Transcript: Johnny von Neumann, the father of modern computing, was thinking about the Fermi Paradox, the prospect that with life spread through the galaxy there must be intelligent civilizations that would presumably colonize the galaxy. He came up with the idea of what is called a von Neumann machine. If it sounds speculative, realize that it’s only a modest extrapolation of current technology. A von Neumann machine is a self replicating probe which travels from our solar system to nearby solar systems, mines asteroids to create replicas of itself, and then travels onwards spawning through the galaxy and propagating and sending back the information to the home planet, Earth. This sounds difficult, but we are probably only thirty to forty years away from producing such a technology ourselves. Even traveling at a tenth of the velocity of light, it would take only a hundred thousand years for such a set of hypothetical probes to propagate through the entire galaxy and send back information to the home planet. Given that the Milky Way has existed for ten billion years, it seems implausible that some intelligent life form would not have already done this if they had the capability and so should have colonized the galaxy. Von Neumann machines bring into sharp focus the Fermi question, where are they?