Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recomendations — You’ve heard about the great gray goo fear — that a nanobot will replicate endlessly and eat the earth (and you too). Someone takes it seriously. Here’s the scoop.
Abstract
The maximum rate of global ecophagy by biovorous self-replicating nanorobots is fundamentally restricted by the replicative strategy employed; by the maximum dispersal velocity of mobile replicators; by operational energy and chemical element requirements; by the homeostatic resistance of biological ecologies to ecophagy; by ecophagic thermal pollution limits (ETPL); and most importantly by our determination and readiness to stop them. Assuming current and foreseeable energy-dissipative designs requiring ~100 MJ/kg for chemical transformations (most likely for biovorous systems), ecophagy that proceeds slowly enough to add ~4-degrees C to global warming (near the current threshold for immediate climatological detection) will require ~20 months to run to completion; faster ecophagic devices run hotter, allowing quicker detection by policing authorities. All ecophagic scenarios examined appear to permit early detection by vigilant monitoring, thus enabling rapid deployment of effective defensive instrumentalities.
Glad you asked? Now you know the buzzterm: ecophagy. Eeeew.
via Jurvetson photo blog
So it will be like the movie with Steve McQueen and the gal that played Andy’s girlfriend in the Andy Griffith show.
Dammit, just when I was thinking Nanotechnology would be soooooo cool. Sounded like it would have such great uses in medical tech, but now I’m thinking it could be harnessed as some super-weapon.
That looks like the Jump-to-Conclusions guy from Office Space!
Some Limits To Global Ecophagy By Biovorous— and thats when everything went blank and I heated up some alphabet soup in hopes that something would eventually make sense. And does anybody really think I’m going to get a dictionary and look up “ecophagy”?
The end is near! First we decoded the genome, then we get eaten alive by microscopic machines (the weak ones according to their genetic code). Next…they will resequence people to “perfection” (whatever that means).
Didn’t they do a Stargate SG1 episode about this?
Nano tech is very cool stuff, but I guess it could get out of hand if the design is not thought through…….
Actually…they did a few Stargate SG-1 episodes about this…
But it was cooler on Stargate SG-1 because these little nano suckers could fly in space…eat away on aliens too.
Go Replicators!