It has both civil and military applications.
Very, very carefully.
In civilian applications, this is called autoindustrialism, and is the standard answer to how you pull an industrial base out of your hat. They ship the seeds for this with every new colony and outpost.
They generally arenât true von Neumann machines, though, because while clanking replicators are a neat trick, they arenât the most efficient way to do things. Rather than setting your robots to build new robots out of a pile of ore and sand, itâs much more effective to have them build smelters and fabs and robot factories, which then in turn serve as an assembly line to build the new robots (and anything else you want). The whole thing can be conceptualized as a von Neumann system, of course, but no individual machine is.
Under, of course, very careful supervision to prevent mutation and runaway. People arenât concerned about them turning into paperclip maximizers, to be clear; theyâre not built smart enough for that. But Cogli, the False Ecumenopolis, is right there as a demonstration of what happens when your autoindustrialism succumbs to the Sorcererâs Apprentice Problem.
(Have I told yâall about Cogli yet? Iâll try and write a âPlaces To Goâ about it soon.)
Now, the military versionâŠ
Limited replication/fabrication systems are one thing. Nuclear War In A Can, Brigade In A Bottle, Janissary In A Drum, all popular products for very good reasons. Bio/nanoweapons are permissible, if youâve built them with all the required safeguards and a few more besides in the name of good sense.
But unlimited military replicators? The Empire barely gets away with the swarm fleets for ADHAĂC CALYPSE and ADHAĂC PARASOL, and thatâs only because theyâre under the Transcendâs direct control, never actually used en masse with field replication, and their owners have a multi-millennial reputation for being incredibly consistent and responsible with this sort of thing.
But uncontrolled self-replicating military assets are a big feature of the Ley Accordsâs Not Even Once list because screwing up your control software in this respect, or failing to protect adequately against mutational oopsies, tends to lead to rogue assets which turn with frightening speed into hegemonizing swarms leaving blights, gigadeaths, and sterilized planets in their wake.
If the galaxy is real lucky, the aftermath of such an event is some very angry people glassing large swaths of your homeworld to both remind you not to, and deprive you of any ability to, do anything that stupid ever again.
If itâs not, you get to go down in the history books of the fleeing survivors, for as long as there are fleeing survivors, as the creator of the Infinite Warcrime Engine. And thatâs not a legacy anyone wants.
(Which is not to say there arenât a few rogue states and groups who arenât interested in the technology anyway, which is almost certainly beyond their capacity, but is in any case Fifth Directorate territory.)
The risk of mutation and runaway, incidentally, is why no-oneâs using von Neumann probes.
Once you send them out into the far reaches of the galaxy, theyâre beyond any control or correction you can exert, and the probability that your probes, however benign, even simple no-touch observers, will accidentally turn into something not unakin to malignant space cancer over time, space, and population trending ever upwards approaches 1. No-oneâs touching that one.
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Oh, donât the Associate Worlds use the von Neumann probes? Very sensible of them. In that case, how they colonize new worlds? I highly doubt they would be so primitive as to depend on means such as generation ships.
In the Eldraeverse, planetary colonization seems to be the mainstream (including asteroid colonization). Does this have to do with the fact that they do not utilize von Neumann machines to dismantle rocky and gas planets for building space habitats?
Cogli looks very interesting. What is the estimated likelihood of cases like Cogli, or even more seriously, von Neumann machines undergoing mutation into a hegemonizing swarm?
Lastly, what is difference between ADHAĂC CALYPSE and ADHAĂC PARASOL?
Do they use information-form crew on an STL starship, with or without von Neumann engineering plant as cargo?
If not, they should. Or maybe after fittlersâŠ
Any generation ships would have been Thirteen Colonies era, several millennia back. (I donât know if any of them actually were generation ships, or if they were all popsicle freighters.)
As for probes, only @avatar knows, but I point out in passing what amazing resolution imagery is possible with baselines measured in light-years.
Iâm guessing the difference between PARASOL and CALYPSE maps to âknown fool oopsied Big Timeâ vs âOutside Context Problem, please evacuate known space in an orderly manner.â
I would think non-self-replicating probes, probes with infomorph crews and/or probes with tangle to allow an infomorph crew to mindcast out to the probe if needed would be good for deep-range exploration.
What I wonder, regarding exploration - is it considered cricket for one polity to lay claim to worlds/systems discovered by another, especially if theyâre not useful to the polity that discovered them?
The Deep Star colony ships were all cold-sleep ships. Generation ships have existed in Worldsâ history, but the Empire never used them.
See, for detailed descriptions, Zoom.
The Super-Size Synthetic Aperture is of fairly limited use for colonization purposes because of how difficult it is to reorient, but the others are on-line and feeding data into the start of the process.
That gets you your initial list of signs of life, civilization, interesting anomalies or resource-rich areas to work from. Next the starwisp tenders go to work and fire Far Horizon Probes off in the direction of these interesting things at speeds in the high-relativistic regime. By careful design of courses, they can usually get a few star systemsâ worth of data out of each FHP.
Now depending on various things, there may be cause to send a crewed relativistic scout out there in advance. (Oh, hey, itâs an existing developed multistellar polity!)
Otherwise, itâs time to skip to sending out the weylforges and the superlifters to get on with constructing a shiny new constellation of stargates in and around the Interesting Areaâą.
At which point you have convenient FTL access to the area[1], and you can switch to dispatching the regular set of IES exploration ships, in an order which should hopefully be obvious from their descriptions. In any case, depending on what youâve got, procedures start diverging dramatically at this point.
Well, on one hand, the first question one gets to ask is âat what point in the above processes does the planet count as âdiscoveredââ? See it? Orbit it? Land on it? Build a research outpost that has a flag[2]?
But fortunately, thatâs not actually how it works, partly because it would mean many star nations would have very little chance to have colonies (running a full-bandwidth interstellar exploration service is very, very expensive), and mostly because allowing a free-for-all in colonization is the sort of thing that leads to endless claim-jumping, planet-jacking, and border wars out the wazoo. Long, long ago the Presidium powers put their collective foot down and enforced the Accord on Colonization.
To say the Accord on Colonization is disliked by almost everyone in the galaxy is⊠something of an understatement. On the other hand, since itâs disliked by almost everyone in the galaxy, itâs unlikely to be replaced with anything else any time soon.
Hereâs how it works.
All worlds opened up to transit, whoever discovered them, are given over to the Accord to hold in trust. Then the allocation process begins:
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First, identified protected planets are taken out of the pool. Protected planets includes a wide variety of things: quarantined worlds[3], necropolis worlds, Precursor sites or other fossil worlds, unique sites of scientific interest, promising prebiotic worlds, unusual native sophonts, that sort of thing.
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Second, non-spacefaring races get first claim on their own system[4], at least until the timer runs down.
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Third, a limited number of habitables and near-habitables are plucked out of the pool before it goes on the market to be allocated as freesoil worlds, open to settlement by anyone. This is the âoutsideâ/âsafety-valveâ solution applied on a Worlds-wide scale.
After all that, then theyâll - meaning the Conclave Commission on Colonization - will take your requests to bid. The rules, which are âmore like guidelines anywayâ, amount to this:
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You must have a plan for use for whatever you request. No claiming worlds just to keep them in reserve. If you donât follow through, for whatever reason, it goes back in the pool. No money returned.
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Garden worlds go to people with good records in the field of environmental stewardship. Those are valuable and will not be handed out willy-nilly to people who might ruin them. If you have no particular record in this area, expect to get something ecopoesis-capable first to see how you do with it before youâre trusted with anything that has a native ecosystem.
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Yes, the bidding rules do favor the people who run the big exploratory programs, which in particular means that the Empire tends to get whatever it is particularly interested in. (People complain about this, but since (a) theyâre perfectly open about this - as âan incentiveâ to explore - (b), they donât abuse it too much, and (c) if the IES stopped exploring, thereâd be a lot fewer planets on the market, they by and large deal.)
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People being people everywhere and the Conclave being annoyingly political despite the Empireâs best efforts, it helps to be a respectable, well-liked star nation and not todayâs annoying rogue state when the planets get handed out. Failing that,
bribesgenerous contributions to worthy causes may help. (See here, under The Council for Economic Justice & Development, for example.) -
While a few outposts here and there on unallocated worlds are permissible if they donât grow large, wildcat colonies will be evicted.
After the exploration and allocation Iâve just described, the typical type of colonial venture makes use of one of these:
For the most part - excepting CorĂcĂĄl and EsilmĂșr, where girdling the entire stars in megastructures has implied disassembling most of the existing planetary masses for material - thereâs just not been a need.
I mean, they have a lot of habitats - the choice between planet-dwelling and hab-dwelling is largely down to personal taste - but space is, not to put too fine a point on it, full of rocks, and as a mature civilization well past the exponential point of its growth curve[5], the existing conveniently-minable space rocks have been more than enough to meet demand.
Oh, infinitesimal, or so the engineers would tell you. Itâs just that in a functionally infinite universe, infinitesimals will happen from time to time, and they only have to happen once in the wrong place to give you a real problem.
The latter is strictly defensive (basically, form an impenetrable sphere around the defended volume); the former⊠is not (in case of Tyranids, pull lever).
I am, obviously, describing the pre-frameslip status quo. â©ïž
Stealing countries with the cunning use of flags, as Suzy Eddie Izzard once put it, is a long-standing tradition that we can reasonably expect to carry on into the future. â©ïž
âŠthat could pose a threat to galactic civilization in general, usually. Mere death worlds donât count; if youâre crazy enough to try to colonize somewhere like Glainevar or Kodelyk, you go for it, pal. â©ïž
Other than protected planets; itâs complex. â©ïž
And without an ideology telling them to fill the universe with spam-in-a-can. â©ïž
As a side note, since someoneâs going to ask the question, the Accord on Colonization only binds its signatories, as is the contractual nature of law. If you arenât a signatory to the Accord, you can do as you like.
âŠof course, if you arenât a signatory to the Accord, you also arenât protected by the Accord when someone decides that they donât like your face, and therefore that the planet you just grabbed would look much better without your face on it.
Caveat raptor.