What would happen if the Earth was grey-gooed into paperclips?

I'm considering a scenario where Humans cannot live on Earth anymore, and need to settle other planets. Some physicist I follow on YouTube like to remind us that almost no mater what we do to Earth, it will always be easier to fix it, then to terraform other planets. So I'm considering extreme scenarios...

Apart from being outright destroyed, being "grey-good" is probably the next worst thing that can happen. But I would imagine that "grey-goo" would have been designed with some purpose beyond just multiplying itself, in particular, producing something "valuable". So I imagine they might turn the Earth into gold, titanium, uranium... assuming grey-goo can somehow transmute materials. But a funnier alternative is the paperclip maximizer.

So my question is, what would happen if the Earth was turned into (steel) paperclips? Would they be "denser"? Would the Earth shrink? Would it cause the paperclips to melt into on giant ball of molten metal? Would the magnetic field become much stronger? Would it somehow disintegrate, causing the rest of the solar system to be "infected" with grey-goo?

posted almost 5 years ago

Sebastien Diot‭

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