Drexlerian nanotech

[Drashner1]

Well, by "reshaping entire systems" I thought we were talking about carving your face into every mountain on the planet or something like that. Not just thriving, which is entirely possible.

For things like reshaping mountains you could have the nanobots construct larger devices, which construct larger devices and so on up the chain until you have machines that can carve mountains with a minimum of fuss. Or possibly have the small initial machines 'grow' the mountain carving machines directly after they've initially spent time replicating up to sufficient numbers to quickly create the 'wombs' in which to grow the mountain carvers.

In a nutshell, there could be a number of different 'paths' by which one could go from individual nanobots to huge mountain carvers - the exact path likely would be based on experience with the tech and/or the environment that is being worked in.

Todd