Grey Goo (Was: ChemistryQuestion)
Mikko Parviainen 15 May 2014 08:39 UTC
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 05:43:57PM +1000, Tim wrote:
> That's one reason why I don't fear a "grey goo" scenario where
> self-replicating nanomachines eat everything: most stuff is just too
> damn useless to be worth the difficulty of processing it.
I have sometimes wondered how much better the new "grey goo" should
be compared to the current one. As it is, there are quite a lot of
self-replicating nanomachines at almost all places, trying to eat
everything, or at least everything organic, and we don't seem to be
being overrun by it.
One *could* argue that we are slaves to the grey goo, though.
Every human carries quite a lot of it inside, and would be in trouble
without it. There's of course a bit of common evolutionary ground
and a lot of time of symbiosis there.
--
Mikko Parviainen
http://pare.iki.fi/blog/