#self-replicating

Self-Replicating Von Neumann Probes and How to Explore the Galaxy

John von Neumann showed in the 1940s that a machine could in principle build a perfect copy of itself. In 1980, cosmologist Frank Tipler applied that idea to space exploration: a probe that mines raw materials from asteroids to copy itself could, in theory, reach every star in the galaxy within a few million years. The logic is hard to argue with. The implications are harder.