Ah, but there’s a rub! As Fermi would have asked: In that case, where are all the probes?
When humans discovered radio, then spaceflight, no extra-solar explorer-machines announced themselves. No messages welcomed us into a civilized sky. At first, there seemed just one explanation…
– Tor Povlov
66.
“Uh, you awake in there Tor?”
She looked up from her report as the radio link crackled along her jaw bone. Glancing out through the observation pane, she saw Gavin’s tethered form drifting far from the ship, near a deep pit along the asteroid’s flank, wherein the ruined shipyard lay hidden from the sun. Surrounded by salvage drones, he looked quite human, directing less sophisticated, noncitizen machines at their tasks.
She clicked. “Yes, I’m in the control tub doing housekeeping chores. Find something interesting?”
There was a brief pause.
“Could say that.” Her partner sounded sardonic. “Better let Warren pilot itself a while. Hurry your pretty little biological butt down here to take a look.”
Tor bit back a sharp reply, reminding herself to be patient. Even in organic humans, adolescence didn’t last forever. Not usually.
“My butt is encased in gel and titanium that’s tougher than your shiny ass,” she told him. “But I’m on my way.”
The ship’s semi-sentient autopilot accepted command as Tor hurried into her spacesuit-a set of attachments that clicked easily onto her sustainment capsule-and made for the airlock, still irritated by Gavin’s flippancy.
Everything has its price, she thought. Including buying into the future. Gavin’s type of person is new, and allowances must be made. In the long run, our culture will be theirs. In a sense it will be we who continue, and grow, long after DNA becomes obsolete.
Still, when Gavin called again, inquiring sarcastically what bodily function had delayed her, Tor wondered:
Whatever happened to machines of loving grace?
She couldn’t quash some brief nostalgia-for days when robots clanked, and computers followed orders.
Let’s recreate the logic of those last-century philosophers, in an imagined conversation, as if two of the old greats were here today, arguing it out.
JOHN VON NEUMANN: “Whether or not it someday becomes possible for living people to travel between the stars, what curious race could resist the temptation to at least send mechanical representatives? Surrogates programmed to explore and say ‘hello’?
“The first crude probes to leave our solar system-Voyager and Pioneer-demonstrated this desire, carrying simple messages meant to be deciphered by other beings, long after the authors were dust.
“And preliminary studies for more advanced missions were made-first in the 1970s by the British Interplanetary Society. Early in the 2000s, NASA funded a ‘Hundred-Year Starship’ program. Among the technologies investigated? How to make machines that can cross the great expanse, then use local resources in some faraway system to make and launch more probes to yet more destinations.
“Should we ever dispatch a wave of such representatives, even once, from that point onward our ambassadors will know no limits. Their descendants will carry our greetings to the farthest corners of the cosmos.
“Moreover, anyone out there who is enough like us to be interesting would surely do the same.”
I can imagine Von Neumann saying all this with the optimistic confidence of well-turned logic-only to hear a grouchy reply.
ENRICO FERMI: “Well. Perhaps. But answer me this: if self-reproducing probes are such efficient explorers, why haven’t these marvelous mechanisms said hello to us, by now?
“Shouldn’t they already be here? Great-great-greatissimo grand-daughters of the original devices, sent by alien civilizations that preceded ours by millions of years? Sturdy and built to wait patiently for eons, they would surely have noticed-and eagerly responded-when we first used radio!
“Suppose one lurking envoy happened to fail. Shouldn’t more than a few have accumulated by now, across the Earth’s four billion years? Yet we’ve heard no messages congratulating us for joining the ranks of space faring people.
“There is but one logical conclusion. No one before us attained the ability to send such things! Aren’t we forced to surmise we are the first curious, gregarious, technologically competent species in the Milky Way? Perhaps the only one, ever?”
The logic of this Uniqueness Hypothesis seemed so compelling, growing numbers of scientists gave up on alien contact. Especially when decade after decade of radio searches turned up only star static.
Of course, events eventually caught up with us, shattering all preconceptions. Starting with the First Artifact, we met interstellar emissaries at last-crystal eggs, packed with software-beings who provided an answer, at long last.
A depressing answer, but simple.
Like some kind of billion-year plant, it seems that each living world develops a flower-a civilization that makes seeds to spew across the universe, before the flower dies. The seeds might be called “self-replicating space probes that use local resources to make more copies of themselves”… though not as John Von Neumann pictured such things. Not even close.
In those crystal space-viruses, Von Neumann’s logic has been twisted by nature. We dwell in a universe that’s both filled with “messages” and a deathly stillness.
Or, so it seemed.
Only then, on a desperate mission to the asteroids, we found evidence that the truth is… complicated.
– Tor Povlov
67.
First Light.
Drifting in a gravitational eddy-the Martian L2 point-eighty-seven petals finished unfolding around a common center, each of them electro-warping twenty kilometers of cerametal into a perfect curved shape, reflecting starlight to a single focus.
The spectacle was lent even more grandeur for spectators who watched from the Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta’s slowly spinning gravity wheel. The great telescope, and all of the surrounding stars, seemed to gyre in a slow, revolving waltz.
“So beautiful, like a fantastic space blossom,” murmured Jenny Peng. “I wish my parents and Madam Donaldson could have witnessed this.”
“Perhaps Lacey will see it. In time,” Courier of Caution replied in soothing tones, emitted by the resonant surface of his crystalline home. The alien entity seemed like a disembodied head floating in a translucent cube, carried by a hovering robotic drone. “Lacey’s sons ordered her cryo-frozen when she passed away. Given your present rate of technological progress, in as little as thirty years she may yet have a chance to revive and-”
“It won’t be the same,” Jenny answered, firmly. Despite her family’s longstanding relationship with Courier, they always disagreed with him over this issue, siding with the Naturalist Party on matters of life and death. “Lacey would have loved to watch this telescope unfold, but with her own eyes.”
Gerald saw Courier’s simulated mouth start opening, as if to argue that organic sensors held no advantages over solid state ones. But clearly this was an old dispute between friends. Anyway there were other things on the ancient star mariner’s mind.