Nanomachines: Difference between revisions

For a long scale of sizes see e.g. [http://www.falstad.com/scale/ here]. But of what's relevant to nanoscale construction - a hydrogen atom is about <ref>on this scale things don't ''look'' blurry, they ''actually are'' quite blurry</ref> 0.1 nanometers across, ribosomes <ref>the part of a cell that builds proteins to received arbitrary data</ref> are around 20 (prokaryotic) to almost 30 (eukaryotic) nm long; [https://web.archive.org/web/20160809135552/http://classes.midlandstech.edu/carterp/courses/bio225/chap04/lecture2.htm bacteria] are in range of 200-2000 nm; visible light has a wavelength of 400-800 nm, a human cell nucleus is about 1700 <ref>it holds [http://bitesizebio.com/8378/how-much-information-is-stored-in-the-human-genome/ about 1.5 Gb]] worth of raw data - but note that it's ''the whole'' storage unit (though there's also another vital, but self-contained unit - in mitochondria), and in a form optimized for several uses and, shall we say, viable level of resilience, not for sheer density</ref>, and a human hair is about 100,000 nm wide. Which gives a good idea of limitations and complexity involved - and raises a question of at which point you have a nanorobot if you start with "cyborgizing" some bacteria.