[ExI] Reinventing SETI: Why Our Alien-Hunting Playbook Needs an Upgrade

[BillK]

On Mon, 29 Sept 2025 at 12:55, spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Disagree.  Our first good strong radio signals are only about a century old.  A hundred year radius sphere is not that big, about ten thousand stars in that range, and even then, only those 50 years out (a coupla thousand) would have had time to return a possibly malignant signal.  We can’t dismiss the Dark Forest notion yet.
>
>  <big snip>
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________


The author mentions that the whole galaxy could already have 'watcher'
robots in every system.
Even at sub-light speeds, in theory, Von Neumann replicating probes
could be everywhere within a few million years.
The 'watching' could be for contact or destruction.
Thinking on that scale however, I have to wonder about the problem of
keeping the robot programming up-to-date. The originating civilization
could be so far away and may no longer exist. Even if it still exists,
it may have changed its mind about the Von Neumann robot objectives or
technology. That is a huge problem to try to fix!


BillK