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Thing that's interesting to me is that we have a number of proposals for how we might reach another star with essentially present-day technology. So even us dum

Thing that's interesting to me is that we have a number of proposals for how we might reach another star with essentially present-day technology. So even us dumb humans think we could get a robot probe out there. A self-replicating one is much further off of course. Are you just questioning the Von Neumann machine aspect or the entire feasibility of sending a basic dumb probe out to another star for a fly-by?

manicdee 7y ago
There’s a huge technological leap between s tiny laser-propelled fly-by probe and a ship full of humans stopping in that system to settle.
irrational 7y ago
A fly-by doesn't count. Even the Voyager probes will someday fly-by some star. Going to a star and setting up shop (whether a human colony or self-replicating probes) is the only thing that counts in my book.
- krapp 7y ago
  >Even the Voyager probes will someday fly-by some star. Not necessarily. I think you underestimate how much of space is space and how little of it is anything else... and that most of that "anything else" is dark matter. Only ~4% of the mass energy of the entire universe is matter. It seems more likely than not to me that any arbitrary path through interstellar space would never pass near anything larger than a grain of dust.
- scrumper 7y ago
  Oh yeah that's way harder. I'd be OK arguing that we could fling something at Alpha Centauri and have it stop using tech with a very low-risk path from today's state of the art, but even just the 3D printing needed for self-replicating probes (such a printer has to be able to print something exactly as complicated as itself from asteroid material, which is really going to be incredibly hard to do, not to mention energy intensive) is a long, long way off and there's no way I'm going to be able to convince you of the viability of that!
baja_blast 7y ago
The problem with Von Neumann probes is they couldn't land on a planet like Earth and use it as a launching off point since the escape velocity is too high for a simple probe to produce off of whatever it can extract from the soil. If any landed here it would have eroded away by now, and for all we know it could be all around our solar system and we wouldn't know.

manicdee 7y ago

There’s a huge technological leap between s tiny laser-propelled fly-by probe and a ship full of humans stopping in that system to settle.

irrational 7y ago

A fly-by doesn't count. Even the Voyager probes will someday fly-by some star. Going to a star and setting up shop (whether a human colony or self-replicating probes) is the only thing that counts in my book.

krapp 7y ago
>Even the Voyager probes will someday fly-by some star. Not necessarily. I think you underestimate how much of space is space and how little of it is anything else... and that most of that "anything else" is dark matter. Only ~4% of the mass energy of the entire universe is matter. It seems more likely than not to me that any arbitrary path through interstellar space would never pass near anything larger than a grain of dust.
scrumper 7y ago
Oh yeah that's way harder. I'd be OK arguing that we could fling something at Alpha Centauri and have it stop using tech with a very low-risk path from today's state of the art, but even just the 3D printing needed for self-replicating probes (such a printer has to be able to print something exactly as complicated as itself from asteroid material, which is really going to be incredibly hard to do, not to mention energy intensive) is a long, long way off and there's no way I'm going to be able to convince you of the viability of that!

baja_blast 7y ago

The problem with Von Neumann probes is they couldn't land on a planet like Earth and use it as a launching off point since the escape velocity is too high for a simple probe to produce off of whatever it can extract from the soil. If any landed here it would have eroded away by now, and for all we know it could be all around our solar system and we wouldn't know.