[pharke]

I've never understood the Von Neumann probe conjecture. Why would anyone design a probe that uses all of the available resources within a system to produce new probes that are sent to the N nearest systems? Surely it's more efficient to use a smaller number of more capable probes than to use a larger number of less capable ones when you consider the fuel mass necessary to get them to the next star. Ideally, you need one foolproof probe that can bootstrap a manufacturing facility in the next system. More likely you would send a few backup probes but you wouldn't send billions of them.

I think multiple Von Neumann probes could have come and gone from our system using little more than a few asteroids and a sip of the Jovian atmosphere.

It's also worth repeating that Von Neumann probes are only useful for information gathering. It would be highly impractical to pre-build all of the colonization infrastructure ahead of time and then mothball it for millions more years while the biologicals caught up, assuming they ever did. So these devices would be limited to scientific exploration or monitoring.

The only thing that I think Star Trek got right about the future is that many people will live in space full time aboard starships. All the planet hopping they do is just to further the plot and provide a familiar backdrop to the audience. Once a species transitions to living in space they will most likely stay there and have little use for planets. Depending on their mastery of fusion or other energy sources they may not even bother hanging around stars anymore. If we want to talk about anthropocentric perspectives the whole concept of visiting other worlds is probably as progressive as vacationing in natural caves, an entertaining novelty done once but never repeated by people who enjoy a roof over their heads, modern conveniences and climate control.

[ncmncm]

Stars, anyway, have Kuiper belts full of useful materials, with lots of room to spread out, and far enough out not to be inconveniently warm. Any civilization working with very large energies will have large cooling needs: if there is anything we can say confidently about future technologies, it is that they will remain bound by thermodynamics.