Turning Air Into Solids

[Rater202]

Going into more detail, Oxygen, Carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen collectively make up 96.2% of a human's mass.

While you couldn't make an entire human out of just air, the non-air elements that make up the mass of the average adult human would cost about US $7.83 to purchase, if you could buy only the exact amounts you need.

If you include the value of the air, it rounds up to about 24 bucks.

It's almost insulting how cheap it would be for someone who had this kind of people to make an entire person from scratch.

[Radar]

Going into more detail, Oxygen, Carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen collectively make up 96.2% of a human's mass.

While you couldn't make an entire human out of just air, the non-air elements that make up the mass of the average adult human would cost about US $7.83 to purchase, if you could buy only the exact amounts you need.

If you include the value of the air, it rounds up to about 24 bucks.

It's almost insulting how cheap it would be for someone who had this kind of people to make an entire person from scratch.

Oh yeah, if the ingredients are so simple to get, what could go wrong?

[Rater202]

Oh yeah, if the ingredients are so simple to get, what could go wrong?

To be fair, FMA assumes the existence of a discrete, immortal soul and that attempting to create life artificially is arbitrarily assigned an objective negative moral value.

The rules of alchemy making it impossible to resurrect a human being is a case of an author creating the rules of the setting in such a way as to reinforce the intended moral of the story.

Also, my understanding is that it is eventually established that that applies to bringing back someone who has died and that it's a relatively simple matter to create life if you don't particularly care about them being a specific individual or where their soul comes from.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Going into more detail, Oxygen, Carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen collectively make up 96.2% of a human's mass.

While you couldn't make an entire human out of just air, the non-air elements that make up the mass of the average adult human would cost about US $7.83 to purchase, if you could buy only the exact amounts you need.

If you include the value of the air, it rounds up to about 24 bucks.

It's almost insulting how cheap it would be for someone who had this kind of people to make an entire person from scratch.

And with a little sand they could make a supercomputer.

Heck, with that sort of an apparently inherent understanding of how to make stuff, they could probably create a warp drive from just what they can scrounge up over a 10 mile walk plus a few dozen dollars in exotic metals. And even that addition is mostly just them being too lazy to walk more.

It's not really a good comparison to actual realistic costs of production, and if we could produce things that way, raw materials would be more ecpensive. You could go broke just by breathing.

[Squire Doodad]

And with a little sand they could make a supercomputer.

Heck, with that sort of an apparently inherent understanding of how to make stuff, they could probably create a warp drive from just what they can scrounge up over a 10 mile walk plus a few dozen dollars in exotic metals. And even that addition is mostly just them being too lazy to walk more.

It's not really a good comparison to actual realistic costs of production, and if we could produce things that way, raw materials would be more ecpensive. You could go broke just by breathing.

Yeah, if you have this sort of power and stumble across, say, a mountain? You could easily go from nothing to making a bunch of machinery, drill and/or fly a plane to some place with uranium deposits and various rare-earth metals, then just...make most modern goods with a nuclear reactor powering it.

Assuming you know how to build all of that, of course.