GREY GOO: Nanomachine Apocalypse

[Music] oh don't start on that again yes i know you could have theoretically simulated more futures of doctor strange and saved us all like three hours and a lot of money it's not the point oh hello on the spectrum of really scary technology you have both the incredibly large and the incomprehensibly small on one end you have planet size computers that tell you with 99 certainty how you're gonna die every day thanks jb and on the other end you have machines so small they could mess with you molecularly and on this side of the spectrum is where i want to stay today and examine one of the most famous technological apocalypses out there what is gray goo and how likely is it to end all life on earth well i'm going to need some more coffee for this one now entering the facility in his 1986 book engines of creation nanotechnology pioneer k eric drexler was imagining machines so small they'd be smaller and simpler than any living thing but like living things he thought that these machines could be programmed to take material from the environment and use it to replicate themselves you know like humans do with alcohol and netflix in theory these self-replicating nano machines could be incredibly useful in everything from manufacturing to medicine able to with countless tiny atom size arms disassemble anything and reassemble it element by element into anything else draxler's vision though came with a pretty big red flag if tiny machines like this malfunction drexler speculated then they might start disassembling stuff indiscriminately and taking all relevant fuel to replicate themselves on earth's surface trees kevin people the atmosphere kevin rivers and they would be replicating too quickly for us to stop them drexler called this nano machine nightmare goo now i think most people myself included were under a misconception about what gray goo really means drexler didn't use this terminology to indicate color or texture he meant bland and uninteresting a nano machine that could out-compete bacteria or any other flora or fauna on the planet earth need not be evolutionarily fancy or interesting just gray this terrible capacity of a nano machine replicator has now become a sci-fi staple and to really understand why you need to grasp exponential growth there are a number of ways to describe how some value can increase over time and the first linear growth is i think the easiest to understand so if something is increasing by a consistent amount over some time period like your hair growing a millimeter or five millimeters every month that is linear growth there's also polynomial growth where some value is increasing to some fixed exponent over time like squared or cubed and finally what we're concerned with exponential growth is when some value is increasing to an exponent but that exponent depends on time a population of bacteria doubling themselves every few minutes is an example of exponential growth as is the number of expanding covid19 cases among very very intelligent people on florida beaches now as you can see from the graph the danger with exponential growth specifically is that things can get out of control very quickly and oh i need my ti-89 titanium for this next bit one second hey so has anyone seen kyle and felicity smoke from arrow in the same room at the same time just saying now if you've ever been exposed to exponential growth it was likely in the context of high school biology so let's start with the equations usually found there the exponential growth equation in its general form is p equals p e r t now i remember it as pert because that's a kind of shampoo shampoo but what it says is some exponentially growing population is equal to the initial population size multiplied by the irrational number e to the power of some growth rate constant times time now we need to figure out why drexler would be so worried about nanobots so let's use a more realistic example with high school biology and bacteria so if we have one bacteria that say doubles its population size every 20 minutes we can solve for the growth rate constant with a little bit of math and then we can start plugging in time values to see how much bacteria we'd end up with so i'm going to go with a little under 48 hours or two days and we end up with now that's a lot of bacteria but i chose the 48 hours figure very intentionally because if each bacteria weighs about a trillionth of a gram then in under 48 hours under perfect conditions a single bacteria could grow into a colony that weighs more than the planet earth yeah similarly theoretically nanobots could explode in the same way and you could see why drexler might be worried about that but like i said these are perfect conditions and this is just math on your standard ti-89 titanium not a sponsor would this ever come to pass in the real world no but seriously has anyone seen them together it's weird right like many more realistic world ending scenarios grey goo has become very popular across all forms of sci-fi media and the nerds who have written these stories have thought up a lot more colors than just gray take the nerds at the website orion's arm they've thought up khaki goo which is military and weaponized nanotechnology the blue goo that fights off this more malicious nanotechnology and even the golden goo which is released into the environment with a specific intent on picking out precious materials like gold from something like seawater like a nanotechnology apocalypse human inventiveness knows no bounds now that we understand exponential growth we can use that knowledge to evaluate the likelihood of death by a trillion tiny hands picking you apart until there's nothing left but molecular sludge and nano machines the first real scientific dissection of this nano machine apocalypse was in 2000 by robert freitas jr in a paper entitled some limits to global ecophagy by biverous nanoreplicators and in this paper use some extrapolations of current nanotechnology and a lot of math to give some timetables for the worst case gray goo scenario first we need to evaluate the machines what are they well at their simplest they're maybe 70 million atoms constructed into a base a power source and a tiny manipulator arm and fridas junior is thinking of this arm moving at maybe one centimeter per second performing a million atomic pick in place operations and for fuel they'd be using anything available on the surface of earth if we just look at carbon like frieda's jr did then we're talking about roughly 23 percent of the mass of the biosphere on earth 23 of everything that you probably care about even lola easy girl it's just a hypothetical no what's arrow now we use our exponential growth math what we want to know is how long it will take a single rogue nanoreplicator to turn all the available carbon on earth into gray gooby leaving just sludge and other nanobots behind so let's plug in some numbers estimating both the carbon in the biosphere and the mass of a single nanobot that replicates every 100 seconds or so a reasonable time according to friedis jr we can start guessing how long death by grey goo will take do the diligence here and you find that more or less everything on the surface of earth will become either grey goo nano machine or molecular sludge in under two hours think about this in some future sci-fi scenario a scientist unfortunately drops a beaker on a ground and then before someone on the other side of the planet has time to watch a movie and then leave their theater everything is either a little nano machine picking apart things atom by atom or useless shapeless it's an incredibly breathtakingly swift end to civilization and a nanoreplicator's ability to do this is why this idea has endured as apocalyptic for so long and yes that is a badass term that i just coined oh what's that oh movie theaters oh sorry movie theaters were places where dozens of people used to gather for hours and watch movies and cough on each other's nachos i know it's crazy i can't even imagine a time when people did that since we're getting technical here you know we can't just leave it at that because yes in theory replicating nano machines could spiral out of control very quickly but in the real world they'd be limited by real world factors like geography available fuel ambient temperature and even shape of the swarm as it spreads out and so the study that we've been considering by frieda's junior looked at a more plausible scenario an accidental release of a single nanobot into the earth's atmosphere now if the earth's atmosphere has an average wind speed average wind speed of around 10 meters per second then with a lot of math which we won't go through today friday's junior concludes that it would take not two days to cover every square meter of the earth's surface but 30 days yeah that's still bad but we'd see it coming now arriving oh gotta mess up because i'll be near other people and i'm conscientious and there's a pandemic hey putting on that mask looked pretty easy you're right arya it was easy once we start to factor in more realistic variables the idea of grey goo being an end to all life on earth starts to well disassemble itself you see in conversations about grey goo i've almost never seen something very important mentioned that dr freitas points out and that's waste heat now machines don't just work through the environment and do their little business they have to lose some energy to the environment in the form of heat that's just how thermodynamics works that's important here because these little machines in that two-day doomsday scenario would be putting out so much heat they'd be literally vaporizing the fuel they were trying to use like incinerating entire cows and stuff and this would force the swarm to move more slowly it would have to and this isn't considering a world where nanobots are a thing they're not now you'd imagine that when nanobots were a possible apocalyptek that we'd have agencies and satellites on the watch for thermal signatures of rogue swarms and if they were thermally undetectable against background frieze jr estimates they would have to move so much more slowly than even the 30 days more like 20 months now when you put all this together and not even including safeguards against apocalyptec and uh defense countermeasures and all that stuff it just doesn't seem like this is a really plausible end of the world grey goo i i think you can scratch it off your 2020 bingo card until next time i'm felicit i'm kyle i'm me now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this video today especially i want to recognize research assistant neil hoogenhout and visiting scholar shelby bradford if you want to get on the facility staff today if you want to join the over 1200 nerds that are on discord talking to me 24 7 giving me episode ideas getting episodes a day early having private live streams with me not those kinds i don't have an only fans and show me in their pictures of dogs and cats and spiders and stuff you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and get on the staff today and if you support the facility just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i don't know how to pass the drexler to his credit didn't just put the gray i the grey goo idea out there and just let it run over science fiction not say anything he spent a lot of time in his career talking about stop focusing on grey goo it's not plausible we should really be trying to get ready for the coming nanotechnology revolution and focus on more plausible ideas instead of this fun but probably not gonna happen thing and yes i know i'm focusing a lot on grey goo you know like many minutes and hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on it and it's it's not a basilisk situation it's fine right thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 397,377

Rating: 4.9001045 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, end of the world, grey goo, robots, drexler, nanomachines, nanobots, apocalypse

Id: oQt6q_TZDkQ

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020