Something New Under the Sun

Chapter One

"Nature is one of our great good words. To do things naturally, to go with the flow, to feel that we are in harmony with the principle that has sustained life on the planet for, according to our best guesses, more that three and a half billion years: all of these are naturally aspirations."

        Chapter one of The Gecko's Foot is a brief overview of what bio-inspiration is and what it is capable of doing. Bio-inspiration is a new kind of science that wishes to create technology using nature as a template. Since the human race is a dominant species, we have to start being more openminded about how we create technology, and the advances that could be made if we were able to start looking at things with a smaller perspective. This book is mostly about small things and how they interact with each other to make bigger things. For example, DNA is the building block of life but we need an advanced microscope to even be able to see it. It works as if it were designed by an engineer but it is nature that evolved to make DNA. Nature has been thought to be entirely different compared to technology. Nanotechnology has brought nature and technology far more closer together. Genetic engineering and newer techniques is what made it possible to look at nature's nanoengineering and to produce something similar to it (aka bio-inspiration).
        The biologist Helen Ghiradella wrote in 1991, "Many of us working in biological fields have perhaps unconsciously assumed that small things must be simple, at least more accessible to human understanding than those on a human scale. This may not be the case, and indeed, the further we investigate the more complexity we seem to find." So what lies between the line of the things that we can see and the things that we can not see?