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[Goumindong]

This thread makes me realize how unrealistic all sci-fi is.
Even a quarter of the technological progress from now to faster than light spaceships and we will destroy ourselves by unleashing gray goo. Its unavoidable.

Nah. Grey goo is slow. If you accidentally released it you would have plenty of time to destroy is provided you were already interplanetary. The reason grey goo isn’t all that scary is because its not directed and space is big. If it takes grey goo 100 years to eat a solar system then by moving at the speed of the grey goo you always have 100 years to defeat it.(that is you have nearly infinite time) And functionally 100 years is an unrealistically fast Timeframe for grey goo to eat a solar system because doubling rates are constrained by travel time and materials and the solar system isn’t particularly dense except for places that are particularly hard to goo. (Like Jupiter and the Sun)

In order to make goo dangerous you have to ascribe to it advanced technology far beyond the intelligence is supposed to wipe out.

If a grey goo showed up in our solar system its more likely it would propel us to be inter galactic than it would be to destroy us. 

[Mondaymonkey]

When it comes for the gray goo, there are more reasons it would not consume entire systems, aside real-world-physics.

One of the barriers defends our Universe from gray goo goes apocalypse - gray goo existence and it's nature. Perfect replication - is a fairy tale because of mistakes that is inevitable because of numerous factors, starting from quantum level. So each next generation of nano-machines will be slight different, and even if they managed to continue self-replicating due to built-in self-adjustments mechanisms - sooner or later one thing happen: gray goo will give birth to sub-species that will use mother-gray-goo as a material. Numerous iterations later you going to have either goo eats itself or extremely complex gray goo ecosystem. First is more likely, second wild create something really wonderful and almost for sure smart and self-aware, and what ever it be, or how dangerous, it will no longer be a gray goo anymore.

BTW any civilization, able to create gray goo is also able to create gray goo virus, that will spread faster and stops when there are no food.

[Flet]

Everyone is assuming the goo wont change itself over time. We see complex actions arise out of simple sets of instructions. The goo wont just have the intelligence of a simple replication machine, it will adapt, the small nano machines themselves as the basic unit of the superorganism.
All those countless machines and that very imperfection which will cause slight deviations - mutations - which will also be trying to replicate themselves and so on.
In fact, we could already be gray goo ourselves. Metal eating bacteria exist, so things we consider life are quite possible able to turn just about anything into energy. Maybe thats evidence its not much to worry about, or maybe the answer to the fermi paradox is we are just finishing up consuming the last habitable location.

[pedro1_1]

Everyone is assuming the goo wont change itself over time. We see complex actions arise out of simple sets of instructions. The goo wont just have the intelligence of a simple replication machine, it will adapt, the small nano machines themselves as the basic unit of the superorganism.
All those countless machines and that very imperfection which will cause slight deviations - mutations - which will also be trying to replicate themselves and so on.

I think all plots that involve any form of artificial inteligence surpassing humanity and destroying it false, because at the worst, we just print all the bluepints we used to get to were we are and E.M.P. Nuke the planet back to stone age, just to get back here in 20 years.
Also E.M.P. weapons are increadibly less destructively on ScyFi than on real life, a single microwave cruise missile would be able to destroy manufactory facilitys on a range of 500 km from it's launch site, if not shoot down, and we are mostly resistent to microwave at all but point blank range, while eletronics are in danger of microwave from a distance of kilometers.

[Igncom1]

This is assuming that all of this technology will be made to be the best it can be, rather then made by the lowest bidder like in real life!

[Nafensoriel]

Grey Goo is bacteria.
We haven't been consumed by bacteria yet.

Engineering wise there is very little difference between bacteria and a self-replicating nano or macro-sized machine.
When engineers are young they think they can make perfect systems... eventually murphy beats that particular dream out of them though.