Do things which old-fashioned fungi can break down, given time and water - physical books, wood furniture, natural fiber clothing - need any special treatments to survive in your environment?
Figure that these plastic-rotting fungi won't be all that much different from the ones you're familiar with. This is not some SciFi "and the Nanotech Gray Goo ate the entire earth in a week" story.
"Life Finds a Way, Inc." has had a planet-sized laboratory, running its Natural Mutation Engine 24x7x365, for a billion-ish years now. But no Gray Goo has actually evolved, and taken over the Earth.
Perhaps, "Gray Goo" is just another cool-sounding trope, and not a real-world possibility?
Generally “Grey Goo” science fiction ignores the lack of metals in the environment thus preventing the grey in Grey Goo as well as energy constraints etc.
However, simply outcompeting organic life using the same atomic building blocks would be a real problem for existing life forms like humans.
Part of the Grey Goo memeset is that the goo is an unstoppable apex predator that doesn't just tweak the ecological balance a bit in a conventional ecological relationship, but permanently establishes an ecological balance of 100% Grey Goo.
Not yet, but the the human population has more than doubled since 1970, while the number of other vertebrates has halved. It's like biomass is conserved, and human growth (both in number and in waistlines) is us systematically converting biomass into ourselves.
In 100 more years when the only vertebrates that aren't extinct or endangered are humans and our livestock and pets, will that be Grey Goo-like enough for you? Or does it only count if we manage to exterminate the insects and lower-order species too?
Because an "unstoppable apex predator" could never become 100% Grey Goo, as it still needs something to eat!
