People talk about the grey goo scenario, but I actually think that is quite silly because there is already grey goo all over the planet in the form of life” … ” nothing CAN do this, because nothing HAS done it.”
The grey goo scenario isn’t really very silly. We seem to have had a green goo scenario around 1.5 to 2 billion years ago that killed off many or most critters around due to release of deadly deadly oxygen; if the bacterial ecosystem were completely stable against goo scenarios this wouldn’t have happened. We have had mini goo scenarios when for example microbiota pretty well adapted to one species made the jump to another and oops, started reproducing rapidly and killing off their new host species rapidly, e.g. Yersinia pestis. Just because we haven’t seen a more omnivous goo sweep over the ecosphere recently …,
…other than Homo sapiens, which is actually a pretty good example of a grey goo—think of the species as a crude mesoscale universal assembler, which is spreading pretty fast and killing off other species at a good clip and chewing up resources quite rapidly…
… doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen at the microscale also. Ask the anaerobes if you can find them, they are hiding pretty well still after the chlorophyll incident.
Since the downside is pretty far down, I don’t think complacency is called for. A reasonable caution before deploying something that could perhaps eat everyone and everything in sight seems prudent.
Remember that the planet spent almost 4 billion years more or less covered in various kind of goo before the Precambrian Explosion. We know /very little/ of the true history of life in all that time; there could have been many, many, many apocalyptic type scenarios where a new goo was deployed that spread over the planet and ate almost everything, then either died wallowing in its own crapulence or formed the base layer for a new sort of evolution.
Multicellular life could have started to evolve /thousands of times/ only to be wiped out by goo. If multicellulars only rarely got as far as bones or shells, and were more vulnerable to being wiped out by a goo-plosion than single celled critters that could rebuild their population from a few surviving pockets or spores, how would we even know? Maybe it took billions of years for the Great War Of Goo to end in a Great Compromise that allowed mesoscopic life to begin to evolve, maybe there were great distributed networks of bacterial and viral biochemical computing engines that developed intelligence far beyond our own and eventually developed altruism and peace, deciding to let multicellular life develop.
Or we eukaryotes are the stupid runaway “wet” technology grey goo of prior prokaryote/viral intelligent networks, and we /destroyed/ their networks and intelligence with our runaway reproduction. Maybe the reason we don’t see disasters like forests and cities dissolving in swarms of Andromeda-Strain like universal gobblers is that safeguards against that were either engineered in, or outlawed, long ago. Or, more conventionally, evolved.
What we /do/ think we know about the history of life is that the Earth evolved single celled life or inherited it via panspermia etc. within about half a billion years of the Earth’s coalescence, then some combination of goo more or less dominated the Earth’s surface te roost (as far as biology goes) for over three billion years, esp if you count colonies like stromatolites as gooey. In the middle of this long period was at least one thing that looked like a goo apocalypse that remade the Earth profoundly enough that the traces are very obvious (e.g. huge beds of iron ore). But there could have been many more mass extinctions we know of.
Then less than a billion years ago something changed profoundly and multicellulars started to flourish. This era is less than a sixth of the span of life on earth. So… five sixths, goo dominated world, one sixth, non goo dominated world, is the short history here. This does not fill me with confidence that our world is very stable against a new kind of goo based on non-wet, non-biochemical assemblers.
I do think we are pretty likely not to deploy grey goo, though. Not because humans are not idiots—I am an idiot, and it’s the kind of mistake I would make, and I’m demonstrably above average by many measures of intelligence. It’s just that I think Eliezer and others will deploy a pre-nanotech Friendly AI before we get to the grey goo tipping point, and that it will be smart enough, altruistic enough, and capable enough to prevent humanity from bletching the planet as badly as the green microbes did back in the day :)
You are starting from the premise that gray goo scenarios are likely, and trying to rationalize your belief.
Yes, we can be clever and think of humans as green goo—the ultimate in green goo, really. That isn’t what we’re talking about and you know it—yes, intelligent life can spread out everywhere, that isn’t what we’re worried about. We’re worried about unintelligent things wiping out intelligent things.
The great oxygenation event is not actually an example of a green goo type scenario, though it is an interesting thing to consider—I’m not sure if there even is a generalized term for that kind of scenario, as it was essentially slow atmospheric poisoning. It would be more of a generalized biocide type scenario—the cyanobacteria which caused the great oxygenation event created something which was incidentally toxic to other things, but it was purely incidental, had nothing to do with their own action, probably didn’t even benefit most of them directly (that is to say, the toxicity of the oxygen they produced probably didn’t help them personally), and what actually took over afterwards were things which were rather different from what came before, many of which were not descended from said cyanobacteria.
It was a major atmospheric change, and is (theoretically) a danger, though I’m not sure how much of an actual danger it is in the real world—we saw the atmosphere shift to an oxygen-dominated one, but I’m not sure how you’d do it again, as I’m not sure there’s something else which can be freed en-mass which is toxic—better oxygenators than oxygen are hard to come by, and by their very nature are rather difficult to liberate from an energy balance standpoint. It seems likely that our atmosphere is oxygen-based and not, say, chlorine or fluorine based for a reason arising from the physics of liberating said chemicals from chemical compounds.
As far as repeated green goo scenarios prior to 600Mya—I think that’s pretty unlikely, honestly. Looking at microbial diversity and microbial genomes, we see that the domains of life are ridiculously ancient, and that diversity goes back an enormously long distance in time. It seems very unlikely that repeated green goo type scenarios would spare the amount of diversity we actually see in the real world. Eukaryotic life arose 1.6-2.1Bya, and as far as multicellular life goes, we’ve evidence of cyanobacteria which showed signs of multicellularity 3Bya.
That’s a long, long time, and it seems unlikely that repeated gray goo scenarios are what kept life simple. It seems more likely that what kept life simple was the fact that complexity is hard—indeed, I suspect the big advancement was actually major advancements in modularity of life. The more modular life becomes, the easier it is to evolve quickly and adapt to new circumstances, but modularity from non-modularity is something which is pretty tough to sort out. Once things did sort it out, though, we saw a massive explosion in diversity. Evolving to be better at evolving is a good strategy for continuing to exist, and I suspect that complex multicelluar life only came to exist when stuff got to the point where this could happen.
If we saw repeated green goo scenarios, we’d expect the various branches of life to be pretty shallow—even if some diversity survived, we’d expect each diverse group to show a major bottleneck back at whenever the last green goo occurred. But that’s not what we actaully see. Fungi and animals diverged about 1.5 Bya, for instance, and other eukaryotic diversity occurred even prior to that. Animals have been diverging for 1.2 billion years.
It seems unlikely, then, that there have been any green goo scenarios in a very, very long time, if indeed they ever did occur. Indeed, it seems likely that life evolved to prevent said scenarios, and did so successfully, as none have occurred in a very, very, very long time.
Pestilence is not even close to green goo. Yes, introducing a new disease into a new species can be very nasty, but it almost never actually is, as most of the time, it just doesn’t work at all. Even amongst the same species, Smallpox and other old-world diseases wiped out the Native Americans, but Native American diseases were not nearly so devastating to the old-worlders.
Most things which try to jump the species barrier have a great deal of difficulty in doing so, and even when they successfully do so, their virulence ends up dropping over time because being ridiculously fatal is actually bad for their own continued propagataion. And humans have become increasingly better at stopping this sort of thing. I did note engineered plagues as the most likely technological threat, but comparing them to gray goo scenarios is very silly—pathogens are enormously easier to control. The trouble with stuff like gray goo is that it just keeps spreading, but with a pathogen, it requires a host—there are all sorts of barriers in place to pathogens, and everything is evolved to be able to deal with pathogens because they sometimes have to deal with even new ones, and things which are more likely to survive exposure to novel pathogens are more likely to pass on their genes in the long term.
With regards to “intelligent viral networks”—this is just silly. Life on earth is NOT the result of intelligence. You can tell this from our genomes. There are no signs of engineering ANYWHERE in us; no signs of intelligent design.
The gray goo is predicated on the sort of thinking common in bad scifi.
Basically, in scifi the nanotech self replicators which eat everything in their path are created in one step. As opposed to realistic depiction of technological progress where the first nanotech replicators have to sit in a batch of special nutrients and be microwaved, or otherwise provided energy, while being kept perfectly sterile (to keep bacteria from eating your nanotech). Then it’d get gradually improved in great many steps and find many uses ranging from cancer cure to dishwashers, with corresponding development in goo control methods. You don’t want your dishwasher goo eating your bread.
The levels of metabolic efficiency and sheer universality required for the gray goo to be able to eat everything in it’s path (and that’s stuff which hasn’t gotten eaten naturally), require multitude of breakthroughs on top of an incredibly advanced nanotechnology and nano-manufacturing capacity within artificial environments.
How does such an advanced civilization fight the gray goo? I can’t know what would be the best method, but a goo equivalent of bacteriophage is going to be a lot, lot less complicated than the goo itself (as the goo has to be able to metabolize a variety of foods efficiently).
The grey goo scenario isn’t really very silly. We seem to have had a green goo scenario around 1.5 to 2 billion years ago that killed off many or most critters around due to release of deadly deadly oxygen; if the bacterial ecosystem were completely stable against goo scenarios this wouldn’t have happened. We have had mini goo scenarios when for example microbiota pretty well adapted to one species made the jump to another and oops, started reproducing rapidly and killing off their new host species rapidly, e.g. Yersinia pestis. Just because we haven’t seen a more omnivous goo sweep over the ecosphere recently …, …other than Homo sapiens, which is actually a pretty good example of a grey goo—think of the species as a crude mesoscale universal assembler, which is spreading pretty fast and killing off other species at a good clip and chewing up resources quite rapidly… … doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen at the microscale also. Ask the anaerobes if you can find them, they are hiding pretty well still after the chlorophyll incident.
Since the downside is pretty far down, I don’t think complacency is called for. A reasonable caution before deploying something that could perhaps eat everyone and everything in sight seems prudent.
Remember that the planet spent almost 4 billion years more or less covered in various kind of goo before the Precambrian Explosion. We know /very little/ of the true history of life in all that time; there could have been many, many, many apocalyptic type scenarios where a new goo was deployed that spread over the planet and ate almost everything, then either died wallowing in its own crapulence or formed the base layer for a new sort of evolution.
Multicellular life could have started to evolve /thousands of times/ only to be wiped out by goo. If multicellulars only rarely got as far as bones or shells, and were more vulnerable to being wiped out by a goo-plosion than single celled critters that could rebuild their population from a few surviving pockets or spores, how would we even know? Maybe it took billions of years for the Great War Of Goo to end in a Great Compromise that allowed mesoscopic life to begin to evolve, maybe there were great distributed networks of bacterial and viral biochemical computing engines that developed intelligence far beyond our own and eventually developed altruism and peace, deciding to let multicellular life develop.
Or we eukaryotes are the stupid runaway “wet” technology grey goo of prior prokaryote/viral intelligent networks, and we /destroyed/ their networks and intelligence with our runaway reproduction. Maybe the reason we don’t see disasters like forests and cities dissolving in swarms of Andromeda-Strain like universal gobblers is that safeguards against that were either engineered in, or outlawed, long ago. Or, more conventionally, evolved.
What we /do/ think we know about the history of life is that the Earth evolved single celled life or inherited it via panspermia etc. within about half a billion years of the Earth’s coalescence, then some combination of goo more or less dominated the Earth’s surface te roost (as far as biology goes) for over three billion years, esp if you count colonies like stromatolites as gooey. In the middle of this long period was at least one thing that looked like a goo apocalypse that remade the Earth profoundly enough that the traces are very obvious (e.g. huge beds of iron ore). But there could have been many more mass extinctions we know of.
Then less than a billion years ago something changed profoundly and multicellulars started to flourish. This era is less than a sixth of the span of life on earth. So… five sixths, goo dominated world, one sixth, non goo dominated world, is the short history here. This does not fill me with confidence that our world is very stable against a new kind of goo based on non-wet, non-biochemical assemblers.
I do think we are pretty likely not to deploy grey goo, though. Not because humans are not idiots—I am an idiot, and it’s the kind of mistake I would make, and I’m demonstrably above average by many measures of intelligence. It’s just that I think Eliezer and others will deploy a pre-nanotech Friendly AI before we get to the grey goo tipping point, and that it will be smart enough, altruistic enough, and capable enough to prevent humanity from bletching the planet as badly as the green microbes did back in the day :)
You are starting from the premise that gray goo scenarios are likely, and trying to rationalize your belief.
Yes, we can be clever and think of humans as green goo—the ultimate in green goo, really. That isn’t what we’re talking about and you know it—yes, intelligent life can spread out everywhere, that isn’t what we’re worried about. We’re worried about unintelligent things wiping out intelligent things.
The great oxygenation event is not actually an example of a green goo type scenario, though it is an interesting thing to consider—I’m not sure if there even is a generalized term for that kind of scenario, as it was essentially slow atmospheric poisoning. It would be more of a generalized biocide type scenario—the cyanobacteria which caused the great oxygenation event created something which was incidentally toxic to other things, but it was purely incidental, had nothing to do with their own action, probably didn’t even benefit most of them directly (that is to say, the toxicity of the oxygen they produced probably didn’t help them personally), and what actually took over afterwards were things which were rather different from what came before, many of which were not descended from said cyanobacteria.
It was a major atmospheric change, and is (theoretically) a danger, though I’m not sure how much of an actual danger it is in the real world—we saw the atmosphere shift to an oxygen-dominated one, but I’m not sure how you’d do it again, as I’m not sure there’s something else which can be freed en-mass which is toxic—better oxygenators than oxygen are hard to come by, and by their very nature are rather difficult to liberate from an energy balance standpoint. It seems likely that our atmosphere is oxygen-based and not, say, chlorine or fluorine based for a reason arising from the physics of liberating said chemicals from chemical compounds.
As far as repeated green goo scenarios prior to 600Mya—I think that’s pretty unlikely, honestly. Looking at microbial diversity and microbial genomes, we see that the domains of life are ridiculously ancient, and that diversity goes back an enormously long distance in time. It seems very unlikely that repeated green goo type scenarios would spare the amount of diversity we actually see in the real world. Eukaryotic life arose 1.6-2.1Bya, and as far as multicellular life goes, we’ve evidence of cyanobacteria which showed signs of multicellularity 3Bya.
That’s a long, long time, and it seems unlikely that repeated gray goo scenarios are what kept life simple. It seems more likely that what kept life simple was the fact that complexity is hard—indeed, I suspect the big advancement was actually major advancements in modularity of life. The more modular life becomes, the easier it is to evolve quickly and adapt to new circumstances, but modularity from non-modularity is something which is pretty tough to sort out. Once things did sort it out, though, we saw a massive explosion in diversity. Evolving to be better at evolving is a good strategy for continuing to exist, and I suspect that complex multicelluar life only came to exist when stuff got to the point where this could happen.
If we saw repeated green goo scenarios, we’d expect the various branches of life to be pretty shallow—even if some diversity survived, we’d expect each diverse group to show a major bottleneck back at whenever the last green goo occurred. But that’s not what we actaully see. Fungi and animals diverged about 1.5 Bya, for instance, and other eukaryotic diversity occurred even prior to that. Animals have been diverging for 1.2 billion years.
It seems unlikely, then, that there have been any green goo scenarios in a very, very long time, if indeed they ever did occur. Indeed, it seems likely that life evolved to prevent said scenarios, and did so successfully, as none have occurred in a very, very, very long time.
Pestilence is not even close to green goo. Yes, introducing a new disease into a new species can be very nasty, but it almost never actually is, as most of the time, it just doesn’t work at all. Even amongst the same species, Smallpox and other old-world diseases wiped out the Native Americans, but Native American diseases were not nearly so devastating to the old-worlders.
Most things which try to jump the species barrier have a great deal of difficulty in doing so, and even when they successfully do so, their virulence ends up dropping over time because being ridiculously fatal is actually bad for their own continued propagataion. And humans have become increasingly better at stopping this sort of thing. I did note engineered plagues as the most likely technological threat, but comparing them to gray goo scenarios is very silly—pathogens are enormously easier to control. The trouble with stuff like gray goo is that it just keeps spreading, but with a pathogen, it requires a host—there are all sorts of barriers in place to pathogens, and everything is evolved to be able to deal with pathogens because they sometimes have to deal with even new ones, and things which are more likely to survive exposure to novel pathogens are more likely to pass on their genes in the long term.
With regards to “intelligent viral networks”—this is just silly. Life on earth is NOT the result of intelligence. You can tell this from our genomes. There are no signs of engineering ANYWHERE in us; no signs of intelligent design.
The gray goo is predicated on the sort of thinking common in bad scifi.
Basically, in scifi the nanotech self replicators which eat everything in their path are created in one step. As opposed to realistic depiction of technological progress where the first nanotech replicators have to sit in a batch of special nutrients and be microwaved, or otherwise provided energy, while being kept perfectly sterile (to keep bacteria from eating your nanotech). Then it’d get gradually improved in great many steps and find many uses ranging from cancer cure to dishwashers, with corresponding development in goo control methods. You don’t want your dishwasher goo eating your bread.
The levels of metabolic efficiency and sheer universality required for the gray goo to be able to eat everything in it’s path (and that’s stuff which hasn’t gotten eaten naturally), require multitude of breakthroughs on top of an incredibly advanced nanotechnology and nano-manufacturing capacity within artificial environments.
How does such an advanced civilization fight the gray goo? I can’t know what would be the best method, but a goo equivalent of bacteriophage is going to be a lot, lot less complicated than the goo itself (as the goo has to be able to metabolize a variety of foods efficiently).
Please add something like this to the RW nanotech article!