“Anyone out there enough like us to be interesting would certainly do the same.
“And yet, if self-reproducing probes are the most efficient way to explore, why haven’t any already said hello to us? It must mean that nobody before us ever attained the capability to send them!
“We can only conclude that we are the first curious, gregarious, technically competent species in the history of the Milky Way.”
The logic was so compelling that most people gave up on the idea of contact, especially when radio searches turned up nothing but star static.
Then humanity spread out beyond Mars and the Inner Belt, and we stumbled onto the Devastation.
Ursula brushed aside a loose wisp of black hair and bent over the keyboard. Putting in the appropriate citations and references could wait. Right now the ideas were flowing.
The story is still sketchy, but we can already begin to guess some of what happened out here, long before mankind was a glimmer on the horizon.
Long ago the first “Von Neumann type” interstellar probe arrived in our solar system. It came to explore and perhaps report back across the empty light-years. That earliest emissary found no intelligent life here, so it proceeded to its second task.
It mined an asteroid and sent newly made duplicates of itself onward to other stars. The original then remained behind to watch and wait, patient against the day when something interesting might happen in this little corner of space.
As the epochs passed new probes arrived, representatives of other civilizations. Once their own replicas had been launched, the newcomers joined a small but growing community of mechanical ambassadors to this backwater system—waiting for it to evolve somebody to say hello to.