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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 6656664" data-attributes="member: 57383">I'm not foolish enough to think we're hypothesizing about something that's easy to do. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />If the probes are just sent out to see what's out there, maybe you would only need something as smart as an arthropod, since it's mission function is to look about itself and beam what it sees back home. I wonder how a tardigrade's information-processing capacity compares to a Voyager space probe?As for the complexity question, I don't see why it would be engineered to live in any environment in space. How could it be? There are some very hostile places out there, and building a machine to cope with all of them would be impossible. Indeed, a lot of places in space are so harsh the probe would have to view them from a very long distance to avoid destruction. It's far more likely that such a probe would be designed to self-reproduce in relative "comfortable" areas of space, by mining asteroids and the like. It might drop spare copies of itself or separately built sensor packs into more hostile areas in suicidal scouting runs while keeping enough probes back where its safe to continue the mission.Oh, and regarding the "just as complex as a human body". It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of that complexity is unnecessary from an engineering standpoint. The design of living organisms has been kludged together by evolution, so there's a lot that is needlessly complicated* and a few parts that are pretty useless (but not so useless they're harmful to survival). A robot wouldn't be designed with vestigial organs that are left-overs from when it was a fish but don't do anything now, or have molecular "machinery" that's much larger than it needs to be.*That's assuming it actually is needlessly complicated, presumably some of that complexity is useful but we just haven't figured out what it's good for. At a minimum, the complexity of having lots of spare "parts" give the lifeform more directions it can evolve in. I'm not sure you'd really want your robot probe to do much evolving, or rather than scouting the galaxy you might find you've inadvertently seeded it with a mechanical civilization.</blockquote>

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