I was reading about an interstellar archive at mammoth which triggered an childhood memory of another awesome galactic architecture machine. That said here’s my 5 cents feeding into the hype of architectural fiction and speculation; the comic Storm - The Von Neumann Machine by Don Lawrence.

The plot is straight forward and the universe Lawrence created through his drawings is just amazing (he deceased in 2003) Storm is an astronaut from earth, who crashed into Jupiter’s eternal anticyclonic storm (the red spot) and travels through time and eventually ends up in another magical world: Pandarve

The Pandarve multiverse is a bubble of breathable gas, surrounding a white hole, that contains Pandarve itself, and thousands of other planetary objects. The main body, Pandarve, is a giant telluric planet. At Pandarve, the normal physic laws are no longer valid; this gives Don and Martin room for incredible stories and magnificent scenery. Also Pandarve is a living planet - which means it has intellect and can even interact with other beings. For this interaction she normally relies on her Theocrat, but she is also capable of creating a humanlike representation of herself.

In the Von Neumann Machine story. Pandarve is threatened by a huge rapidly approaching anomaly. Storm and his comrades, Ember (hot red-head warrior woman) and Nomad (has the physique of a black man, yet he has a red skin) are commanded by Pandarve to save her and to divert or destroy the anomaly. They travel towards the approaching object and find out that it’s a Von Neumann Machine:

(..) a self-replicating spacecraft designed to investigate its target system and transmit information about it back to its system of origin.^[6] The concept is named after Hungarian Americanmathematician and physicist John von Neumann, who rigorously studied the concept of self-replicating machines that he called “Universal Assemblers” and which are often referred to as “von Neumann machines”. While von Neumann never applied his work to the idea of spacecraft, theoreticians since then have done so.

If a self-replicating probe finds evidence of primitive life (or a primitive, low level culture) it might be programmed to lie dormant, silently observe, attempt to make contact (this variant is known as a Bracewell probe), or even interfere with or guide the evolution of life in some way.

Physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University has even raised the possibility of a probe resting on our own Moon, having arrived at some point in Earth’s ancient prehistory and remained to monitor Earth (seeBracewell probe).

An interesting variant idea on the interstellar von Neumann probe idea is that of the “Astrochicken”, proposed by Freeman Dyson. While it has the common traits of self-replication, exploration, and communication with its “home base”, Dyson conceived the Astrochicken to explore and operate within our own planetary system, and not explore interstellar space.

Oxford-based philosopher Nick Bostrom discusses the idea that future powerful superintelligences will create efficient cost-effective space travel and interstellar Von Neumann probes.

(source: wikipedia)