Item — HN Reader

That's assuming that's the only mode of travel. There could be worm holes, or things we can't imagine.

Also if the goal was to find life, searching would not be optimal. It would be better to launch pods that self expand to nearby planet, make their own pods, and go to the next nearby planets.

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The universe is so vast, that I think even self-replicating probes traveling via wormholes would not be able to cover even a tiny fraction of the existing planets before their suns die out. The universe is really really really big.

200 billion trillion stars in the universe.

13.7 billion years old, with a window of detection of about 1,000,000 years (evolution to self-extermination).

Maybe I'm just a dumb human, but I really don't see why a supergenius race would invest the resources in scouring the universe. Unless it was their manifest destiny. In my head a narrative to address this crosses from sci-fi into fantasy.

“Because it is there”

Even if there is a wormhole or some crazy sci-fi thing we haven’t thought of, there are a million trillion stars. Basically invisible. Unless you suggest some technology appears that allows an entity to travel to every star and observe it for billions of years. I’d love to hear a sci-fi proposal that covers this without invoking omniscient gods or the supernatural.

If you thing Von Neumann probes are cool, you might enjoy the sci-fi series Bobiverse:

https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

Very cool!

Multidimensional beings that transcend time and/or space. Not necessarily dieties, but it kind of is from our perspective.

Another night be that consciousness exists at many physical levels. Just like you are made of trillions of automata of cells and bacteria, which are played out by proteins and DNA, maybe the universe is a single consciousness, and we are but one part. Or a part of a part.

It starts with clicking a button to make a single paperclip.