Hi! Over at my blog, I summarize and link to Keith Wiley's paper challenging the Fermi Paradox, "The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth", http://abitmoredetail.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/blog-like-posting-where-i... The subject struck me as something that Eclipse Forum would be all over. Wiley begins his paper by defending the idea of the Bracewell probe. The advantages of self-replicating probes to the civilizations that make them, Wiley argues, are such as to guarantee their eventual manufacture, especially since the threats that they might pose if their overreplicate or became berzerkers are very likely exaggerated. Wiley suggests that some plausible solutions to the Fermi paradox would have hundreds to hundreds of billions (!) of probes being present in our solar system right now. Wiley also argues that the percolation theory proposed by Geoffrey Landis, which suggested that the random expansion of a civilization across interstellar space would create large "voids" lacking said civilization's presence, is flawed. Either the random death of civilizations in colonized systems or the evolution of a frontier system from static to expansionistic norms would lead to the eventual colonization of these voids. Looking at species is ultimately less useful than looking at systems: what befalls Tau Ceti need not befall Epsilon Eridani. There's no reason to expect that, once they become interstellar, zones inhabited by a species (and its descendants/associates) will all follow the same trends in lockstep. This all has obvious implications for Eclipse Phase. The ETI that nearly destroyed transhuman civilization does seem to have a local monopoly over Bracewell probes, while the rarity of megascale constructions as described in canon--the computronium nodes detected from Corse, and the rumours of artifically-generated blue stragglers, are the only two thigns that come to mind--sets upper limits as to the sorts of civilizations out there. I was taken by Karl Schroeder's suggestion that the apparent contradiction between the predictions of ubiquitous extraterrestrial civilizations and their apparent absence can be explained easily if the sorts of megascale constructions predicted to be reliable markers are _not_ commonly built. Planetary masses of computronium detectable at interstellar distance might not be common, especially with a galactically dominant ETI that goes after highly visible civilizations. Thoughts?