The idea that a galaxy could be rapidly colonized by Von Neumann probes makes sense to me, but when I think about the specifics I have doubts. How many rare-earth metals go into an iPhone? Where will it get plastic from? How will it create circuitry for the new probes? Is it going to build a whole fab? Does it need to find planets where dead dinosaurs have turned into oil? It starts to seem that these probes would need a planet as rich as Earth to build more of themselves. I guess if we had some amazing nanotech advances and you could build the whole thing out of easy-to-obtain materials it makes sense, but how likely is that? I'd love to hear from someone who had thought about this longer than I have.
> Once arrived, they could instead make more humans, from parts.
Maybe their manufacturing process is named "evolution"? :-) In that case they could just bring along some primitive life form. Who cares if it takes a few million years? And what if evolution isn't as random as we think? Or maybe the parts that are random are too trivial to care about, from the perspective of a few million years.
