Grey goo for House Majority Leader
"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop -- at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
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. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable. The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident.
Imagine the traffic jam that would cause.
(I'm not the first to make the connection. NYT columnist John Tierney wrote on Sep. 24: "Imagine that the Gulf Coast was inundated not with water but with a swarm of nanobots. These would be microscopic machines designed to break down substances like cancer cells in a body or pests in a farm field. But what if scientists accidentally created some superorganism that outcompeted all other life and wiped out everything on the Gulf Coast -- then spread like pollen around the world. What if they engineered nanobots that kept replicating and evolving until they broke down the substance of every living thing, leaving the planet covered in gray goo?")
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