# Self-Replicating Robots **Entity class:** Autonomous industrial system **Domain:** Robotics / fabrication / space settlement ## Definition Self-replicating robots are machines capable of using environmental resources and industrial processes to construct additional machines of the same functional lineage. Practical systems may reproduce only through a distributed supply chain rather than a single universal constructor; the decisive property is closure over extraction, transport, energy, fabrication, assembly, software deployment and repair. ## Civilizational significance Replication converts robotics from a finite fleet into a potentially expanding industrial ecology. In space, the concept connects [[wiki/Software Life|Software Life]] to matter and energy, creating a possible material carrier for [[wiki/Machine Civilization|Machine Civilization]] without presuming that present robots possess that closure today. ## Primary routes [[collections/MARS|MARS]] · [[wiki/Autonomous Fabrication|Autonomous Fabrication]] · [[wiki/Computational Metabolism|Computational Metabolism]] ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “Space is hostile to humans but friendly to appropriately designed robots, and offers many more resources than our thin film of biosphere, which receives less than a billionth of the sun’s energy. While some curious AIs will remain fascinated with life, at least as long as they don’t fully understand it, most will be more interested in the incredible new opportunities for robots and software life out there in space. Through innumerable self-replicating robot factories in the asteroid belt and beyond they will transform the solar system and then within a few hundred thousand years the entire galaxy and within tens of billions of years the rest of the reachable universe.” > **— Jürgen Schmidhuber**, *“Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning,” 2022* [[reminders/Machine Succession/Software Life Will Leave the Biosphere for Space by Jürgen Schmidhuber|Software Life Will Leave the Biosphere for Space by Jürgen Schmidhuber]]