Gray Goo

I have a vague idea for a sci-fi setting in a post Gray Goo event world. Given technology has progressed to the point that such a thing could happen, I imagined survivors would exist in airships, preying on one another for limited resources, while evading storms that can lift nanoclouds to high altitudes. Additionally high-risk trips to the surface could take place in inert areas for resources that weren't consumed. Even nanobots could be a resource if they could be reprogrammed. Thoughts? What I do need is reasons why grey goo wouldn't be 100% unstoppable.

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Grey Goo can't eat water, and there's not a lot of stuff in the air. Also, you can give the Grey Goo a lifespan of only a few weeks so there's a surface chapter to the apocalypse.

>The government has their own areas of hacked / friendly grey goo that maintain safe areas for human habitation.

>Solar flares disrupt grey goo for a short period of time. Giving around three days of safe travel through hostile territory while they repair.

>Grey goo still follows some of its old programming and leaves certain areas unharmed and or follows an old forgotten arms pact treaty / national boarder laws.
>Day light savings time is considered a holiday as the robots go into standby factory reset conditions for the day as they try to possibly fathom the change in time. Locals call it Y2K day ironically.

>Grey goo evolves political and moral standards, some swarms become friendly to humans.

>Mad science has bred rust monsters to combat the grey goo. Tearing rust covered islands out of the sea of silver that was once the planet's surface.

>The goo actually requires some humans for maintenance purposes and or Bodily fluids ala TiTS.

I don't user, what kind of theme are you looking to build?

don't know*

One idea I thought of was that the nanobots would be powered by piezoelectrics, so fierce winds or heavy impacts activate them, but they are otherwise inert. Means that you could have people on the ground, but anything as heavy as a car would be devoured.

Or they could be tuned to different vibration frequencies, meaning that some would be powered by cars, some by voice or some by heartbeat.

>I don't user, what kind of theme are you looking to build?

Airship to airship combat in a sci-fi Mad Maxian scavenger world.

Wouldn't people just invent lightweight cars with super fat tires?

Quite possibly, but that sounds quite vulnerable to attack.

No man. You have to go with hovercrafts. A hovercraft riding over an anti-personnel land mine won't set it off.

The grey goo is very weak to radiation. High atmospheric environments have a high enough radiation content that the grey goo goes inert.
Nuclear power plants and Chernobyl becomes a safe haven.

>Grey Goo can't eat water
Oceanic colonization as well as or as a substitute for airships. The seabed may be made of carnivorous nanites, but they can't swim and don't float so an oceangoing ship is safe.

I'd go with sudden strange and unpredictable moments of silence then. Where sudden areas just go dormant and people rush to scavenge the safe zone before everything goes to hell. You don't need an explanation (people have forgotten the true reason / blame it on mysticism), but you can use it as an excuse for conflict.

Hovercraft create mad vibrations and this would wake the grey goo up.

You can use dubstep to temporarily push the goo away.

So the airships exist, but were built generations ago and are largely self maintaining. The knowledge of the old world is largely apocryphal, but the hungry dust is the great danger. But when it sleeps, the cunning can harvest it and feed it to their skyhome. It's very dangerous however, and safer to raid other skyhouses for their resources.

What ruleset would you use for this? The setting sounds like one of the ages before the setting of Numenara

Gray goo can eat water. Binding the oxygen and hydrogen with carbon to make plastics or oil if they need polymers.

Gonna have to explain why the replicators can't fly, hombre. It'd be more believable if you put your survivors in orbit or on the planet's moon.

So this is Nausicaa with toxic jungle replaced by nanobots? Sounds pretty good, but definitely needs more work on explanation why those bots can't make anything flying and haven't consumed everything yet.

I'd need to know more about how nanobots fly to answer that. The OP did mention storms carrying nanoclouds, but that's more of an intermittent threat.

One possibility is nanobots eating down to the earth's core and disrupting the magnetosphere, leading to the stripping away of the atmosphere by solar winds, but I suspect that causes more problems than it solves.

The nanobots were intended to be capable of constructing a great variety of things, but due to whatever reason they can only self-replicate, and their code is far too basic for them to design or even copy aircraft or comprehend the purpose of an aircraft. All they can do is convert matter into more nanobots.

I love all of these suggestions, you should pay attention to these OP

I'd add that perhaps if a particular nanobot is "born" with a whacked-out identification system, it may end up a non-target for consumption to other nanobots, like all are meant to be, but see the rest of them as valid food, creating what is essentially a cancerous tumor in the grey mass. Here it's significantly safer for travellers to tread because while the goo will still eat anything that touches it, it's so preoccupied with eating itself that it eats external objects at a ludicrously slow rate. Perhaps having this sort of cancer nanobot could be seen as a slow plague by the survivors. A single puff of dust will still eventually eat away an entire ship, and its whole crew, but it does so slowly that it's possible to basically go on living with it.

Also maybe the bots are solar powered, so a single speck of dust is not guaranteed to mean eventual death. If you spend long enough out of any light you may be able to simply wash/scrub them off.

OP here, there's a few ideas there I like, particularly the solar flare disabling one. I want the gray goo to be a mindless force, so developing a moral system is not appropriate.

For those who haven't seen it, the gray goo event at the start of Invisible War:

youtu.be/CLDlDG1q0_o?t=1m25s

I imagine something like that, but without stopping.

As some have mentioned, a reason why nanobots are not found throughout the oceans and atmosphere. Bacteria who have no means to fly are still found even I'm the upper atmosphere simply because they're so small, and barring a reason the same would presumably happen with Nanites.
Food would also be a severe problem, as even just the lamp surface area covered with Nanites would filter out all CO2 for carbon for polymers, meaning that at some point there would no longer be enough carbon for photosynthesis.
I'd recommend limiting the Nanites in some way as to what they eat or the like. Even something simple like metals only could work, and you can also just say that's the reason they're too heavy to permeate the atmosphere or oceans. Remember calcium and plenty of other parts of the human body are metals, so it's still terrifying and lethal to life.

*land surface area.

Also it means if the Nanites have a small enough detection radius people could wade through the goo on wooden stilts or similar, which while unrealistic sounds cool enough for fiction.