Suppose we create robots capable of self replicating with a minimum of waste? If we let them loose, would they eat up the planet until there was nothing left but grey goo and waste?
I was thinking they would look like hexapods and have a couple tool arms, be about the size of a computer mouse, and work in tandem to create more of themselves from any inorganic things they ran into, like metal, rubber, glass, sand...so they would recreate every circuit every time.
I wonder if that would ever be possible. Or maybe they could build little factories that built new bots, then the bots would bring raw materials to the factories...
This is a major engineering enigma right there. How would they be powered? They would need to communicate somehow. I can imagine dumping a shoebox of these on an old car and then after a while there would be a huge pile of them crawling away leaving only a pile of dust.
