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Interstellar probes can carry out slingshot manoeuvres around the stars they visit, gaining a boost in velocity by extracting energy from the star's motion around the Galactic Centre. These maneouvres carry little to no extra energy cost, and in previous work it has been shown that a single Voyager-like probe exploring the galaxy does so 100 times faster when carrying out these slingshots than when navigating purely by powered flight (Forgan et al. 2012). We expand on these results by repeating the experiment with self-replicating probes. The probes explore a box of stars representative of the local Solar neighbourhood, to investigate how self-replication affects exploration timescales when compared with a single non-replicating probe. We explore three different scenarios of probe behaviour: i) standard powered flight to the nearest unvisited star (no slingshot techniques used), ii) flight to the nearest unvisited star using slingshot techniques, and iii) flight to the next unvisited star that will give the maximum velocity boost under a slingshot trajectory.
In all three scenarios we find that as expected, using self-replicating probes greatly reduces the exploration time, by up to three orders of magnitude for scenario i) and iii) and two orders of magnitude for ii). The second case (i.e. nearest-star slingshots) remains the most time effective way to explore a population of stars. As the decision-making algorithms for the fleet are simple, unanticipated "race conditions" amongst probes are set up, causing the exploration time of the final stars to become much longer than necessary. From the scaling of the probes' performance with star number, we conclude that a fleet of self-replicating probes can indeed explore the Galaxy in a sufficiently short time to warrant the existence of the Fermi Paradox.
...a fair portion of those civilizations have hundreds of millions or billions of years on us...
originally posted by: LogicalRazor
It is still probable that WE are the only civilization that has advanced technologically.
originally posted by: smithjustinb
Intelligent life may not be prevalent. There is only one species on Earth capable of doing anything like this. There are millions of species on Earth that aren't and have no desire to do this. We're unique on this planet. Who's to say we're not unique among others?
EDIT: It is still probable that WE are the only civilization that has advanced technologically. Sad...but probable & quite mathematically possible.
originally posted by: VoidHawk
originally posted by: smithjustinb
Intelligent life may not be prevalent. There is only one species on Earth capable of doing anything like this. There are millions of species on Earth that aren't and have no desire to do this. We're unique on this planet. Who's to say we're not unique among others?
Monkeys have recently been found to be using tools, some have been found making things such as umbrellas, how long before they're talking?
We're discovering whales and dolphins are highly intelligent, maybe in a few thousand years they too will be talking.
We are not unique on this earth, we just have a little head start.
originally posted by: Totemic
Given the likely prevalence of intelligent life in our galaxy and the likelihood that a fair portion of those civilizations have hundreds of millions or billions of years on us, the probability is that our solar system has been probed by multitudes of alien civilizations throughout the history of our system.