[gurneyHaleck]

Yeah, I really don't buy that premise at all. Just because some individual likes the idea of drones, doesn't make them implicitly virtuous.

The decision to use resources to pollute the wilderness with arbitrary technology is a leadership decision, relying on the personality characteristics of an entity or social chain of command.

This business about "drones" is an anachronistic paraphrasing of the original concept. People didn't speak in terms of the "drone" fad in the 20th century, like we do now. Drones were usually just target practice for the Air Force and Navy.

The original concept just specified range of influence, and a demonstration of presence. It did not impose a manner of activity, be it drone replication or direct colonization with regimented staff, and divisions of duty among personel. [0] The Fermi paradox remained agnostic, simply implying possible speed of travel given geological time scales.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos mentioned unmanned satellites (or unaliened? unoccupied...) as the most likely hypothetical form of first contact. Before we bump into any living thing, will probably notice a few remote control devices fanned out in front of their main corpus of civilization or colonization. That TV show also hypothesized about the possibility of dying civilizations leaving behind self-perpetuating remnants of technology, the likes of which might or might not be sentient. All of it was TV speculation though, not presented as surely factual.

If you read between the lines, the premise of a "dying" civilization hints at the lack of self control present in a runaway factory neglected and left to churn out garbage. That idea does not assume that a collective of entities would always wish to tamper with and contaminate their surrounding domain presumptiously.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

[wyager]

You're trying to do some sort of pop-psych/pop-social analysis of hypothetical aliens, which I don't think will be a fruitful excercise.

It's pretty clear that the "drones" the GGP is referring to are self-replicating autonomous machines, which could, with a relatively extremely small initial mass-energy investment, visit every solar system in the galaxy in a matter of megayears. It doesn't require leadership or social approval or whatever you're talking about; anyone with technology marginally more advanced than what we have could do it with the equivalent of a few tens of billion dollars of machinery. The more advanced you are, the cheaper it gets. It's very odd that we haven't seen anything like that yet.

[krapp]

The entire Von-Neumann probe scenario makes its own unprovable assumptions about the nature of alien civilizations, and the feasibility of the technological scenario required. By definition, the lack of such probes isn't "odd", as it's the way things appear to be in our universe. It's the height of arrogance to assume that, as steeped in ignorance as we are, the flaw lies in the stars rather than ourselves.

It's like Kurzweil describing the exponential curve of self-replicating AI leading to the Singularity and infinite machine intelligence... it's an elegant, mathematically self-evident solution that just happens not to correlate with reality.

[wyager]

No, it doesn't really make any interesting assumptions at all. We already have the technology to send interstellar probes at several percent of lightspeed via Orion-style nuclear pulse propulsion. It's just politically impossible due to the partial test ban treaty. We're still a ways away from autonomous self-replicators, but not that far.

It has literally nothing to do with the nature of whatever aliens might build these hypothetical machines. The only requirement is that some group with modest resources and marginally better technology than us wants to do it.

> It's like Kurzweil describing the exponential curve of self-replicating AI

A little early to try and refute that, don't you think? We're still on an exponential production trend.

[krapp]

Something that can self-replicate is still not something that can self-replicate over millions of years and through millions of generations in the harsh environment of interstellar space, feeding off of and taking advantage of any arbitrary material it might find for self-replication and reaction mass, while still maintaining a consistent exponential growth curve throughout the galaxy.

That's not "modest resources and marginally better technology than us", that's perilously close to being magic. Not even viruses, the most aggressive and efficient self-replicators we know of, have managed to consume all the biomass on the planet, or could reasonably be expected to do so.

[wyager]

> feeding off of and taking advantage of any arbitrary material it might find for self-replication and reaction mass

This is a false premise. It doesn't have to do anything this fancy.

You can expect that any given asteroid is likely to have a certain amount of iron, carbon, silicon, nickel, etc.

In almost any solar system, you can mine the materials needed for construction very easily. Solar gives you enough energy to do (slow, deliberate) resource extraction from asteroids.

As for propellant and reaction mass, we already know nuclear explosions work excellently. Unfortunately, based on analysis of meteors we don't expect asteroids to have great heavy-metal concentrations; on the order of 10ppb for Uranium. This presents a challenge, but not an insurmountable one; it just means that you'll probably want to get explosive materials closer to the center of the system.

> Not even viruses, the most aggressive and efficient self-replicators we know of, have managed to consume all the biomass on the planet, or could reasonably be expected to do so.

This is true, but 100% irrelevant to the challenges of creating space-based manufacturing capable of reproducing all its own components.

[gurneyHaleck]

Just because you like the idea, doesn't mean it gets adopted.

[wyager]

Not really sure what you're talking about. What I want has nothing to do with it. Could you expand?

[gurneyHaleck]

The Fermi Paradox posits the premise of ANY artifact indicative of intelligent origins.

It doesn't have to be "self replicating drones." It could be inert bullets, arrow heads, sharp sticks, carefully arranged electromagnetic retro-reflectors.

Drones are a fad. The paradox doesn't require an alien implementation of drone technology, self replicating, autonomous, or what have you.

[wyager]

> Drones are a fad.

The concept of autonomous machines is a fad?

[gurneyHaleck]

Yes. A recent one. Prior to 2003, people were less interested in non-sentient autonomous machines. Drones.

As technology advances, autonomous machines may very likely grow beyond the definition/parlance of a "drone" (machinery designed and dedicated only to perform specific tasks) into more powerful forms of intelligence.

At that point, such machinery graduates beyond the definition of an artifact (a possession held in the ownership of higher-order life), and one might speculate whether it represents a form of life unto itself, or where one might draw such a boundary.

Either way, such sentient machinery (read: not drones) might not be bound by geological/astronomical timescales, outlasting its inventors possibly permanently, but still represents a component of the Fermi Paradox. If such things are possible, where are they?