What is the proper, or true relationship between humans, nature, and technology? The other night I scribbled a diagram on a post-it note. I just found the note, and made a cleaner version:

We are embedded in nature, whether we realize it or not. As individuals and as a species, living on a planet, nature is our context, now, and what gave birth to us in the past.

The word “technology” is derived from the Greek word “technos”, which means “art” or “craft”. I am using the word here to mean all things that humans create: tools, weapons, art, language, drugs, cities, civilizations – all artifacts.

Coming up the stairs from our apartment, I spied a couple of palm trees sprouting from the seeds that had dropped. There is a large Date Palm right at the top corner of this walkway. The walkways was recently covered in sand (decomposed granite actually), and apparently it provided proper conditions for the dropped dates to germinate. A few days ago they were just thin little green fingers, plain and straight, sticking up. Now that first vertical leaf is starting to develop the typical palm folds - the ones evolved over millions of years to survive wind and tropical storms.

It hit me: That all the amazing structure, all of a large tree, or any other organism, is contained within molecules within that seed. So much information unfolds, from a molecular scale, into a large creature.

Do we have anything to match this in a computer chip? Nature out shines all our technology, using atomic and molecular machinery. Though it’s not really machinery is it? An atom is captive vibrations, and a molecule is a structured collection of those.