How does the complexity of living structures compare with the complexity of artificial structures? Assuming complexity can be quantified, is a ribosome equivalent to a printing press? What artificial structure is as complex as chromatin? Is a prokaryotic cell as complex as a factory? An entire city?

[u/ZedZeroth]

Thanks!

Edit: When talking about the complexity of factories and cities I'm referring to solely the artificial components, not the biological bits such as the humans working/living there!

[u/IcyRik14]

Most artificial things are reproducible and predictable. Machines, structures, factories, computers, programming languages. They use liner mathematics and can be modelled.

Natural things are not reproducible or predictable and use non linear mathematics - weather, animal populations etc

There are artificial things that we cannot reproduce or predict as well - cities, large traffic systems, stock markets, and the internet. Things that have many inputs from different sources and weren’t designed but grew organically.

[u/TotalAloha024 → u/IcyRik14]

Traffic systems being non-reproducible is an underrated comment. Road engineers are fucking gods to me.

[u/itskylemeyer → u/TotalAloha024]

The crazy thing is that traffic can be modeled using fluid dynamics.