What is gray goo? ‘Silo’ Season 3 Episode 8 reveals major secret about dystopian world
‘Silo’ has spent three seasons hinting at what caused the apocalypse. Now, Season 3 Episode 8, titled ‘Gray Goo,’ is delivering on that promise. The name of the episode itself was enough to make fans speculate, and not without reason, as ‘gray goo’ is a real concept in nanotechnology. It refers to an actual scientific theory, and knowing the background of this term makes it clear how fitting it is as the title of this episode. The phrase ‘gray goo’ was first used in 1986 by engineer K. Eric Drexler in his book ‘Engines of Creation.’ Drexler imagined the possibility of tiny machines that could create things at the molecular level. These machines could be programmed to replicate, leading Drexler to imagine the consequences of losing control of self-replicating machines.
In the worst-case scenario, the machines would just continue multiplying. They would use whatever resources were available to them to produce more copies of themselves. They wouldn’t stop once they finished performing a task, but would continue to spread until they had consumed the plant and animal life around them, along with all other available materials. The result would be a world overwhelmed by countless tiny machines, called the ‘gray goo’ scenario. Importantly, this ‘gray goo’ is just a hypothetical scenario, not a real substance or event. The idea became widely known following the publication of Drexler’s book and its adoption by popular science fiction and media.
That’s where Drexler’s fictional goo meets ‘Silo.’ At the beginning of Season 3, Charlotte dove into a mysterious dark cloud that wiped out her F-35 jet’s electronics. In Episode 8, viewers finally find out what the ominous blob actually was. Billionaire Per Stensen, the man behind the silo project, revealed to Senator Thurman that he believes that nanotechnology is an existential threat to humanity because it is cheap, undetectable, and irreversible, unlike nuclear weapons, disease, or asteroids. The Iranians had developed their own nanoweapon, which they had used to attack the Dulles Tech Corridor, and the public was led to believe that the attack was caused by a dirty bomb because that explanation was easier to accept. The mission carried out by Charlotte was not really an act of retaliation, but rather a distraction. The true objective was to ascertain the progress of the Iranian nano-project and get past their defenses undetected, while another group got beneath the building to destroy it from within. The cloud that wiped out her squadron was the same nanoweapon in action.
That revelation completely changes the context of everything that has happened in the series so far. This means silos were not created to withstand a nuclear war, but to withstand self-replicating machines that couldn’t be stopped, the very scenario that Drexler described in 1986. It also sheds light on the poison piped into Silo 18 in the present day. If the old world’s collapse was the result of technology getting out of control, maybe the silos’ very existence represents the extreme opposite: to keep humanity under control, isolated, and contained so that such a tragedy is never allowed to happen again. With only two episodes left in Season 3, viewers will have to wait to see how things unfold further.
