On Thu, 08 Sep 2005, Peter D. Tillman announced authoritatively:
> --from a post to rasfw [google groups]
> Message-ID:
Oh, that's a lovely possibility. A universe populated principally by
self-reproducing killers that do the following when they enter an
arbitrary populated stellar system:
0) convince the crew that this system is the `enemy system',
by means of faked displays and misdirection.
1) split quietly in two (the crew don't notice; the ship has a lot
of matter stored which the crew think is fake, and it uses more
misdirection to conceal the evidence of reproduction and signs
of the retreating ship). Let's call the copies `sucker baby' and
`punch'. The crew end up entirely on `punch'.
2) `punch' does what we saw the `bad guys' in FoG do: vape the
worlds; it kills them off faster the more advanced the tech level
of the resident species, so that the residents can't retaliate in
time. In addition to dropping worldkillers it drops devices that
construct `evidence' that this was an `enemy system', for later.
It doesn't tell the crew it's doing the latter, but finds that
evidence with much fanfare, later on. (Alternate possibility:
it never constructs `evidence' at al, but just fakes it with
faked displays and misdirection.)
3) `sucker baby' runs around, hidden from `punch's crew by `punch',
`rescuing' people so as to have a supply of crews for future
`punch' copies. Then it produces a transformed `punch', and, oh
look, it's one or more Ships of the Law, aka crewed future `punch'
copies. (Probably it also makes copies that have no crews, but
those copies might have a lower chance of survival, so it makes
sense to make Ships of the Law if possible: see below.)
There is, of course, no confederation of stellar systems backing up the
`Law': all we have is a massively ramified network of killer probes,
swapping data over kiloyear periods in order to build more convincing
faked displays to fool their crews.
You only need to discard the very last paragraph or two of _Anvil of
Stars_, which is not plausible anyway (who was listening?) and
suddenly all of this works.
The only thing is I'm not sure if this is evolutionarily stable; if the
crews don't contribute much the cycle will tend to simplify down to
simple self-repliating planet-killers. But in _Anvil of Stars_ we hear
about the crew (well, one member of it) contributing: they provide a
spark of creative genius that the self-replicating killers cannot
themselves provide, making it more likely that a self-replicating killer
attacking a high-tech world will survive the attack intact enough to
reproduce. This is stable if and only if there are a *lot* of high-
tech worlds out there, as opposed to places like Earth.
So yes, this scenario provides the moronic aliens that the thread you
referenced complained about: but they're *using their victims to become
smart*. And their makers, well, their makers probably built them as
war machines, long ago, and soon became victims in turn.
--
`One cannot, after all, be expected to read every single word
of a book whose author one wishes to insult.' --- Richard Dawkins
>> Stay informed about: The Algebraist (and other book recommendations) 
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