Also what is grey goo and could it ever be possible?
In: 0
Nanotech is tiny machines, you’ll have some in your phone as accelerometers for example, tiny little moving parts that you’d need a scanning electron microscope to see.
The grey goo idea is if someone made a bunch of these tiny little robots that were made to self reproduce, they could end up like a virus, consuming any materials to reproduce.
There’s a good chance these sort of things might be impossible, eg there’s a limit for transistor size (the basic components of a computer processor and memory) where quantum tunnelling means stuff just keeps corrupting itself.
A basic transistor would be like a switch, on or off, which would be classed as a 1 or a 0 for binary memory. The rest of the processors arrays of thousands of these switches that do the computing. Quantum tunnelling puts a limit on how small these switches can be.
If you stick electrons inside this switch, it conducts and becomes “on”.
The issue is at tiny scales, the electrons can just jump in and out of the switches, part of quantum nature of electrons, and their wave function. – aka an electron would be somewhere in a tiny location, but it can just be anywhere in that area and if a transistor gate is small enough, that electron can just appear outside of it.
Anyway, the smaller you make these microscopic robots, the less brainpower and programming they can have, limited by the size of transistors, so you won’t get any self aware nanobots deciding to take over the world.
Latest Answers