Also what is grey goo and could it ever be possible?
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Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter on the near-atomic scale in order to produce various devices or materials. It is mainly at this point purely fiction/theoretical as we are not able to do such things. We are approaching such a point with things like our most advanced microchips though.
Nanobots are conceptually nano-scale robots capable of performing various tasks. Again we cannot actually make these and there are major hurdles to making them a reality. The idea of “grey goo” is a theoretical example of a danger posed by nanobots if they were made real. Ideally such robots could be commanded to replicate themselves rather than being produced by some other process, taking raw materials and assembling more nanobots. Conceptually such a process could run out of control if the nanobots were not able to be commanded to stop doing this task; they would continue to consume nearby material and make more nanobots without end.
The result would be a mass of “grey goo” that would convert anything it touched into more grey goo, wiping the planet clean until all that existed were nanobots. Such tiny robots would also be essentially undetectable and easily moved by air currents, meaning someone could get only one or two nanobots on them without any way of knowing. Those nanobots would continue their task of creating more nanobots until eventually they formed a visible mass and repeated the same inevitable destruction of everything.
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