To Infinity and Beyond!

What if you could build a really good robot? You could spend ten years working out the details with an enormous team of product testers, etc. It takes a long time because you want to get this robot right, because this robot’s main job will be to create another robot.

This new robot is capable of building a new robot in a year that’s just like itself, so you set it to its task right away. At the end of that first year, you now have two identical robots, both capable of building a new robot just like them every year.

After two years, you have four robots, all equally capable of reproducing, although you don’t really think of it that way… not yet, anyway.

Four becomes eight, eight becomes sixteen, and after ten years of doing this, you’ve got a fleet of just over a thousand robots, ready to build more of themselves.

After 23 years of each robot simply making one new robot every year, you end up with more robots than there are people on the planet today, just over 8 billion. This is star…