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by Diogenesian 18 days ago
Why would biological systems be a counterargument? Smelting metals and sustaining life both require an enormous amount of water and about ~1ATM of atmosphere, as far as we know, and there's no plausible known mechanism for sidestepping this requirement. So "magical synthetic biology that can self-replicate in space" is actually a worse solution to the problem than "magical metallurgy that can be done in space" since humans at least have smelted metals, but we've never built synthetic forms of life. (Not counting CRISPR)
1 comments
AlotOfReading 17 days ago
You're making assumptions that the parent isn't necessarily making. Imagine sending humans to other earthlike planets on hypothetical generation ships. Those humans could throw away their technology and rebuild from zero over thousands of years to send more spaceships of humans to yet further planets. Presto, an example of self-replicating biological von Neumann systems.
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EA-3167 17 days ago
It's important to say that isn't self-replicating in the von Neumann sense, even setting aside the question of how it's being executed. Humans don't replicate, we reproduce and critically evolve, never more quickly or drastically then when we're introduced to a new environment with new selection pressures. Unless these future humans have the technology to avoid that natural drift then they won't be a probe for the original species in any sense, they will speciate. In fact if you send people on a one-way trip to start over from scratch, I think it's pretty extreme to imagine their nth descendants caring about the goals of the parent civilization. Even if they in turn become spacefaring it's not as though they'll act as "probes" for their ancient and probably forgotten ancestors.
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AlotOfReading 17 days ago
There are decades old papers [0] on this subject that explicitly use humans as a analogy and call it "reproduction" because of the need to learn or evolve for local conditions. I don't think using terms in a way they've been used since the first serious analysis of the concept is going to confuse anyone.

    I think it's pretty extreme to imagine their nth descendants caring about the goals of the parent civilization.
It's an example to demonstrate the concept in familiar terms, not a psychohistorical prediction.

[0] https://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/ReproJBISJuly1980.htm

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