Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody by Robert Brockway

surviving and functioning outside of their intended environment for long durations. And when you factor in how easily they could spread—their transferability by blood and other bodily fluids—you start to get a worrisome picture. One bad accident at the local zoo with somebody hosting these nanobots and next thing you know, you’ve got untiring, superspeed pythons racing through the streets and a terrifying new version of sea lion roaring at the bottom of your pool. In an instant, the food chain is drastically reordered. Though the chief concern for now is just the effect a modified species could have on its local ecosystem, any supercharge in the efficiency of predators is the last thing we need.
    After all, humans are only at the top of our food chain because we’re smart enough to compensate for our insane physical incompetence as a species. So … maybe you should start studying. Because pretty soon, a billion tiny robots might be seriously hot-rodding up some grizzly bears, and you? Well, let’s just say you’re going to have to get a hell of a lot smarter in a big hurry if you plan on making it back from the store with both arms.

10.
GRAY GOO
    IF YOU’RE TALKING about nanotechnology at a party, two things are assured:
Nobody is going to have sex with you in the foreseeable future, and …
Somebody will bring up the Gray Goo Scenario .
    The term “Gray Goo,” for those of you probably too busy boning right now to read this, describes the danger of self-replicating nanomachines running amok, forgoing any meaningful objectives in favor of just endlessly reproducing themselves like tiny little robotic Irish Catholics. The term was originally coined by a man named Eric Drexler in 1986, in his book Engines of Creation . He called it this partly because nanotech was just being recognized as the next industrial wave of the future, and also because the far more awesome title, “Engines of Destruction,” was already taken by three Swedish metal bands, two monster trucks, and one particularly shitty mechanic.
    In his book, Drexler writes of Gray Goo as something akin to the Midas touch, the simple wish that everything you touch turns to gold, which leads to you dying of starvation, because you cannot eat gold. Here the simple wish is that you didn’t have to build every single goddamned microscopic robot by hand, which leads to your limbs being eaten by robots. Because if you encourage incredibly simple nanobots to build more of themselves, the danger is that they won’t know when to stop pulling apart matter for its raw building materials, then using those appropriated materials to build more robots, which, in turn, will do the same thing. If left unchecked, the nanobots would eventually break down everything into its core elements, effectively restructuring the entire planet into robots. While the idea of an entire planet turning into a robot may indeed make a sweet-ass plot for the next Transformers movie, the unfortunate consequence would be the end of all life as we know it. Not exactly worth the trade-off, in my opinion.
Hindsight Is 20/20
“I guess we shouldn’t have ‘encouraged’ those robots to eat people in order to build more people eating robots.”
—Early nanotech scientist
    The terrifying notion of microscopic organisms pulling apart base matter and assembling more dangerous creatures isn’t exactly new. It was originally inspired by DNA, small molecules that break down raw materials and build more complex molecules from them. They gave structure to all life on Earth, and all a self-replicating nanobot does is follow this same concept, with the limiters pulled off. If you did the same thing to human beings, the results would be similar; we’re basically just destructive machines tearing up shit to build more of ourselves until there is nothing left on Earth but a mass of writhing bodies engaged in a gargantuan, planetary-scale accidental orgy.
    Luckily Eric Drexler wrote another essay years