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Are alien probes scouring the galaxy ?


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i suppose the difference is that the Drones we use for such purposes as spying on people or assassinating America's Enemies are remotely controlled, and the decision making is left to those bravely controling them from a bunker deep underneath a mountain in Wyoming. When we start devloping self-aware Drones that can make their own decisions, then perhaps people might begin to raise objections ....

Ooh... that hadn't occured to me... yes, I see your point. When self-aware drones that can make their own descisions and possibly one of them descisions could be to make their own drones. Then we could have drone made drones.

I'm not liking this drone business very much at all.

I'd rather much have a tribble problem.

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Good thing few of the military drones don't have arms or thumbs.

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There may be some long forgotten probe from a civilization just wondering around the universe. The farther it gets from their planet the longer it takes to send information back to them. So if there is probes out there it's probably old junk.

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You mean like voyager. They are at the boundery to intersteller space.

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Sometimes SF seems to predict the future; this comes only from the fact that the genre makes so many predictions, and not from any abillity to see the future. In fact it is terrible at it, mainly because authors have to feed their readers.

We see this here.

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Not sure if science fiction predicts the future or controls it. It seems that a lot of science goes into making science fiction come true.

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In my opinion, it can be quite mandatory for several - or maybe even many intelligent beings from other planets in our galaxy to probe the galaxy - if not the universe.

Every star has a death date. some stars in our galaxy were created billions of years before ours. surely many have since super-novaed.

obviously a society of people that has evolved for billions of years will want to try to locate a new home planet before their own gets obliverated. And that could happen from a neighboring stat going super nova, too.

yeah, it makes sense that several - even many peoples throughout the galaxy were and still are scouring the galaxy for a new home - IMO, anyway.

Edited by Earl.Of.Trumps
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I think once your race become nomads they will remain so. They would only stop long enough in a system to get any resources. Not like the movie, independence day. I think they would raid the astriod belt and the nonhabital planets and moons.

Thy may also seed a system and then move on. That way their race would become immortal.

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This appears to have turned into unrestricted speculation, and, of course, if that is where you are than all and more is not just possible but, in an infinite world of possibilities, even necessary.

Self-sustaining worlds -- Dyson spheres or whatever -- would not necessarily need to "stop off" places for resouurces, but would forsee the upcoming heat death of the universe and develop ways to generate their own energy out of the apparently limitless energy inherent in space/time (which tends to become uselsess to us not because it is used up but because its entropy is increased).

They would also in effect create limitless space for their existence either by manipulating dimensions or by creating electronic worlds to live in ("simulations").

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If they can build a movable dyson, they would have to know how to make or pluck a sun out of its orbit. I think making one would be safer.

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A computer world would end when the computer does.

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I don't know that moving a star around would be necessary.. Let it go where it wants. For the most part that shold not ever be a problem in an expanding universe. However, moving it wouldn't be too hard given a Jupiter-size mass or two to orbit it in the right ways and given enough time.

Dyson spheres though are not the solution; stars do die. More distributed energy sources tapping directly into space/time on a localized basis makes more sense.

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I think we are probably in a computer simulation now; in fact the universe is. Just keep it going.

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I think we are probably in a computer simulation now; in fact the universe is. Just keep it going.

The brain is a computer, our cells operate on a base of six. So yes we could be in a computer sim.

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This appears to have turned into unrestricted speculation, and, of course, if that is where you are than all and more is not just possible but, in an infinite world of possibilities, even necessary.

Self-sustaining worlds -- Dyson spheres or whatever -- would not necessarily need to "stop off" places for resouurces, but would forsee the upcoming heat death of the universe and develop ways to generate their own energy out of the apparently limitless energy inherent in space/time (which tends to become uselsess to us not because it is used up but because its entropy is increased).

They would also in effect create limitless space for their existence either by manipulating dimensions or by creating electronic worlds to live in ("simulations").

I thought that Heat Death of the Universe was when all energy... photons of various favors, and all matter had been broken down and completely stopped. The complete end of all entropy in the universe. So there would be no matter left and no energy moving about at all. Even the quantum background hickups that supposedly can create and remove quantum particles would have stopped. There would be no energy and no matter, just an infinite void where everything is the same everywhere.

There will be no one and no matter around when the Universe starts to approach heat death.

http://en.wikipedia....of_the_universe

The heat death of the universe is a suggested ultimate fate of the universe in which the universe has diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain processes that consume energy (including computation and life). Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy).

Luckly for us, living in the universe, the timescale for Heat death is on the order of 10100 years, and we're only at about 13.8 x 109 years old now, so we have a little time left. Which is like 1 second (Representing the current age of the universe) in 320 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion years.

Edited by DieChecker
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My understading is a little difference and derives of the question of where the energy of the big bang, which started as a quantum flutuation and then expanded exponentially, filled with energy of low entropy.

Since energy can't be destroyed, we use it by increasing its entropy, but there is no reason to think that the inflation used up all the available energy; indeed, there could be no end to the supply availble. Now you tell me how to tap into it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have a Dyson sphere. It's a very good particle-accelerator when it is turned on. Are there instructions available for helping it to go to the next step ? :D

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name='spacelizard667' timestamp='1373993966' post='4846486']

IF their robots are self-replicating where would they get the raw materials from considering that these robots would need something more than air to replicate themselves from, [/b]

:tu: BOOM! The Million Dollar question even I have problems understanding. Thats the nail on the head right there.

So you build a self replicating probe, (TIP: YOU BUILT IT, with hands and screws and glue and plugs and stuff that fingers do) a probe that is intricate and smart.

Right. So put that probe in a shed with no materials available and command it to replicate!! What will happen? How can it replicate? HOW? Perhaps Im having a brain fart - but Id like to know?

Someone?

Anyone?

Now, some of you will know MIT have already built a so called self replicating machine, except it doesn't really self replicate, but...it can replicate the form of something else.

But so can a jelly mold, to an extent

Heres a quote from the MIT 'machine' page

MIT Builds Self-Replicating Machines

Eventually, engineers want to scale the cubes down to the size of sand grains, enabling the precise replication of 3D objects. Practical applications of the technology, however, will not have to wait that long.

To repair a broken fan belt, for example, the owner could tape the split ends together and place the belt into a box containing the robotic cubes. The cubes would imitate the form and serve as a belt until the owner reached an auto parts store. Afterwards, the cubes could be deconstructed and used to duplicate another shape when the need arises. Follow the jump for a video that shows the cubes at work!

http://bigthink.com/...cating-machines

Now that was just a paragraph from that page, the whole (but short) page is worth a read!

.

.

Edited by seeder
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I have a Dyson sphere. It's a very good particle-accelerator when it is turned on. Are there instructions available for helping it to go to the next step ? :D

We were thinking of getting one, but they were a bit expensive, so we got one of these instead. It seems to do the job reasonably well.

Henry-Hoover_zps8f134c90.jpg

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:tu: BOOM! The Million Dollar question even I have problems understanding. Thats the nail on the head right there.

So you build a self replicating probe, (TIP: YOU BUILT IT, with hands and screws and glue and plugs and stuff that fingers do) a probe that is intricate and smart.

Right. So put that probe in a shed with no materials available and command it to replicate!! What will happen? How can it replicate? HOW? Perhaps Im having a brain fart - but Id like to know?

Someone?

Anyone?

Now, some of you will know MIT have already built a so called self replicating machine, except it doesn't really self replicate, but...it can replicate the form of something else.

But so can a jelly mold, to an extent

Heres a quote from the MIT 'machine' page

MIT Builds Self-Replicating Machines

Eventually, engineers want to scale the cubes down to the size of sand grains, enabling the precise replication of 3D objects. Practical applications of the technology, however, will not have to wait that long.

To repair a broken fan belt, for example, the owner could tape the split ends together and place the belt into a box containing the robotic cubes. The cubes would imitate the form and serve as a belt until the owner reached an auto parts store. Afterwards, the cubes could be deconstructed and used to duplicate another shape when the need arises. Follow the jump for a video that shows the cubes at work!

http://bigthink.com/...cating-machines

Now that was just a paragraph from that page, the whole (but short) page is worth a read!

.

.

A nanofactory, or some other application of nanotechnology would be my guess.

A nanofactory is a proposed system in which nanomachines (resembling molecular assemblers, or industrial robot arms) would combine reactive molecules via mechanosynthesis to build larger atomically precise parts. These, in turn, would be assembled by positioning mechanisms of assorted sizes to build macroscopic (visible) but still atomically-precise products.

http://en.wikipedia....cular_assembler

Edited by Slave2Fate
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A nanofactory, or some other application of nanotechnology would be my guess.

http://en.wikipedia....cular_assembler

Ah so really then, we are not to consider an alien probe in space just duplicating itself, but rather, a swarm pre made in a nano factory, and that I could understand, sort of. I mean our own robots build cars right? Well, to a point anyway, the fiddly stuff is finished by humans. So going back to the OP then we couldn't really have self replicating probes in space then, not unless they also tagged along a nano factory. In which case the OP is misleading saying probes could replicate themselves

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A nanofactory, or some other application of nanotechnology would be my guess.

http://en.wikipedia....cular_assembler

My guess would be that the probe would have a minature factory built into it. And that would allow it to build a larger facility to process materials and build parts, which would allow for the condtruction of another probe, which would aid in the construction of a larger facility.

This all requires a amazingly complex machine however which can find the raw materials, process them and fabricate them. And we're talking about dozens of different materials and thousands of parts. Can you imagine if such a probe has to re-produce a computer processor? Since I work at Intel, I understand the hundreds of processes and the machines and testing needed to produce a single chip. It is simply astounding. And something can go wrong at any step and ruin the chip.

A replicating probe could do that, but I think it would have to build a city sized facility to do so and have to build thousands of machines, and process all the testing itself, since it would have the only computer processor. To do all this by itself would be possible, but might take millions of hours of work.

Maybe the best idea would be for the probe to bring dozens of processors with it. Then it could build a copy, or build machines to build more copys much quicker. and then not send out any other probes till the factory they built was produciing processors. Maybe.... That would be a lot faster....

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We're assuming that these probes would be like nanobots; I'm envisaging, well, typical Flying saucer sized craft, operating from a convenient, reasonably central base somewhere (e.g. for the Solar system, the Asteroid belt, for example), which they set up as they spread out in a kind of colonisation principle.

Edited by Colonel Rhuairidh
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I don't think any of this is at all realistic. Just my opinion.

Speculation is a good thing sometimes, but I like it best when there is something concrete to start with; all this seems completely out of deep space.

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