gray goo n.

One night I went to the MIT Nanotechnology Study Group with Eric Drexler... I had asked Eric’s wife, Chris Peterson, about the darker side of the technology. Chris, an MIT chemistry graduate, said, ‘It’s called the gray-goo problem among people who have started to think about this.’ She then went on to describe scenarios in which bacteria-size robots could prove more devastating to life on Earth than even nuclear bombs…. Such bacteria-size robots would multiply insanely, mindlessly consuming anything and everything that was carbon based, which is to say all life upon the planet, after which the robots could begin eating the rocks, eating the very planet upon which they had been created.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the ‘gray goo problem’. Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term ‘gray goo’ emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass…. The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: we cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.

On the far bank bulked the black silicrobe-built bubble the authorities had hastily erected around MIT five years ago, during the Gray Goo Boo-boo.

The containment worked. Although nanomachines were assembled constantly for tasks as diverse as ferreting oxygen atoms out of the regolith and building spacecraft structures of pure diamond out of carbon dust from asteroids, there had been no runaway ‘gray goo’ of nanomachines devouring everything in their path, no plagues of nanobug diseases.

Prince Charles supports the nano-rapture or grey-goo scenario, where the chance, deliberate or just plain miraculous invention of molecule-sized architects skilled in the ways of raw matter build us all our ideal homes.

Rather than study or contact distant habitable worlds, this ATC’s probes might drop big asteroids on them. Or dust worlds with replicators, setting off nanotech/gray-goo catastrophes.

‘The humans are that scared of me?’ ‘Gray goo, remember? Eat everything, perpetual replication until all resources are consumed. If they think you can resist their efforts to shut you down, their only option is to make sure you no longer exist.’