Grey Goo

Grey Goo is like a Horde of Alien Locusts, only replace Alien Locusts with Nanotechnology—and instead of grass, they "eat" anything. Or, if the protagonists are lucky, just anything mineral or electronic.

They're worse than alien locusts. Grey Goo destroys resources by turning them into more grey goo—more Nanomachines. It's The Virus for nonliving things—though it may be able to take down living things as well, and likely will turn them into nonliving things if they're in the wrong place. In theory, you can end up with a planetary body made of nothing but grey goo. Physical laws regarding energy, thermodynamics and the like stand in the way, but even a partial success in this case is likely to suck for everyone involved.

The color is conventional. Other colors of goo that work the same way are just as bad. Red Goo or Black Goo are intentionally released nanoweapons that do the same thing, and may or may not have an off switch, which may or may not work in any case. Green Goo doesn't disassemble everything, but just kills living things, or renders them infertile. Blue Goo is a defensive "antibody" developed to fight back against another scenario; if there's a nanobattle inside your body, the waste heat might cook you to death anyway. Golden Goo is a specific grey goo variant, where nanomachines designed to pull gold from seawater disrupt the ocean ecosystem, or less probably, dry up the oceans. Pink goo are people. No, not like that but it is the cause of it.

For some reason, most of the time these specifically were created to clean up oil spills.

Can cause The End of the World as We Know It—specifically, Type 3b or 4 on Apocalypse How.

Compare Blob Monster.

Examples of Grey Goo include:

Meta

Anime & Manga

  • Grey goo has completely devoured Mercury by the time of Gunnm (AKA Battle Angel Alita).
  • The WORMS in Sky Girls are related to this. Sort of.
  • Turn a Gundam features Black Goo in the form of the Moonlight Butterfly (Gekkōchō), which is named because it manifests as giant shimmering energy contrails that emerge from the titular Humongous Mecha's back like wings. The nanomachines only target technology, but do so on an immense scale; the last time the Moonlight Butterfly was used, it sent humanity into a Dark Age that they're still recovering from (when the series begins, technology is roughly on par with the early 1900s).
    • It Got Worse in creator Yoshiyuki Tomino's original novel, where the full powered version of the eponymous Gundam can affect the area from Earth to Jupiter with the Moonlight Butterfly - that's over 600 million miles.
    • The DG Cells in G Gundam are a combination of this and The Virus.


Comic Books

  • Adam Warren's adaptation of the Dirty Pair revealed that the Earth had been destroyed decades earlier in a massive Grey Goo outbreak, the "Nanoclysm", which led to nanotechnology being regulated and virtually outlawed. The villain of the miniseries planned to use a cache of nanotech to take over Heroes-R-Us's Central Computer, and from there, the known universe. Unfortunately, the Central Computer revealed that it was partially based on something the Nanoclysm left humanity as an apology...
  • The Modular Man from Tom Strong is a large-scale example of this. Each individual module is about the size of your head. Once he gets to Venus, though, he multiplies until he has something closer to the proper Grey Goo appearance.
  • Transmetropolitan mentions it as a possible weapon if the commonly-used "makers" are reprogrammed. The standard MO for handling a "grey goo" scenario is to release blue goo to contain the grey goo and restrict its damage to a small area. One brief mention is made of someone who lost his legs because he decided to (and succeeded) shut off the grey goo instead of releasing the blue goo.
  • The Filth features this type of creatures, but portrays them in a very sympathetic light during the stages of their evolution. The more they spread, the more the world is seen from their perspective.
  • What happened to Negaduck after being hit by the Tron-Splitter at the end of "Crisis On Infinite Darkwings".


Films


Literature

  • Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds has Earth effectively uninhabitable from the effects of rogue swarms of nanobots. The nanobots were originally created to affect weather patterns, but they were corrupted. New bots were created to fight those, which went rogue, and so on and so forth. The survivors from the disaster, who now reside in orbital habitats, weaponized the Grey Goo and use it as a weapon of mass destruction.
    • Something similar happens in his Revelations Space universe, where The Greenfly terraformers go rogue and will inevitably consume the entire universe.
  • One of the best examples is Wil McCarthy's Bloom, a novel set in a future where the last fragments of humanity lives in habitats in the asteroid belt and in jovian orbit, after the entire inner solar system was devoured in a Grey Goo incident. Earth, Venus, and Mars are now large fuzzy balls of nanotech, nanotech solar sails drift aimlessly throughout the system, and occasionally errant strands drift out on the solar winds and try to devour anything they touch in the outer solar system.
    • It's okay, though, because the billions of people devoured in the incident are merely compressed, not gone, and their brain engrams still survive in the bloom, immortal and living in virtual paradises of their own construction; imagine how powerful a computer would be if it was made from an entire solar system?
  • Another über-example would be Charles Stross' Accelerando, where pretty much the same events as in Bloom happened deliberately, and for the betterment of mankind.
  • The novel How to Mutate and Take Over the World ends with nanites from a desert factory transforming the world into key lime pie. And this gets spoiled about a third of the way in, in a fictional review of the book.
  • In one of the Thursday Next novels, Thursday's time-traveling father tells her of a future wherein the world was overtaken by such a scenario; the world is consumed by pink slime. It turns out to be strawberry pudding.
  • Death From the Skies by Phil Plait presents a berserker Von Neumann probe, which is essentially grey goo on a cosmic scale.
  • Neatly inverted in Saturn's Children—robots think of organic life as "pink goo," reproducing without limit.
  • In Scott Westerfeld's book Specials, the main characters break out of a weapons storage facility using nanotechnology-based silver goo (much more flashy and dramatic than plain old gray goo, to paraphrase the author).
  • A rather spooky example presented here as a story, which shows us why you should just let the gray goo be...
    • And played with in this story on the same site, where the sentient gray goo triggers the nanoapocalypse to save humanity from an impending asteroid collision.
  • Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski's The Killing Star includes weaponized Grey Goo which is used to pick off one of the few surviving outposts of humanity.
  • In Greg Bear's Forge of God, this is done deliberately and systematically by a beligerant alien race, to humanity as well as at least one other race. The sequel, Anvil of Stars, is the story of a handful of the survivors of Earth—specifically, the children—seeking out the race that destroyed Earth, to enact the Law.
    • In Greg's Blood Music, the Green Goo is not nanotechnology, but biotechnology, but operates in basically the same fashion. The "noocytes" consume all the biomass in North America, converting it to more noocytes. It turns out that all the living creatures who are assimilated are also recorded and "alive" in a new kind of reality, similar to "Bloom" above.
  • The Melding Plague also ended humanity's golden age in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. Everybody was enjoying the benefits of a highly advanced nanoscience, until humanity encountered a plague that could subvert all but the hardiest nanotechnology. Such subversion has disastrous consequences for the device in question, anything to which it was attached, and potentially anything nearby. This is partly used to justify the somewhat schizotech nature of the setting.
  • Played with in The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. The Grey Goo scenario is a common fear in the near-future setting due to a famous scientist's doomsday predictions of a nanotech catastrophe, even though it's generally accepted that he was just fearmongering and was wrong. A character later comments that the Grey Goo scenario has already happened; it's called organic life. It turns out that self-replicating nanotechnology is key to a massive terrorist attack, but not in the traditional sense.


Live-Action TV

  • A minor example of this was the nanite colony Wesley Crusher was running in one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Fortunately, this goo turned sentient and was willing to be moved to a better food source before it disabled the ship.
  • The Replicators of Stargate SG-1 are this trope scaled up to lego size. When they eventually evolved to silver goo, their diet changed from "any kind of metal" to "neutronium only", thus keeping the new model a rarity.
  • A failed pilot for a TV series called Doorways by George R. R. Martin featured a parallel dimension where, yep, nanomachines used to eat up oil spillages went and ate all the oil. This scenario was the result of Executive Meddling—G.R.R.M's original script (and the one found in his "Dreamsongs" retrospective compilation) featured the parallel Earth as a Winter World, but this was apparently too bleak for a first episode.


Radio


Tabletop Games

  • Gray Goo is discussed in GURPS: Ultra-Tech in a section on Von Neumann machines and points out the waste heat of the goo eating a planet is likely a more pressing threat than being eaten by it. On the up side they require extremely high level technology and are expensive to make, on the down side some versions might be able to fly or travel through space.
  • Centauri Knights, a far future/HumongousMecha sourcebook for Big Eyes, Small Mouth, takes place on a dead alien planet colonized by humans. According to the Game Master information in the back, the reason the planet was vacant was because an ancient war resulted in a Grey Goo superweapon accidentally being unleashed upon the planet (the game even explicitly uses the term "Grey Goo" to explain the phenomenon).
  • Virus Bombs of Warhammer 40,000 work on a similar principle to the Red or Black Goo scenario noted above. The Imperium utilise them in dire situations when a problem can only be solved by destroying a planet.


Videogames

  • Tasty Planet is a game based on Grey Goo where a cleaning agent gets bigger and bigger as you guide it through the levels starting on a Petri Dish until it eats the planet, then the solar system, galaxy, universe, space and time! Then it explodes and everything starts over.
  • The True Final Boss of Super Robot Wars Original Generation, Septuagint, can be seen as this. It may be more of purple crystals, but its directive is clear: exterminate the whole world by consuming anything to come to its path, and it can even make crystal-based duplicates of things it has consumed.
  • Mass Effect has Zaherux, a planet covered in silicon "seas" that has unmanned probes sent to it crash, a popular extranet meme goes that the seas that cover it are actually "disassembler" nanites.
  • Biological version in Outpost 2: Divided Destiny. A terraforming microbe runs wildly out of control, breaking down organic matter, among other things, and forcing both colonies on the planet to try to evacuate-one of the rare versions in which the Goo truly is unstoppable, though one colony can delay it briefly, and the omnipresent threat during the campaign.
  • In Hostile Waters, the "alien" antagonists have a grey goo Disassembler cannon. It fires at a city and reduces it to mush. Why it stops, they don't explain, but that's all the better for you.
    • Actually, it's up to you to blow up the cooling radiators before it fires its third salvo and destroys Central, the world capital. Once you do that, the next shot blows it to hell and spreads disassemblers throughout their base.
  • In the intro cutscene of the video game Deus Ex Invisible War, a terrorist employs a "Nanite detonator" in Chicago, destroying the city.
  • One of the Special Projects in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri shows the video of several containers placed on the site of a battle, littered with debris and dead bodies. The containers open, releasing nanites that look like glowing goo. They proceed to consume everything in sight, including the dead, and use the materials to create a brand-new Hover Tank.
  • Tiberium in the C&C universe can be seen a slow-acting example of it. It needs around half a century to engulf a significant portion of the Earth.
  • Grey goo missiles called the "Nano Virus" are a high-level planetary siege weapon in Sword of the Stars. It is amusingly classified as a bio-weapon, meaning you have to go through several tiers worth of gene modification to access it. The Nano Virus is harmless to organics, but the planet's industrial output will be heavily damaged and it will wipe out an AI rebellion as if they were living creatures hit by a regular bio weapon. It is the only bio weapon that will affect the Zuul, since their machinery is made of the same metal as everyone else's.
  • Parasite Eve features massive amounts of Pink Goo. The Big Bad is actually a Patient Zero infected with intelligent pink goo by accident. Every enemy in the game was created by the pink goo. If you go on to the Chrysler Building in the EX game, the building itself is infected with the pink goo (which is the in-world reasons that mode has random maps) and pink goo is literally everywhere.
  • A grey goo like attack is possible in Supreme Commander 2. The Cybran Nation can upgrade their engineers to have weapons, by doing this and building nothing but engineers you will get an ever growing blob of engineers that will automatically shoot every enemy in sight and use the remains to build more engineers. Full instructions here.
  • In Smoke's ending in Mortal Kombat Armageddon, the power of Blaze causes his nanobots to go into overdrive, consuming all of Edenia and replacing it with a sentient mass of grey goo that calls itself Smoke.
  • The Vasari from Sins of a Solar Empire, who specialize in Nanotechnology, have ships that are able to throw blobs of destructive nanobots at enemy ships.


Webcomics

  • This page of xkcd jokes about how IPv6 is perfect in that the nanobots will only be able to devour about half the planet before they run out of addresses.
  • In Schlock Mercenary nanobots are widespread, so hostile nanoswarms (both evolved out of control and weaponized) are a common threat, too, and there are standard-issue tactics and equipment to stop them; people worried about nanobot infection drink nanotech-fighting chemicals, "nanofilm" is routinely employed to control rogue nanobot swarms, and worst comes to worst, the nanobots will be isolated by ubiquitous AI with gravity-control technology and/or simply fried.

Captain Tagon: Our Doctor tells me that those nannies have been trying to 'colonize' their surroundings ever since they got here.
Assassin Flamb: We've all been drinking Nanneze like it was Ovalkwik.[1]
Captain Tagon: Eugh. That stuff'll kill you.
Assassin Flamb: The Nanneze, or the Ovalkwik?
Captain Tagon: Both.

    • So, of course, they ran in the problem head-on.

Nanomachines are extremely unlikely to survive the wash of plasma depicted above, while armored combatants have little to worry about. Things made of flesh (including recently hardened, ultra-durable flesh) fall somewhere in the middle.
If you find yourself attacked by nannies, hold your breath, close your eyes, and set yourself on fire. Then stop, drop, and roll, and hope that good skin regeneration technology is available where (and when) you live.

Web Originals

Western Animation

  • The Justice League Unlimited episode "Dark Heart" dealt with alien nanomachines that were in the process of taking over Earth this way.
  • Matrix from Gargoyles, a sentient mass of nonobots created by Fox's mother (who mentions the grey good scenario by name) in Australia, tries to bring "order" to the world. Dingo made a Heel Face Turn and convinced Matrix to fight for "Law and Order" (Long story involving the Aborigine Dreamtime, roll with it). Later, he did provide one of the funniest lines in the comic series on taking over the world, see page quote.
  • One of Ben 10's alien forms is Upgrade the Galvanic Mechomorph, a piece of Grey Goo from a planet of sentient Grey Goo that has the ability to separate itself into smaller, independent entities that get less intelligent the more they split. They were created by the series' resident Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, the Galvans, but developed a mind of their own.
  • An episode of the 1980's animated The Incredible Hulk involved a scientist bioengineering a Blob Monster that could eat literally anything except the special glass of its container, and would get bigger the more it ate. Of course the glass breaks and it starts eating Gamma Base. Fortunately, it turns out that the one thing it's allergic to is gamma radiation, which the Hulk constantly emits.
  • One episode of The Powerpuff Girls features nanobots destroying Townsville, though they didn't seem to be making more of themself, just ripping everything that wasn't alive to dust.
  • Futurama: Bender becomes this in one episode after installing a Matter Replicator that makes two smaller duplicates.
    • Inverted in another episode, in which some nanobots released on a deserted planet first eat some waste oil, then start trying to eat clothes, but soon get bored of that and create an entire ecosystem made of nanobots instead of cells. Where the necessary mass came from is left as an exercise for the reader.
  • In Godzilla: The Series, one of the first Monsters of the Week is a colony of self-replicating petroleum-eating Nanomachines that, inevitably, goes out of control and turns into a Zilla-sized shapeshifting blob on a feeding frenzy.
  • The G1 Transformers episode Krimzeek involved a highly specialized electricity eating spark creature, splitting into new copies of itself as it ate more and more current.


Real Life

  • A strange example from Real Life which has elements of the Grey Goo scenario: In the 1950's scientists managed to isolate an immortal cancer cell line (that is, undying cells that could be grown outside of the human body) which they named HeLa, after Henrietta Lacks, an unfortunate woman who had died from the cancer. Scientists at the time were trying to isolate and grow normal human cells outside of the body but were having no luck. Within a short period of time, however, they noticed many of the normal cells suddenly being transformed into cancer cells. This puzzled scientists until they realized that the new cells were actually HeLa cells that had contaminated the normal cultures.
HeLa cells were so durable that they were difficult to get rid of via sterilization and the tiniest bit could convert whatever normal tissue they came into contact with. HeLa cells soon spread throughout the world and even today scientists have problems dealing with HeLa contamination of their cell cultures.
Fortunately for humanity, the HeLa cells quickly die out or result in only weak tumors when injected into a living human body (yes, there were people crazy enough to try this out). Even more fortunately for humanity, the HeLa cells ability to grow outside the human body led to it being a useful tool in the development of the Polio vaccine, in cancer research and in the testing of drugs, cosmetics and many other substances. A rare case where Grey Goo actually turned out to benefit humanity.
Better yet, the cells are a Black Box; no one in decades of research has been able to figure out why they won't die! At this point in time, the mass of her post-death divided cells is greater than the mass of her body at death. Something on the order of 20,000 kilograms worth. And that's in the sixty years since she passed away.
But there is also a downside: HeLa cells benefited humanity but not Henrietta's impoverished and undereducated family; when they first heard about the immortal cells they thought scientists had her actual body being kept alive somewhere. When a woman wanted to talk to them about Henrietta for a book, they initially hung up on her because they thought she was another scientist looking to exploit them.
  • Then there's the theoretical threat of Strange Matter. The television series The Universe featured it in their 10 Ways to Destroy the Earth, and basically, everything on Earth melts like a warm ice cream sundae into non-organic goo. Sweet dreams!
    • There are far more energetic particle collisions happening every second as subatomic matter bombards the planet and occasionally smashes into the atmosphere or the ground. So far, in the last nearly five billion years, we've somehow managed to evade such a fate. This suggests that either the energy required to produce strange matter is far larger than what the LHC can manage or the odds of such collisions producing it are so incredibly small as to be considered nearly impossible. The Earth is safe. For now!
  1. ↑ "very heavy stimulant cocktail cut with shampoo and inert ultra-tensile carbon"
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