Turns out they were after butt fat all along

Indeed.

Butt Eradicators and Paperclip Maximisers

Sorry this will be my band name now

a fellow universal paperclip enjoyer, i see

Grey goo also doesn't work because it'd almost certainly use the same building blocks as life, and in a competition with life, life's probably going to be the winner. Even if it didn't, unless it's doing weird cold fusion subatomic interactions (probably impossible) to make more of whatever element it's composed of, it'll just run out of food in whatever local environment it's in.

I don't think this is necessarily true. The reason DNA is so affected by radiation is because it's malleable. It's built out of chemical building blocks that fit like Lego. Gray goo would likely be similar to extremely complex proteins which replicate like a physical version of a quine.

IIRC the bigger issue is that the nanobots would end up just melting themselves, to avoid this they'd have to work a lot slower, probably at about the rate of a particularly fast acting bacteria.

Whilst I agree that universal consuming nanobots are a bit far fetched, I’m not sure I’m sold on the replication problem.

Life has replication errors on purpose because we’re dependent on it for mid to long term survival.

It’s easy to write program code with arbitrarily high error protection. You could make a program that will produce 1 unhandled error for every 100000 consumed universes, and it wouldn’t be particularly hard, you just need enough spare space.

Mutation and cancer are potential problems for technology, but they’re decidedly solvable problems.

Life only makes it hard because life is chaotic and complex, there’s not an error correcting code ratio we can bump from 5 to 20 and call it a day.

Always ass been.

Logic checks out. The whole universe is ass.

The term gray goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. In 2004, he stated "I wish I had never used the term 'gray goo'."

Lmao

gray goo? more like gay goo amirite