If you wish to make a human being from scratch…
Start with enough oxygen to fill a freight container. Then add an amount of hydrogen that fills 4,700 party balloons. Find enough carbon to load up a water softener and add that too. Throw in a pinch of calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. Sprinkle in some copper, iodine, and chromium. Mix with evolution and wait a few billion years. That’s the recipe for you—what universe threw into a biological cauldron like a witch and produced, maybe cackling as it did so. But cosmic time is too long to wait. With a top-of-the-line atom reassembler, the resourceful mad scientist can create an army of human drones overnight. The recipe for a human doesn’t fill up a shopping list as you may suspect. Just twenty-two elements can describe almost all of the molecules that are, at this moment, you. Not only do we ...
