This one is going to be a bit unconventional, but I love thinking about grey goo. For those unfamiliar, grey goo is a concept in science fiction/futurism where an advanced civilization explores space by creating really small, easy to produce, robots that can fit together like Legos. When they reach a destination, they combine together to form devices that can extract minerals and build more of the tiny robots, and they advance further out into space, collecting data as they go.Now one common criticism of grey goo is that many are afraid that it can come back and start extracting resources from a civilization's home world. Sure, you can program the robots to not extract resources from their home system, but then there could be an error in copying the code that results in that safe guard failing. Now, whether or not we can program or design around this is an interesting discussion. But an even more interesting discussion is what will happen if there could be errors when copying the programming to begin with.You see, If that one portion of the code can mutate, then all the code can mutate. Some sections of the code will produce dud robots if it mutates, but over trillions upon trillions of tiny drones, some of them are going to benign, or even beneficial. And different mutations will occur in different sets of robots, allowing for not only evolution, but the rise of entire robot ecosystems.This means that this tiny powder of robots holds the potential to create literal robot life. And I mean literally literal, not figurative literal. It will meet all seven criteria for life. Homeostasis? Well, they have to regulate heat in order to compute and resources to reproduce. Organized into cells? We can think of the tiny robots making larger machines as cells. Plus this criteria was pretty arbitrary anyway. I mean slime molds are usually just one big cell with multiple nuclei floating about, but they count as alive because they just so happen to have a phospholipid bi-layer. Metabolism? They need to generate power and get materials to reproduce somehow, or else they'd be pretty useless robots.Growth? They'll have to create more of themselves over time to arrange into configurations that allow for producing more of themselves. Adaptation? The code can mutate and give rise to new structures and behaviors. Response to stumuli? Wouldn't be a robot without it. Reproduction? That's what makes it grey goo.Just think. If even grey goo backfires and destroys all life on earth, it has the potential to bring about a new era of life, where robots dominate over organics. Over galactic time frames, there will be new variations in new evolutionary niches that would be impossible for our frail carbon based forms. Perhaps sentience could arise from it given enough time and the right selection pressures...And that's why grey goo is flipin' awesome.