Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has becomeknown as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncon-trolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo”emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less in-spiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superiorin an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

Drexler startedthe Foresight Institute in the late 1980s “to help prepare society for an-ticipated advanced technologies”

While still a student at MIT, a young Eric Drexler met O’Neill, for whom he worked as a research assistantat Princeton in the summer of 1974, funded by the wealthy patron and influential space colonisation spokeswoman, Barbara Marx Hubbard(another devotee of Teilhard’s ideas).408Drexler“went on to develop plans for lunar factories, solar sails, and methods to mine asteroids for mineral resources” and “was one of the L5 Society’s most articulate and vocal advocates for an expanded human presence in space.”409Butby the late 70s,Drexler began to turn his attentionto a new concept, nanotechnology, which fed into the space colonisation dream, but also broadened the emphasis of the L5 space-age, human potential movement, into something that underpinned cryonics and life-extensionist ambitions,and other facets of what later became a distinctly transhumanist vision of the future.