Posthuman Blues

We visualize space probes as delicate, tiny conglomerations of solar panels, instrument packages and radio dishes. Probes like Viking and Magellen, which orbited and mapped Venus, last a matter of years before exhausting themselves and falling inert.

But a probe launched by a mature, far-sighted culture might be very different. Instead of a brittle observation platform designed to last all of three years, we might expect self-repairing (or even self-replicating) _interactive_ machines that might easily pass our criteria for "intelligence." Communicating with such an artifact -- if it chose to communicate at all -- could take bewildering forms (i.e., "theatre," as opposed to swapping lists of prime numbers). And time might be irrelevant. A suitably equipped alien probe could outlast entire civilizations, shrugging off cosmic rays and whiling its time in a show of godlike sentience.