Hi, we're here from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how we could use self-replicating machines to explore the universe.

When and why your liver shrinks and grows dramatically,

and what science says about how much your birth order really matters.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

Self-replicating machines could help us explore the universe. They were theoretical for a really long time but scientists are still exploring the possibilities and the technology is starting to seem a lot less far-fetched than it used to be.

So let's talk about these machines.

A self-replicating robot is often referred to as a Von Neumann machine after the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann.

He was the first to mathematically model a machine that could replicate itself.

In today's world of 3D printers, that might sound like a simple task, but this was the 1940s.

Von Neumann had this idea when computers barely existed, and he certainly never thought about

using it for spacecraft. That idea came decades later in a

1979 book by Chris Boyce. Here's how he put it. You'd launch a Von Neumann

probe equipped with an interstellar propulsion system and send it to a neighboring star system.

Once it got there, it could mine asteroids and planets to gather the raw materials it would need to

replicate itself.

It would make several copies of itself which

would themselves launch toward neighboring star systems. Each of those

Von Neumann probes would repeat the process and after say a few million years you'd have probes

exploring every corner of the galaxy and these probes wouldn't just make more of

...