A university student in France asked me the following question:
“If an advanced extraterrestrial civilization were to develop intelligent, self-replicating, and self-repairing autonomous robots (von Neumann probes), the cosmic timeline for its galactic spreading changes drastically. Even under the conservative assumption that these machines travel at 1% of the speed of light, they could theoretically colonize the entire Milky-Way galaxy within a few hundred thousand years.
On a cosmic scale, a few hundred thousand years is a mere blink of an eye. Yet, our current empirical reality presents a stark contradiction: we observe no physical evidence of such automated systems, nor any signs of large-scale galactic engineering.
This leads to a fundamental question: Does the absolute absence of these self-replicating probes strongly imply that no civilization technologically superior to ours currently exists — or has ever existed — within our galaxy? Or are there alternative, overlooked constraints (such as software mutation limits or existential risks) that would prevent a superior civilization from deploying such technology in the first place?”
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