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

explanation....

Ursula frowned at the words on the screen. No, it wouldn't be fair to judge too harshly
those thinkers of a century ago. After all, who could have expected the Universe to turn out
to be so bizarre?
She glanced up from the text-screen to see how Gavin was doing with his gang of salvage
drones. Her partner's tethered form could be seen drifting between the ship and the ruined
yards. He looked very human, motioning with his arms and directing the less sophisticated,
non-citizen machines at their tasks.
Apparently he had things well in hand. Her own shift wasn't due for an hour, yet. Ursula
returned to the latest draft of the article she hoped to submit to The Universe... if she could
ever find the right way to finish it.
In correction mode, she backspaced and altered the last two paragraphs, then went on....

Let us re-create the logic of those philosophers of the last century, in an
imagined conversation.

"We will certainly build robot scouts someday. Colonization aside, any truly
curious race could hardly resist the temptation to send out mechanical
emissaries, to say 'hello' to strangers out there and report back what they
find. The first crude probes to leave our solar system -- the Voyagers and
Pioneers -- demonstrated this basic desire. They carried simple messages meant
to be deciphered by other beings long after the authors were dust.
"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