Carbon-gobbling grey goo

"That's the argument. We can impact the environment. We may not be as smart as we need to be, or know what we should know, to make things better. We could easily make things much worse."

-bdunbar, responding to this post

GreyGoo
Frequency: Unique (if you meet it, it's eaten the planet) Armour Class: -10 Move: 0 Hit Dice: 1,000,000,000,000 % Damage/Attack: Eats the planet (including all adventurers not already aboard spaceships)

-Charles Stross, "Singularity! A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds"

And now Sir Richard Branson is offering a $25-million prize to the first person who can invent some and throw it at the problem of global warming. Okay, the prize is for any solution that would sequester a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. But what other technology than self-replicating nanomachines could possibly eat up the 800 billion extra tonnes we've added to the atmosphere in any reasonable length of time? Particularly if we use the presence or promise of such a quick, cheap technical fix as an excuse to keep pumping out an additional 30 billion tonnes every year? (Back-of-envelope calculations based on these figures)

Being in charge of the massive Virgin corporate empire, Branson probably sees us all as hopelessly addicted consumers, and has just realized what that means for the future of the world. He's clearly panicking, and needless to say, if we want to come up with workable solutions that won't be worse than the problem, we can't afford to panic.