Marshmallow fluff is nanotech

There is a food in my kitchen that I haven't had in years. I'm convinced it contains nanotechnology.

Let me back that up a bit.

My dogs take several medications. In order to get a dog to take pills, one must first mask it in a food. Liver sausage, cream cheese, maybe a beer (I kid, but there is a non-alcoholic beer available for dogs). At our house, we use peanut butter. That is until our vet told us that it would be a good idea if Butterscotch ate as little fat as possible from now on. Peanut butter, or the brands I've looked at anyway, averages at around 19 grams of fat per serving. I asked the vet what else we might use.

"Marshmallow fluff," she said. "It has zero fat."

So I got the fluff and sure enough the dogs like it just fine. It's been a treat for me too, as I haven't had it probably since I was a teen. Now I'm indulging in plenty of fluffernutters. And yet I've noticed something that has me curious. Here is a photo I took recently of the fluff:

You can see where I spooned out part of the mass. Those are the kind of scoop marks one expects when you use jars of peanut butter, mayonnaise, ice cream, sour cream, yogurt, and you get the idea. Now, here is a pic of the same fluff one hour later:

No scoops. No crevices. No scrapes. Nothing. It's like it had never been opened.

I scooped out more, then checked a half hour later. A smooth surface of fluff greeted my eyes.

I haven't actually sat down and observed the fluff in an uninterrupted fashion, but it appears that if you pierce or skewer the fluff, it eventually repairs itself and returns to its initial form. There is only one reason I can think of for a material to have these kinds of characteristics.

Nanotechnology.

Engines of Creation is a 1986 book by K. Eric Drexler. I was planning on assigning excerpts from it for my class on ethics and transhumanism, but, well...we all know what happened. But I digress...

Drexler imagined nano-sized devices, meaning invisible to the naked eye. These "universal assemblers" could build or even rearrange objects atom by atom. There are, obviously, all manner of applications for nanotech, from precision delivery of medicine or surgeries in the human body (not to mention completely erasing the need for dialysis) or removing pollutants from air and water. It could also, as Drexler warns, lead to perils such as the "gray goo" scenario, wherein self-replication of nanobots leads to them consuming all organic matter in their path, leaving behind, you guessed it, gray goo.

Could marshmallow fluff be "white goo"? One handy-dandy feature of nanotechnology would, after all, be self-repairing materials. Tears in clothes sew back up on their own, tires on cars never puncture, and fingers grow back even after nasty lawn mower accidents. I'm kidding on that last point, but only sort of. My point being, these attributes are, as I stated at the outset, seen in marshmallow fluff.

I found K. Eric Drexler's website. I've sent him an email asking about the fluff, but so far he hasn't gotten back to me. Looks like his last blog post was in 2014, so I don't know how much he's online these days. I'll let you know what he says.

Man. You'd think the makers of marshmallow fluff would really play up the nanotech angle in their marketing.

And before I get any mail telling me what a dope I am, I'll let you know that I can be quite the satirical blogger.


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