10-22-2015, 04:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-22-2015, 04:55 PM by stevebowers.)
(10-22-2015, 04:10 PM)chris0033547 Wrote: So if this advanced xenosophonts really exist around this star and if they decided to investigate the galaxy and send self-replicating von Neumann probes to the nearest stars in the year 535 CE. How long would it take for one of the copies of these original probes to arrive here?Good question.
By a very strange coincidence, KIC 8462852 is at about the same distance from Earth as the To'ul'h home planet is in OA. Terragen probes reached To'ul'h Prime in 3831 AT, so if they had technology equivalent to the OA terrans we could expect them in about 2000 years or so; a bit faster if they had Current Era tech.
Using replicating probes this would take a bit longer, since the infrastructure to create each new wave of probes has to be constructed from scratch in the new systems. But as Carl Sagan realised many decades ago, the speed at which a wave of replicators spreads depends on how far each probe travels before replicating. If the probes only travel ten light-years or so before replicating, then they will take a lot longer to get here than if they travel 100 light years, or a thousand. Note that a replicating swarm that travels long distances before replicating will be spread very thinly, unless each swarm member replicates a very large number of times (which is not impossible, of course).