Re:Grey goo (Score 0)

And how does this little creature somehow synthesise diamond for it's mandibles? On a diet of animals and trees it's supposed to create the environmental conditions (45-60 kilobars & 900-1300C) for the creation of diamond? How does it mould them into mandibles? If you're going to make this lifeform exempt from following a realistic energy budget, then they might as well warp drives on their back for what it's worth. They can't exist because you ignored the bedrock, the very foundation of life, the main input: energy.

I know a guy who goes on similar flights of fancy with transhumanism. Even after I mention the current energy crisis (how we can barely support current fossil fuel consumption) and metal depletion (copper depletion at 26% and zinc depletion at 19%) he still believes that us living in server farms in a couple of years is a realistic scenario. Even after citing projections that complete depletion of certain key metals would occur if the OECD's current computer infrastructure were developed worldwide, he still won't listen. I don't understand how he can believe that the earth will be covered in even contemporary computer infrastructure anytime soon, let alone the ginormous dense grid required for the future Raymond Kurzweil envisioned.

But it's understandable. People easily get gripped by flights of fancy; crap based on a unquestioned assumptions; axioms of a contemporary episteme they operate within. Chief among these romantic ideals is: "Imagination is the only limitation on creation". Not true at all. There are plenty of limits and constraints on earth that govern what can continue on in this chain reaction of replication we call "life". There is a definite energy budget on earth. Save for radioactive decay in the mantle, only so much energy reaches each square metre of earth per day from the sun and only so much of that is available to do work. On this energy budget I think there is a definite limit to what can thrive; grey goo, cyborgs, run-away AI and other transhumanist wet-dreams not being among them. Fossil fuels being just concentrated sunlight from a time long past, the sun is still the ultimate supplier of energy and these fanciful creations people think up wouldn't be living within their means. Unfortunately for them the earth is a harsh banker. You either live on the stream of income from the sun, or you're gone; no entering the red or getting overdrawn. There is a budget and these pie-in-the-sky ideas ignore it.

Energy consumption is a necessity. It should be the first criterion when assessing whether something is realistic or not.