create new nano factories? This in fact is exactly the way it will be, at least according to nanopioneers like K. Eric Drexler. Let's face it: it's a hell of a job to build a nano machine by hand. It would be much easier to make nano machines that are capable of copying themselves, much in the way DNA-molecules replicate themselves. Nano scientists claim it is even essential for a nano machine to be self-replicating. Since they are so tiny, we would need millions of them to be of any use. It would take a lifetime to make them all by hand. Nano factories are thus by definition Von Neumann machines: devices capable of creating new copies of themselves.

But there's a nasty downside. What will such a self-replicating nano machine do if you carelessly tossed it away? You guessed it: it would go on grabbing all atoms within reach, rearranging them into copies of itself. And the copies would make more copies of themselves. And those copies would make even more copies of the copies of the copies. And so on.

No, you just DON'T want to know what this means. Within only 72 hours after the release of the first molecular nano machine, every single atom on earth would be `used' to create new nano machines. In other words, all plants, animals, humans, cars, buildings and even rocks would have been `eaten up' by a vast, exponentially growing army of invisibly small nano devices.

Devices that can make copies of itself will end civilization as we know it. Read through this article and you'll know what I mean. I'm sure alot of scientists would argue against what the article says but still it makes a lot of sense.

Why does that remind me of Prey all of a sudden?