In order to begin to understand how amazing a cell is, imagine if you could magnify a cell a thousand, million times, until it was as large as New York City and looked like a giant spaceship. On the surface of the cell-spaceship, you would see millions of doors, opening and closing to let some things in while keeping other things out.
If you would enter through one of these doors, you would see a spectacular sight: a maze of tunnels and hallways, with different things speeding along the tunnels on their way to different parts of the cell. Some of these tunnels would lead to different parts of the outer cell, but others would lead right to the nucleus, which would look like a huge glass ball filled with miles of neatly stacked DNA molecules.
All around you, within the huge spaceship, you would see all sorts of robot-like machines building, creating, destroying, all working perfectly. It would look like a factory full of the most advanced computers, a factory larger than a city. Oh, and not only that, but it would reproduce itself, down to the last detail, in just a few hours! Can you believe that every single cell in your body is as complex as the city-sized factory you’re imagining?
