Last night, I watched a documentary about chaos. It spoke a lot of about systems "self-organising", referencing the work of Alan Turing, and the formula he used to determine the stripes on a zebra, and patterns on cows.

_{Image via PublicDomainImages / pixabay}

The one thing that struck me while watching the documentary is something that I've always thought about, but never considered or researched very heavily. What are the atomic, elemental building blocks of the human body? We of course know that most of the human body is water, but it's more interesting to look at it an atomic level. To me, at least:

The human body consists of:

Elemental	% of total body weight
Oxygen	65
Carbon	18.5
Hydrogen	9.5
Nitrogen	3.2
Calcium	1.5
Phosphorus	1
Potassium	0.4
Sodium	0.2
Chlorine	0.2
Magnesium	0.1
Sulfur	0.04
Others	0.36

_{Data in table adapted from Ask A Biologist.}

How then, does consciousness manage to manifest itself from these assorted atomic masses? If I were to go to the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen shops, purchase some, and add dashes of the other essential atomic elements for human life, why can't I put it in a mixing bowl, and voila, new human?

_{Image via qimono / pixabay}

No doubt it could be possible, if you were able to chain each and every atom in the exact sequence we find it in the human body; but what would that person be like? Would they be like the one that we copied? Is it even possible to "copy" things on an atomic level.

Yes, we have genetic engineering, in order to introduce the most favorable traits into crops, animals, or even human embryos, but how far away are we from atomic engineering? By that, I mean very unscientifically, the engineering of atoms, into systems that mimic those of the human body.

I've recently been re-exploring the work of Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and continue to be intrigued by his work Simulacra and Simulations and wonder what an engineered human might be like. We have such a precious view of consciousness; yet sub-atomically, the random dance of electrons point to either a a completely chaotic universe, or a deterministic one.

The concept of free will and the general order of things that we classify and comprehend is not the concerns of atoms, sub-atomic particles, and the universe.

I'm not a religious individual. I try to understand the world around me with an interpretation of physics, chemistry, biology, and a large dose of nihilism, yet I remain rapt with wonder at the fact that plentiful, elemental particles that make up the world, make us up too.

To bring in Carl Sagan with some closing remarks: "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."