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(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.
Posted by Lynn Edward Carroll on 03/31 at 11:26 AM
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.
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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