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Saedius t1_ix5bcy3 wrote

Yes - although you'd have to ask at some point in time what constitutes the same molecule. With enough energy we can burn all the carbon into carbon dioxide, reduce the CO2 to methane, and use that to make every carbon skeleton extant, but I shudder at the budget. There are others as well. You could heat the alkane in the absence of oxygen to pyrolyze it. From that, one should be able to get a variety of aromatic scaffolds that you can elaborate to most aromatic structures. You'd expect yields in the fraction of a percent, and a reagent/energy budget that rivals the GDP of a small country.

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roundearthervaxxer t1_ix5colm wrote

Fascinating. Can you elaborate? Why so expensive?

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Joe_Q t1_ix5dfc7 wrote

Some of the transformations that would be required in u/Saedius' protocol would be so low-yielding, and / or the desired product such a small component of a complicated mixture, that you'd need to spend use a lot of time and resources to generate them in reasonable quantities and purify them.

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PlaidBastard t1_ix5pxqb wrote

The 'unlimited reagents' is kinda the thing that makes it trivial/uninteresting.

It's not only possible to know the sum amount you need of each element, if you know how much of each starting compound you have, you can estimate the energy input (or output) of the reactions to get from A to B regardless of which steps you take, depending on which parameters you vary and the type of thermodynamic system you're modeling.

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rootofallworlds t1_ix5oo22 wrote

Yes. Trivial demonstration: Disintegrate the molecule into its component atoms by heating it up to several thousand Kelvin, then repeat the same steps that made it in the first place.

This might not be the most practical process, with steps like "let a tree grow" and "bury the dead tree for 100 million years".

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darthy_parker t1_ix67j2f wrote

If you mean to turn any individual molecule directly into any other one, then likely no, because the first molecule would not have the exact elements required to make up the final one, and also, there’s no method available to manipulate individual molecules like that.

If you mean to convert a reasonably large amount of one molecular substance to a reasonable amount of another one, then yes, since you could always break it down fully into constituent atoms and then use the methods that were required in the real world to create the target molecule. But then you would just be synthesizing the final molecule from scratch, without really any reason to call it “made from the first molecule”, especially if other new components are required and/or others that were present in the first molecule are not required.

If you mean if there’s a process that goes short of complete breakdown of the first molecule? Probably not for every possible input/output pair.

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