The Von Neumann Probe

Space · Simulation · 45 seconds

Self-replicating probes colonise the Milky Way at different fractions of light speed — and the unsettling Fermi twist that follows.

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The story

A Von Neumann probe is a hypothetical spacecraft that can build copies of itself from raw material it finds along the way. Send one out, let it mine an asteroid, build two more, and those build more — and a single probe becomes an exponential wave that could, in principle, reach every star in the galaxy.

The simulation colonises the Milky Way at different fractions of light speed, from near-lightspeed down to a sluggish ion drive, while the galaxy turns at its true rate. The unsettling payoff is the Fermi twist: even slow, self-replicating probes could blanket the entire galaxy in a few million years — a cosmic blink. So if it's that easy… where is everybody?

Concept: John von Neumann's self-replicating automata applied to interstellar exploration; colonisation timescales follow standard back-of-the-envelope estimates. The galaxy's rotation uses a galactic "year" of ~230 million years.