"David Brin - Lungfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Ursula concentrated on directing the lesser minds within Thunderer's control board --
those smaller semisentient minds dedicated to rockets and radar and raw numbers -- who still
spoke and acted coolly and dispassionately ... as machines ought to do.

3
Greeter is right. One of the little humans does seem to be on the track of something. We
crippled survivors all listen in as Greeter arranges to tap the tiny Earthship's crude
computers, where its Captain stores her speculations.
Her thoughts are crisp indeed, for a biological creature.
Still, she is missing many, many pieces to the puzzle....

4
THE LONELY SKY
by Ursula Fleming
After centuries of wondering, mankind has at last realized an ancient dream.
We have discovered proof of civilizations other than our own.
In the decade we have been exploring the Outer Belt in earnest, humanity has
uncovered artifacts from more than f o r t y d i f f e r e n t c u l t u r e s . . . a l l r e p r e s e n t e d
by robot starships... all apparently long dead.
What happened here?
And why were all those long-ago visitors robots?
Back in the late twentieth century, some scholars had begun to doubt that
biological beings could ever adapt well enough to space travel to colonize
more than a little corner of the Milky Way. But even if that were so, it would
not prevent exploration of the galaxy. Advanced intelligences could send out
mechanical representatives, robots better suited to the tedium and dangers of
interstellar spaceflight than living beings.
After all, a mature, long-lived culture could afford to wait thousands of
years for data to return from distant star systems.
Even so, the galaxy is a big place. To send a probe to every site of interest
could impoverish a civilization.
The most efficient way would be to dispatch only a few deluxe robot ships,
instead of a giant fleet of cheaper models. Those first probes would
investigate nearby stars and planets. Then, after their explorations were
done, they would use local resources to make copies of themselves.
The legendary John Von Neumann first described the concept. Sophisticated
machines, programmed to replicate themselves from raw materials, could launch
their "daughters" toward still further stellar systems. There, each probe
would make still more duplicates, and so on.
Exploration could proceed far faster than if carried out by living beings. And
after the first wave there would be no further cost to the home system. From
then on information would pour back, year after year, century after century.
It sounded so logical. Those twentieth century scholars calculated that the
technique could deliver an exploration probe to every star in our galaxy a
mere three million years after the first was launched -- an eyeblink compared
to the age of the galaxy.
But there was a rub! When we humans discovered radio and then spaceflight, no
extra-solar probes announced themselves to say hello. There were no messages
welcoming us into the civilized sky.
At first those twentieth century philosophers thought there could be only one