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A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes


Frank Tipler jolted the astrophysics community in 1980 when he introduced self-replicating interstellar probes into discussion of the Fermi Paradox. The mathematical model of self-replication came from John von Neumann, and was codified in 1966 (after von Neumann’s death) by Arthur Burks in Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (1966).

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