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IEET > Security > SciTech > Vision > Bioculture

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How to Destroy the Earth with Gray Goo

Ransom Riggs

Posted: Mar 9, 2009

(Hat tip to Boing Boing) Director Ransom Riggs used motion capture for the animation. Dramatizes the fanciful “gray goo” scenario, in which a hapless would-be evil genius unleashes a plague of nanorobots to devour the earth.

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COMMENTS

Lynn Edward Carroll • United States of America • Mar 31, 2009

Well done. Good point too! Theoretically, fungi could cover the earth in a short time, but nature has built in a mechanism to halt their growth after a certain point. Nano tech could create a replicating nanobot and unless there were a built-in inhibitor, your little scenario could come true. Brrrrrr! I really enjoyed the flick.

Jannet Mondragon • 3 • Sep 30, 2010

wow this was awesome

Valkyrie Ice • • Sep 30, 2010

And I will say this YET AGAIN.

Any nanobot "carbonvore" would indeed grow exponentially... untill the carbon in the center was all consumed, at which point without a system to transport carbon from the exterior to the interior, the mass would "starve", greatly reducing the speed at which the mass could expand. Each "doubling" of mass would require the square of the previous amount of carbon to double again, making exponential growth unsustainable.

It the same law that keeps elephants from being the size of whales. As no "grey goo" is going to have the ability to create resource distribution networks to maintain equal resource distribution, the ability of it to "consume the planet" is VASTLY OVERSTATED.

It makes a great scary scenario though. Pity no-one applies common sense and basic biological science to it.

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