Note, that Life only involves some 500 chemicals from the 6000 known chemicals.
Those numbers are far too low.
Just consider proteins. The human genome has something like 20,000 genes.
"Following the hypothesis of "one gene = one protein," there should be at least ~20,000 nonmodified (canonical) human proteins. Taking into account products of alternative splicing (AS), those containing single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) arising from nonsynonymous single-nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs), and those that undergo PTMs, as many as 100 different proteins can potentially be produced from a single gene. Of the many different terms proposed to describe protein variants, here, we chose "protein species" or "proteoforms"...
The number of different proteins comprising the human proteome is a core proteomics issue. Researchers propose numbers between 10,000 and several billion different protein species. Here, we describe the theoretical prediction for the number of different proteoforms that might arise from AS, SAP or PTM events...
Applying these numbers to the equations (N = 20,043), we estimate that in humans there exist 0.62 or 0.88 or 6.13 million protein species."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4889822/
It's still a pretty wide range, but 600,000 to 6 million different kinds of proteins gives us a ballpark figure.
Considering that proteins' functions are often a function of their elaborately folded shape, with active sites that fit, like locks into keys into other chemicals, considering that proteins operate like gritty little nanomachines, selectively pumping specific chemicals across membranes, considering that they comprise the ubiquitous enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions throughout the cell, and the complexity starts to become apparent.
http://www.biology-pages.info/P/Proteins.html
Just restricting our attention go prokaryotes like bacteria. I think that it's safe to say:
No human machine ever made even approaches a simple bacterium in complexity.
Write4U said:
Single celled organisms consist of a few purely bio-chemical polymers encased in a single membrane and do not require trillions of perfectly knit chemical reactions to function quite efficiently.
Perhaps not trillions, but certainly many thousands. The material inside even the simplest cell, its cytosol, isn't just a featureless goop. It's a jostling and seething mass of molecules, like tiny machines on the atomic level. The cell membrane isn't just a plastic bag, it's... busier... than that.
http://www.biology-pages.info/D/Diffusion.html#active
From David Goodsell,
The Machinery of Life, Springer 2005, p. 9:
"The human body is a living, breathing example of the power of nano-technology. Almost everything happens at the atomic level. Individual molecules are captured and sorted, and individual atoms in these molecules are shuffled from place to place, building entirely new molecules. Individual photons of light are captured and used to direct the motion of individual electrons through electrical circuits. Molecules are packaged and transported expertly over distances of a few nanometers. Tiny molecular machines... orchestrate all of these nanoscale processes of life. Like the machines of our modern world, these machines are built to perform specific tasks efficiently and accurately. These tasks, however, are molecule-sized tasks and the molecular machines in cells have been perfected to operate at the level of atoms."
Addressing bacteria, much simpler than the eukaryotic human cells...
"
Escherichia coli is currently the most-studied cellular organism known to science... Study of
Escherichia coli cells played a major role in many of the seminal discoveries of biochemistry, including the genetic code, glycolysis, and the regulation of protein synthesis... More recently, scientists have been looking a whole cells and trying to figure out the way that the parts work together.
Escherichia coli was one of the first organisms to be fully sequenced, so we can now look at its genome to see the entire set of plans needed to specify all of its proteins... we are very close to having a complete parts list and specification for this well-studied cell...
The most plentiful ingredient in a typical
Escherichia coli cell is water, making up about 70% of the weight of the cell. The other 30% is comprised of proteins, nucleic acids, ions and all the other molecules....The genome encodes over 4,300 different protein chains and another 191 different RNA molecules. These perform an estimated 1250 enzymatic reactions and 255 transport tasks. About 1220 types of small molecules, including amino acids, nucleotides, sugars and a host of others, circulate through the spaces in between the larger molecules...
The cell must also control when and where each gene is used. The information held in the DNA genome is highly regulated. A host of repressors and activators interact with each gene, determining when it will be used to create proteins." (pp. 60-61)
http://www.biology-pages.info/L/LacOperon.html
http://www.biology-pages.info/T/Transcription.html
