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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 p
by 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 agoOh 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!