It’s hard to imagine these constraints actually holding up well, nor the unstated constraint that the ability to make nanobots is limited to this one type.
My actual prediction depends a whole lot on timeframes—how fast do they replicate, how long to dust-ify all the feldspar. If it’s slow enough (millenia), probably no real harm—the dust re-solidifies into something else, or gets into an equilibrium where it’s settling and compressing as fast as the nanos can dustify it. Also, humans have plenty of time to adapt and engineer workarounds to any climate or other changes.
If they replicate fast, over the course of weeks, it’s probably an extinction event for all of earth life. Dust shuts out the sun, all surface features are undermined and collapse, everything is dead and even the things that survive don’t have enough of a cycle to continue very long.
It’s hard to imagine these constraints actually holding up well, nor the unstated constraint that the ability to make nanobots is limited to this one type.
My actual prediction depends a whole lot on timeframes—how fast do they replicate, how long to dust-ify all the feldspar. If it’s slow enough (millenia), probably no real harm—the dust re-solidifies into something else, or gets into an equilibrium where it’s settling and compressing as fast as the nanos can dustify it. Also, humans have plenty of time to adapt and engineer workarounds to any climate or other changes.
If they replicate fast, over the course of weeks, it’s probably an extinction event for all of earth life. Dust shuts out the sun, all surface features are undermined and collapse, everything is dead and even the things that survive don’t have enough of a cycle to continue very long.