Lost in the Maize

Hegswarm – what a great word! Far more elegant and versatile than the “Gray Goo” that has nibbled at the heels of nanotechnology for the past decade.

Over the holiday break, I’ve escaped academia for the relative sanity of family reunions and mince pies, and have been catching up on some reading. Currently I’m in the middle of Iain M. Banks’ latest novel Surface Detail – which presents a disturbing yet compelling vision of a future where mind-states can be moved between biological (i.e. gray matter) and digital (i.e. computer) media, and the idea of an afterlife becomes an engineered reality. However, what grabbed my attention yesterday while reading the book was Banks’ concept of a “hegenomising swarm,” or “hegswarm”.

These he describes as outbreaks where

“…by accident or design – a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy’s matter into nothing but copies of themselves.”

He adds

“It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy, and arguably hegswarms were just that; another legitimate – if rather overenthusiastic – galactic form of life.”

Passing over his rather delicious allusion to questionable human traits, this seemed the perfect extension of the idea of self-replicating nanobots – the mythical constructions that turn everything in their path into copies of themselves.

Maybe as the nanotechnology is re-invented under the “Nano2” banner we need another nano-bogeyman to help it along – in which case, I nominate the nano-hegswarm as the number one contender.

But, I must confess, all this is really just an excuse to pull out one of my favorite nanotech videos for the holiday season – Ransom Riggs‘ rather excellent if entirely fictitious short “Destroy Civilization with Nanotechnology… in Just Six Amazing Steps.”

Enjoy, have great holiday, and watch out for those hegswarms!