I’ve heard that Someone have counted number of firms involved in that process, and on average, is about 10,000 frims (to the level of electrical plants, mines, processors)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Mathews must be living on that ET planet he’s looking to find. Since when do we have the technology to launch an “exobot” that is self-replicating and autonomous? Able to do such things as to create new CPUs, memory chips, etc.; mine and smelt raw materials? Refine the materials to required specs for use in making another such “exobot”?

And then what of replicative failure? Copies won’t be exact, meaning successive generations are increasingly likely to fail – the same problem we allegedly face with cloning ad infinitum.

Let’s not forget that getting the first one of these things on its way to begin with isn’t going to be cheap and probably would dwarf the annual budgets of most if not all countries of the world.

Show me a design for a portable mining/smelting/materials preparation facility smaller than a small city and we can talk. But that is just the starting point. Every one of those “replicants” will need their own power source to continue. Or will the first one be carrying all the spares in its back pocket?

Unless the robots are actually in some sense alive, they will never be able to reproduce themselves in distant places without human help. Even then it is going to be very tough, because conditions that can support any sort of life — even artificial life — are very rare.

A better method might be to send out something like a series of cluster bombs, each one being a large already “pregnant” mother-robot pre-loaded with daughter robots that can be released along the way. Additional generations of even tinier granddaughter and great-granddaughter machines would be built into the daughters so the process could be extended. The final generation might consist of nanobots. If the shelf-life of these successively smaller machines can be assured, generations of offspring could continue exploration for many centuries without additional material assistance. Human help via communication channels would probably continue to be useful.

In fact, this kind of technology is already being developed and tested on our own planet. Within a few months or years, autonomous unmanned vehicles will surely be releasing daughter generations in large quantities all over the world. Extreme levels of electronic miniaturization and high-volume production, coupled with the availability of inexpensive solar power cells, make this scenario inevitable.

For perspective, consider that silicon integrated circuits are already being manufactured with line widths so small that an ordinary rod-shaped bacterium, say one micron wide by two microns long, accidentally dropped onto a chip, would cover thousands of memory cells.