We could be visited by the remains of a civilisation that died out many hundreds of millions of year ago.
Think about the current state of our own development. We're fast reaching the limits of what this planet can sustain and using up all its natural resources, so we're already looking to harvest the abundant resources found in space.
Space is a hostile environment for biological organisms, but it needn't be so hostile to robots. There's enough energy in space from the sun, and enough materials in asteroid that you could set up a system where robots mine and send resources back down to Earth. Escaping Earth's gravity well is expensive so it's better to have robots mend themselves in space, and if you can do that, also eventually replicate new robots.
You now have a system which grows exponentially over time, like life does on Earth. And then it will start to spread out to the further edges of the solar system. Robots would have to have the ability to shut down for prolonged periods of time and then boot up again once they reach a new power source. So given trillions of robots, you could expect some of them to spread to other solar systems and start a new population that grows there.
For all we know, the whole galaxy might be in the process of being eaten up and we wouldn't even know until they reached here.
No fancy Physics, just time and probability. We might even be the race that ends up destroying the galaxy.
Think about the current state of our own development. We're fast reaching the limits of what this planet can sustain and using up all its natural resources, so we're already looking to harvest the abundant resources found in space.
Space is a hostile environment for biological organisms, but it needn't be so hostile to robots. There's enough energy in space from the sun, and enough materials in asteroid that you could set up a system where robots mine and send resources back down to Earth. Escaping Earth's gravity well is expensive so it's better to have robots mend themselves in space, and if you can do that, also eventually replicate new robots.
You now have a system which grows exponentially over time, like life does on Earth. And then it will start to spread out to the further edges of the solar system. Robots would have to have the ability to shut down for prolonged periods of time and then boot up again once they reach a new power source. So given trillions of robots, you could expect some of them to spread to other solar systems and start a new population that grows there.
For all we know, the whole galaxy might be in the process of being eaten up and we wouldn't even know until they reached here.
No fancy Physics, just time and probability. We might even be the race that ends up destroying the galaxy.
