“Oh no”, you sigh. Not again. But here I am writ­ing about aliens. At least, it has noth­ing to do with the TV show Aliens in Amer­ica. And, for your sake, it’s short too. Since I was read­ing a lot from Charles Stross as of lately, I just had to think about it. What’s the hall­mark of an advanced civ­i­liza­tion? While philoso­phers might argue this point to death, it involves a cer­tain tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment. Just imag­ine a highly tech­no­log­i­cally advanced species who can do won­ders with its tech­nol­ogy. If we can’t see the tech­nol­ogy, would we fall for them if they state that they’re our Gods?

Any­way, that’s not what I was think­ing about. I went along the lines of “how would they explore the uni­verse”? Even if they got ships that are able to move faster than light (FTL), cos­mos is a really big place and it’s get­ting big­ger every sec­ond. So, how would they go about it? I for myself would opt for self-replicating robots. They would be per­fect for that kind of task. You start send­ing a bunch of them out into space and then you lean back and wait for results com­ing in. If they can move faster than light, they wouldn’t have to wait all that long, would they? If they can’t, they’d cover more ground in the most effi­cient way pos­si­ble. Their robots would have resources aplenty, what­ever they’d need to fuel their repli­cat­ing and journeying.

I won­der if that’s the first sign of higher life-forms on other plan­ets we will dis­cover. To me, it sounds com­pletely log­i­cal. If you’re an avid watcher of Star­gate, be it SG-1 or Atlantis, then you are already famil­iar with the con­cept of repli­ca­tors. Any­how, I wouldn’t assume they’d look any­where near the same. Well, it’s noth­ing more than a mind game but I can’t stop think­ing about it.