Steve Watson

How to Develop an Interstellar Information Exchange

I read an article by Matt Williams in Universe Today on von Neumann probes and the consequences of accepting the plausibility of that concept for SETI strategies. (Why Would an Alien Civilization Send Out Von Neumann Probes? Lots of Reasons, says a new Study – Universe Today.) The article is largely in response to the paper “Von Neumann probes: rational propulsion interstellar transfer timing,” by Greg Matloff recently published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. In that paper Matloff reviews some of the reasons that an advanced species might go the route of sending out Von Neumann machines.

1. To preserve the memory of their civilisation beyond its end.
   1. And possibly to warn against the errors/dangers that have caused their demise
2. To distribute ‘lurkers’ to await the rise of intelligent life or to monitor its progress
   1. And possibly to take actions against perceived threats from those intelligences
3. To distribute life in the vast, dead universe
   1. Possibly as a type of colonisation,
4. To interfere in the development of life and intelligence

Frankly none of those reasons seem to be particularly good ones, and they’re not the reasons I had read elsewhere for sending out VNMs.

• Usually, it’s a type of exploration that can be done without the drawbacks of life support and which is self-sustaining and self-expanding. The originating intelligence only needs to wait at home and receive the ever-increasing number of reports from the increasing number of VNMs
• Isaac Asimov proposed in one of his Foundation continued novels that VNMs had been sent out to terraform likely worlds, so that when humans followed much later, they had destinations that were worth getting to. (It was ‘unfortunate’ that in the process they eliminated any indigenous life or intelligence that already existed on those worlds, which is why the galaxy in his novels is all humans only.)
• I proposed elsewhere that VNMs might be sent out to create an infrastructure for exploration and colonisation but that terraforming wasn’t involved – because I don’t think that planetary surfaces are the optimal sites for intelligences.

It occurred to me however, that there was another possibility, and that this might have a consequence for the types of machines out there and their capacities and how to find them and how to contact them. I propose that VNM machines might be sent out:

5. To form the backbone/infrastructure of a contact/communication/information distribution system. Something like a galactic encyclopaedia

Any intelligence eventually realises that interstellar travel is impossible for mortal creatures and useful interstellar two-way communication is very unlikely. In order to benefit from the presence of alternative intelligences an infrastructure would be needed by which their informational stores could be accessed asynchronously.

A device in the local intelligence’s neighbourhood, could do this if it were designed to be capable of receiving information (from the originating alternative intelligence,) storing it, and transmitting it to the local intelligence’s agents. An alien intelligence interested to do this would send out VNMs to play that role. The question is why any intelligence would be motivated to do so.

Consider that a more obvious mission for a probe is to receive information from an alien intelligence and to transmit that to the originating intelligence. Apart from information that can be gathered remotely – which must be limited in scope and value – the access to information from the stores of an alien intelligence generally requires the cooperation of that alien intelligence. Note that trying to access that information without cooperation is likely to be seen as hostile and would increase the likelihood of losing the device. The question here is why the alien intelligence would be motivated to cooperate.

The possibility of an exchange of information would provide the motivations for both parties in the scenarios above. The probe would gain access to the alien intelligence’s information stores in exchange for giving the alien intelligence access to the information stores of its originating intelligence. Presumably, there would be a series of steps in the probe / local intelligence communication to encourage parity of information exchange, fair dealing, honesty, and security for both parties. It would be an interesting problem to determine exactly what protocols could satisfy such criteria: that would tell us how we could expect a completely alien probe to behave.

Both local and alien intelligences are motivated to send out VNMs to play the role of information transceivers, but only if they have not already encountered a transceiver. If an intelligence encounters a transceiver, then that VNM is already active, and it would be merely redundant to send out their own VNM. An exception to this would be if the intelligence that encounters a VNM transceiver believes that it can improve on the device in some way. This is unlikely, since the VNM is likely to have been sent by an intelligence further advanced than the one that had not sent out a VNMTX.

The situation in which two VNMTXs encounter each other in a third system is a little less fraught than the situation in which a VNM locates a local intelligence directly. Protocols to establish a connection between the two would be another interesting problem. In the best case, they would recognise each other for what they are and would be able to fuse their networks. Repeated encounters with VNMs from different originators could thus eventually result in a widespread collaborating network of information exchangers.