Man vs God...!!!

I was reading a book on Nano-Technology, the other day and the introduction chapter was so attractive that I thought, it should go on my blog. So, here goes..

“ Man has learned a lot from nature. Yet his manufacturing practices are primitive. Everyone knows that a lot more needs to be done to get closer to nature. For Ex, no one has reached the efficiency of photosynthesis in storing energy. No one can facilitate energy transfer (or electron transfer) as efficiently as bio-molecules. No factory does water purification and storage as efficiently as coconut trees or water melons. The brain of one person can, in principle store and process more information than today’s computer. It is unlikely for any movie camera to capture visuals more vividly than the human eye. The olfactory receptors of the dog are much more sensitive than any sensors we have developed.

Photo-voltaic devices convert light with only 16% efficiency.. Our best internal combustion engines work at only 52% efficiency. While cooking, we use 38% of thermal energy produced by gas. But our body utilizes almost the entire chemical energy, it produces. Nature as a whole fixes 110-120 billion tons of carbon per annum through photosynthesis. We humans emit only 0.65 billion tons of carbon dioxide through respiration. But carbon emissions due to human activity alone constitute 8 billion tons, 77.5% of which is due to burning of fossil fuels alone. Obviously the technologies we have developed are much less efficient than those operating in nature. But most importantly, the benefits accruing from the processes and machines developed by us are incongruent with the huge amounts of resources we utilize for these developments. “
It was very enlightening for me. I had never looked at technology in that perspective before…!!!