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This is a very quickly prepped intro for a video game Dave and I are planning. Read it at your own risk.

The first self replicating robots were simple stupid bugs. They were only artificially intelligent in that they couldn’t take any instruction at all. They looked like little spiders with paper clip legs and a dirty chunk of charcoal at the center. They were a marvel of modern engineering and cleverness and at the same time everyone who saw them was instantly reminded of how much better a simple spider was at doing the same thing. Still, scientists couldn’t figure out how to make spiders solar powered instead of air breathing, so they persisted in developing carbon and metal analogs.

The robots replication process resembled a bird building a nest. The parent robot wandered randomly around the environment, testing the environment and gathering very small amounts of resources it needed. Returning to the ‘nest’ the robot deposits the materials into what appeared to be a small pile that slowy grew into the thorax of the junior robot. The pile would grow until it was the same size as the parent, at which point the parent robot then sits on the ‘egg’ for some time, finding the electrical circuits that snaked through the crystal matrix and connecting the appropriate ones together. When the programming was complete the parent would gather the metals for the legs and attatch them to the best spots on the ‘egg’ and the baby robot would come to life and start the process again.

Building the first replicating robot took advanced electron microscopes, ion vapor deposition guns, and carefully refined chemicals in a clean room environment. Once you had one though, you didn’t need all that. The micro electronics, sensors, and collectors in the bot could detect and refine the simple carbon, silicone, gallium and boron, iron, and copper that it needed to make dozens more. Overnight a hobby culture developed in raising families of bots and trying to improve the design. Still, for years, the only things the bots could do was replicate themselves. It seemed that the technology would be overshadowed by the fast developing bio engineering and the creatures consigned to the robot ant farms of fifth grade classes.

The breakthrough came from a Finnish hobbyist working in his solarium. The ‘evolution engine’ replicated the process of natural selection for the bots, but he played God and decided which bots lived or died. a radiation source assembled from old phosphorous television tubes randomly scrambled the programming as the bots were replicated. The first evolutionary goals were simple – explore more, make piles of raw materials, increase the size and energy density of the internal storage units. A computer webcam watched the bots and those that didn’t exhibit the right programming were zapped with a spark that killed them. most of them weren’t viable in the first place, from too much radiation damage, but eventually, he had a usefull bot, one that would explore (at random) and collect a raw material and bring it back to the nest where it was born.

The evolution engine was replicated and refined by hobbyists around the world, and the commercial sector brought larger scale experiments and more and more self replicating robots that could actually accomplish tasks. Innevitable revolutions in manufacturing, recycling, and art. Innevitable revolutions occurred against the environmental dangers, hive mind intelligence, and moral implications of forced evolution of artificially intelligent creatures. This is not the story of these histories. This is the story of man’s first expansion to another planet.