When does a meme get a life of its own? Nanotech guru turns back on ‘goo’, by Paul Rincon for the BBC, is a story about how Eric Drexler’s concerns about the phrase he coined in 1986 in Engines of Creation for a disatrous epidemic of nanobot replication which turns everything into “grey goo”. Stephen Strauss in The Globe and Mail (Sat. July 24, 2004, p. F9) writes about how the meme travelled – A far-fetched theory that won’t come unstuck. Prince Charles and others at the ETC Group in Winnipeg are trying to divert the meme away from disaster to questions that need to be asked now about biotechnology. (See Nanotechnology Publications, ETC Group – these include briefs on the Nonotech and the Precautionary Prince.)
This meme could get a big boost in popular culture when the movie version of Michael Crichton’s Prey comes out. Prey is one of Crichton’s better works (books like Timeline seem written as movie scripts, not science fiction to be read) and it dramatizes an out-of-control nanotech development with interesting implications for identity. When it comes out as a movie we could see Grey Goo go Global. So lets track the meme with some Web stats. Below are the stats for today (July 25th, 2004). After the movie comes out I will repeat the queries and compare.
Google search for “Grey Goo” (in quotes) generated 9,080 results with Grey goo – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia as the first.
AltaVista found 26,000 results with The First Church of the Grey Goo at www.greygoo.org as the first.
I then ran “Grey Goo” through the TAPoRware Googlizer asking for the top 20 links and passing those pages to get a frequency sorted word list. Here are the content words with a frequency of 30 or more.
Goo 170
Nanotechnology 129
Physics 85
Grey 84
Molecular 80
Replication 76
Carbon 75
Self 71
Nano 71
Replicating 67
Energy 67
Journal 65
Earth 65
Time 62
Manufacturing 58
Drexler 57
Global 56
Biomass 52
Science 49
Gray 45
Machines 44
Materials 38
Nanorobot 38
Mass 36
System 36
Surface 35
Natural 34
Micron 33
Population 33
Life 33
Research 32
Engineering 31
Technology 31
World 31
Runaway 31
Body 30
Related 30
Scenario 30
Paper 30
I then used the Googlizer to get the top 10 pages and give me a frequency sorted list of the collocating words within a 5 word span of Grey Goo. Here are the results, The – 44, Is – 15, Of – 14, A – 12, And – 10, To – 8, In – 6, Be – 5, About – 5, Nanotechnology – 5, Drexler – 5, Church – 4, Which – 4, All – 4, Could – 4, That – 3, Into – 3, Term – 3, This – 3, June – 3, Runaway – 3, As – 3, First – 3, Category – 3, Or – 3.
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