Prince Charles called upon the British Royal Society to investigate the "enormous environmental and social risks" of nanotechnology in a planned report, leading to much media commentary on gray goo.
Within days, the planet is turned to dust." Early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms.At the end of ten hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion.In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all the planets combined — if the bottle of chemicals hadn't run dry long before.'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.